A few weeks ago, I had a chance to speak with Scott Swigart about MySQL, open source, development and community challenges, and other stuff. He sent me a link to the published interview, available on HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com. It was very interesting reading the comments of some of the other interviewees, like Stormy Peters, from OpenLogic, and Patrick Hogan, from NASA.

This article details how to setup MySQL 4.1 or later on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.x. Additionally it tells you how to add java support and configure MySQL so that all new database tables use the InnoDB transaction-safe database engine instead of the default MyISAM engine. This is essential if you are writing applications with technologies such as WebObjects that automatically utilize the ACID commit or rollback capabilities of a transaction-safe database.

Matt Asay realises the "support" model is broken in an Open Source economy. Or at least buggy.

In Thinking about renewals in a productive fashion he starts wondering with Savio Rodrigues

What happens when 15 percent of your current paying customers decide they can use your (open-source software) product without paying you a dollar. Worse still, these are users you convinced to buy support/license from the mass of nonpaying users. Customers surely realize that their support/license payments enable the OSS vendor to continue developing the product in question. Sure, you get some free development from the community, but 95 percent-plus is still done by the vendor's employees. What happens when more and more customers pass the "pay for continued development" buck and …

Charlie Babcock of InformationWeek is reporting results of a Sun survey that finds PostgreSQL to perform just 12% lower than Oracle on similarly-priced hardware. Not bad.

The database, of course, is not "similarly priced." The punchline, therefore, is that customers who pony up seven figures for their Oracle databases may well find that $0.00 can deliver near-equivalent performance. If only CIOs were paid based on the savings they generate while still cranking out hefty IT performance, many IT professionals might find open source databases like PostgreSQL under their Christmas trees.

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My framework of choice at the moment is called "everything". Everything has very few users in the world, but it holds to a certain number of
design characteristics that I like.

It deals with entities as objects
Objects are inheritable
Easy to hack
Revision control on objects

If I were a Java developer, which I have not been in more then a
decade, I would use Hibernate. Hibernate has many of the design characteristics that I list. Similar frameworks exist for PHP and Python.

Why do I like the approach of using objects? Objects are entities that I can serialize and store in caches as a single discrete item. Object caches are common in web architectures now(aka Memcached and other similar creatures). Object store works well, and it is constantly improving.

Many web infrastructures can be run out of object store systems, but not all.

Many, …

another month, another mysql connector/odbc release. it has almost become a trend. we only chipped it down to about 124 bugs this time, about a half-dozen less than last time. but we?re going back and re-evaluating some the open bugs now.

we didn?t manage to get windows x64 packaged up this time, but we might slip out a 3.51.17 package for that platform before the next full release. part of the problem in getting it together in time for this release was that odbc on win64 appears rather half-baked, and we couldn?t find much in the way of applications to test with it.

now i?m hip-deep in making sure that the way we calculate the various column lengths that you can retrieve from odbc are …

Microslow patch has been there for some time, but only for earlier MySQL editions such as 4.1 and 5.0. Now it's also available for the latest 5.1.

Because MySQL went through a lot of internal changes, the patch had to be written from scratch. It introduces some minor change in existing functionality and also adds new.

For the patch to work you must of course enable slow logging with --slow-query-log parameter. MySQL 5.1 has this nice feature which allows you to redirect query log (it's actually called general log now) and slow log to CSV tables mysql.general_log and mysql.slow_log respectively. …

Given a chance, I always check www.zmanda.com on different gadgets with various browsers and form factors. As soon as iPhone became available, I was at the Apple store checking out the new device and especially its web browsing capabilities.

It took me a couple of attempts to type the URL, but then I got it right and I could see our web site, wiki and forums. Everything looked great. Surprisingly, I could see most of the page without too much zooming and moving the window. Our upcoming Management Console for backup and recovery of MySQL is built on a LAMP stack with a look and feel similar to our website. What if we could actually manage all or at least some frequent day to day backup activities of MySQL DBA via iPhone?

Here at Zmanda we are moving fast, and within a few days we presented to a couple of our customers how to manage MySQL backups via iPhone. Here is a use case. A …

In my previous post I was a bit wrong giving Innodb some properties it does not have.
In fact Innodb does not currently sort pages in their position order flushing them to disk. Pages to be flushed are instead identified by other means - LRU and pages which contain oldest LSN (so which were flushed longest time ago).

As pages are to be flushed are identified Innodb looks at pages pages N-1 and N+1 and if they are dirty schedules flush for these as well. Such approach allows to merge few pages together and perform flushes in larger blocks.

It is really interesting to see how much sorting would speed things up, ie how much flushing pages 1 10000 200 20000 300 30000 in order 1, 200, 300, 10000, 20000, 30000 will help compared to random order and if it is worth to bother or if optimization Innodb performs is good enough and IO subsystem and RAID can do the rest.