Imagine you and your friends have a project and a website each. You are likely to look for ways to increase the number of visitors on your site that are actually interested in your project. And you don't want to spend a lot of money on it. Additionally, you probably don't mind helping your friend's projects along the way (since you have been blogging about it anyway).

Suits you? Thought so. Read on, this is for you. Ad Mates revives the old idea of web-rings (remember 1997?) and gives it a modern polish as well as fundamental change in thought. It works like this:

• You all join a group (signup is free),
• create advertisements for you projects,
• add a bit of code to your websites and
• Boom, you show each other's ads on your sites.

So far so easy, but why is this noteworthy? Because Ad Mates is based on the idea of …

Yesterday I attempted to get a working MySQL environment to support the number of utilities we all use including mytop, innotop, mybench, mysqltoolkit. These products require a number of Perl Dependencies, and while that may be a rather trivial task under Linux and with the power of cpan, working on Solaris is a whole different story.

For the record, I’m working with Solaris 9 SPARC 64bit.

I won’t detail you with how hard it was to get to this point, except to say thanks to Jeremy, Baron and Frank so far. Here is where I’m at.

You need a number of pre-requisites, most from …

Yesterday I attempted to get a working MySQL environment to support the number of utilities we all use including mytop , innotop , mybench , mysqltoolkit . These products require a number of Perl Dependencies, and while that may be a rather trivial task under Linux and with the power of cpan , working on Solaris is a whole different story.

One of the frequent requests we've heard from MySQL customers in the last year is the need for more certified DBAs. That's one of the reasons we kicked off some seminars earlier this month to help train Oracle DBAs in MySQL. According to the IOUG more than one third of the Oracle users are also running MySQL. But as with any new technology, they don't always have the in-house skills they need. So we did a test run of a couple of "DBA Bootcamp" seminars in New York and San Francisco to train Oracle DBAs in how to use MySQL.... READ MORE

The titles of the videos look very much like “must watch”. Found via ThinkPHP, thanks.

Vadim asked me yesterday to update Microslow patch for 5.1.21, because the previous one I wrote for 5.1.20 failed to apply correctly on the new MySQL release. Imagine the expression on my face after I unpacked the sources and found out that MySQL incorporated the patch to their release. So it’s a built-in feature now in the 5.1 line. So far I noticed one addition to my code which is logging the microtime statistics into TABLE type log storage.

Maciek

Novell reports earnings. Linux Foundation issues statement on OOXML. Free Software Foundation unites with environmental and social causes. (and more)

Novell Reports Financial Results for Third Fiscal Quarter 2007, Novell (Press Release)

Linux Foundation Statement on OOXML, Linux Foundation (Press Release)

Environmental and social justice groups unite in support of free software, Free Software Foundation (FSF) (Press Release)

ActiveGrid Teams with MySQL on Microsoft Access Application …

For a start, you shouldn’t be using a web forum. Are you too stupid to use email or what?

Ask yourself, does your question boil down to “pls do my job 4 me. kthxbye” (because it’s in stupid speak because it’s an obviously stupid question to be asking). If it does, don’t post it. Instead, RTFFM (where F is for Fine…. at least one of them is anyway), look at the archives. You will then find approximately eleventy-billion messages pointing you to exactly the right tool and docs to let you answer your question - easily.

We’ve begun writing the second edition of the now-classic High Performance MySQL. “We” means co-authors Arjen Lentz (formerly of MySQL), Baron Schwartz (that’s me), and Vadim Tkachenko and Peter Zaitzev, both formerly of MySQL’s high-performance team and now partners at Percona, a high-performance MySQL consultancy firm and host of the popular MySQL Performance Blog. Neither of the first edition’s authors (Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling) is working on this project, but they’re with us in spirit, I think.

Performance is a subject that seems straight forward, but can get controversial easily. After all, we all want our software to be fast, right?. But there is a catch, performance comes often at a high price: code that is difficult to understand, change or extend.

I remember, many years ago, writing code with a friend. The routine in question was rendering a graphic to the screen, basically copying a piece of data from the RAM to the video card's memory. This was being done in assembly, because every cpu tick was to be optimized. To make a long story short, we even ended up 'unrolling loops'. This means to change something like this:

for f = 1 to 3 {
do something;
}

to

do something;
do something;
do something;

It would use more memory, but it would be faster than the loop. Now, imagine if the loop was longer that three... and if you start reading this code. It'd be more …