Coming to OSCON at the end of the month?

If so, I’d be happy to see you on Thursday 26 July 2007 5:20pm - 6:05pm in F150, where I will be talking about The MySQL Architecture of Participation.

Quoting from the O’Reilly session page:

While MySQL has been FOSS from the start and GPL since 2000, the development process at MySQL has been fairly concentrated around the company itself. One of the corporate goals for 2007 is to open up our entire development model:

• ensuring that our already-opened tools are open enough (our bugs system at bugs.mysql.com, and our source control system with BitKeeper)
…

I have been excited about the MySQL native drive (mysqlnd) since I first heard about it.  They are looking for testers now.  The sites I could test on are not really that high traffic.  So, not sure I would be much help to them.

I am not sure how I feel about this bit of news in that post:

“While mysqlnd was originally designed for PHP 6, Andrey Hristov has now finished the backport of mysqlnd to PHP 5 and added support for ext/mysql.“

On one hand, it means I can play with it sooner.  But, on the other, it gives slackers another reason not to upgrade to PHP6 and mysqli.  Its a shame.  I really like mysqli.  I would really like to see an end of life for ext/mysql.  But, this just keeps it going.  Even more scary is this line:

“Given that 60 % of the PHP user base is still on PHP 4, …

I was just taking a look at the Amazon S3 patent mentioned on Slashdot.

I am pretty sure I have prior art on this. Take a look at this project I published back in 2000, though it was written in 1998 on Freshmeat:
http://freshmeat.net/projects/mod_repository/

It implements a REST interface, with Triggers that are used to create replicated servers of itself. It had a large deployment at SCO (yeah, chuckle...) and MySQL back as early as 2001. MySQL used it as the object store behind its Worklog system (and I …

As noted already in March, we have decided to open up the MySQL Developer Meeting for selected members of the MySQL User Community, i.e. for MySQL users who have a need of interacting with our developers. In Sorrento 2006, Prag 2005 or Malta 2004, we had similar developer meetings — but the external representation amounted to one (1) customer presentation.

In Heidelberg (one bus shuttle hour from Frankfurt airport), we’ll do things differently.

Some key points:

1. Community Days are concentrated to Thursday 20.9.2007 and Friday 21.9.2007: While we have very few sessions closed for the community even on the other days (Wed 21.9, Sat 22.9, Mon 24.9), our scheduling started from the insight that few community members can afford to stay for too many days. So meetings that are of most relevance for Community generally …

MySQL welcomes external verification by high-volume LAMP websites of the performance improvements gained by replacing libmysql with mysqlnd.

To recap some basics from the mysqlnd download page at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/php-mysqlnd/:

The MySQL native driver for PHP is an additional, alternative way to connect from PHP 5 and PHP 6 to the MySQL Server 4.1 or newer. It is a replacement for the libmysql, the MySQL Client Library. From now on you can use ext/mysqli either together with libmysql as you did in the past or with mysqlnd.

We have no plans to remove libmysql support from ext/mysqli, which would break existing applications. We just add …

Some have pointed out that the 12 Days of Scaleout campaign is a “cheap marketing tactic.”

Why, yes. It’s inexpensive as far as campaigns go. It’s definitely marketing. The grumbling seemed to be that there was no content on how the scaleout happened and worked for these companies.

We have to remember that not everyone is a geek. While we already know and love MySQL, there are people out there who only vaguely understand what a “database” is, much less have even heard of MySQL. Many laypeople I talk to haven’t heard of Oracle!

MySQL needs this kind of marketing. Perhaps it better belongs as an advertisement in a glossy magazine, but I see no problem with MySQL using what they own — lists, forums, PlanetMySQL, its own web page — to do cheap marketing. In fact, “cheap marketing” is one of the main reasons …

We’re working with web site preparing for massive growth. To make sure it handles large data sets as part of the process we work on generation test database of significant size as testing your application on table with 1000 rows may well give you very dangerous false sense of security.

One of the process web site had was creating of summary tables which was done by executing some huge group by query, doing some stuff with results and then populating tables. This all worked well for small tables… but not for larger ones.

First problem was PHP script generating the table took 10GB of RAM and was swapping development server which had just 4GB of Ram (and plenty of swap space) like crazy. Why ? Because by default mysql_query uses mysql_store_result C library call and buffers all result set in the process memory. Not good if there are over 50 millions of rows. Note this limit is not controlled by …

As the 2007 Community Advocate of the Year, I’m taking the “MySQL 5 Wishes” meme and changing it a bit. I hope y’all don’t mind:

1) Everyone has a different level of familiarity. The community does well with this when writing articles, for instance cross-referencing older articles, linking to documentation, the MySQL Forge, etc. Not much background information other than “MySQL usage” is assumed.

However, where we fall down is when we aggregate some writings and call it documentation. The worst form of this is a tool that grows organically, from “look, here’s a script!” to a full-blown tool/patch/add-on. Sourceforge stinks for trying to make documentation, so most folks just link to their posts tagged “mytool” or whatever the name is.

Using some marketing skills would be wonderful — make a page for folks who have never seen one post about it. Voila, you get your code going from something that …

After a relaxing holiday in France with some friends I now return to coding! I can feel my tan wearing off already as I enclose myself in my room, fingers tapping away on the keyboard, screen glaring its artificial light onto skin which for a few sweet days had basked in the glow of real sunlight!

But that's for losers.

Anyway, the problem right now is the size of the steps I'm taking. The initial traffic analyzer design was simple enough because it didn't attempt to interpret the MySQL packet payloads in any significant way. It discarded unprintable characters and dumped the rest to the console or to a file. Right now, however, I've assigned myself the task of actually interpreting the data I'm receiving and this is not quick or easy.

The problem lies in the passive nature of the system. As with the design of any complex piece of software, you have to think long and hard about what can go wrong. In the …

The 52nd edition of Log Buffer is up, edited by Dominic Brooks and published on his blog, OraStory. On deck, Daniel Fink. Boy, these Oracle people sure know how to blog! We haven’t heard from a MySQL blogger since Ronald Bradford did Log Buffer #47, from an PostgreSQL blogger since Robert Treat’s #27, [...]