First off, I'm changing the title of the series to "In the trenches with..." because I'm finding that the best people are often not keen to sing praises to themselves (i.e., "Unsung heroes"). At any rate, while these people are, in fact, the heroes of open source, the series is designed to glean their expertise and provide a "trenches" view of commercial open source.

Hence, a new name.

Nowhere is super-capable humility in more abundance than MySQL. I love that company. I've yet to meet anyone there that I wouldn't enjoy sitting next to on a long plane ride. Mostly because they're somewhat quiet, and I hate talking to people on planes. But... :-)

I asked Zack Urlocker to suggest an "unsung hero" at MySQL and he suggested I chat with Gary Whizin, senior director of …

Vadim and me will be speaking on OSCON 2007, taking place in Portland,OR July 23-27.

Our talk will be about Open Source Transactional Storage Engines meaning Innodb, Falcon, Solid and PBXT.

We’ll look into architecture of these storage engines as well as compare performance in number of Benchmarks.

If you will be visiting OSCON please drop by, if not we’ll share presentation and some other notes here after the conference.

We’re also planning to visit Jay’s both on MySQL.. Initially we were thinking to organize yet another BOF on MySQL Performance but as this conference is not MySQL focused single MySQL BOF is probably enough and Performance related questions could be taken care of on it.

We’re also organizing …

I've been talking the last few days with Oracle, Novell, and SAIC about how open source figures into their product plans and, in SAIC's case, how open source affects the company's services strategy. Each of these companies has obvious things to gain (and perhaps to lose) from open source.

Today I wanted to talk with a company that has not traditionally been known for its open source work. BMC Software. I have been talking with the open source group at BMC for over a year, but I rarely heard much open source noise emerging from the company. That is, until BMC hired Will Hurley from Qlusters, and then suddenly I heard a lot more.

I caught up with Will late last week to find out what open source secrets BMC has been hiding from the world. As it turns out, open source is alive and well at BMC, and growing. Funny that: I've yet to talk with a company for whom open source doesn't figure …

Mehlam Shakir, CTO of RippleTech, discusses a practical approach for auditing MySQL databases to meet security and compliance regulations. Hear real-world cases and see a live demonstration of how RippleTech?s Informant solution compliments MySQL by adding a security layer without any performance impact.

For more information on RippleTech?s INFORMANT, visit http://www.rippletech.com/

I have to say, I was a bit worried this would be a typical vendor presentation where every other word is marketing speak for how great the product is. It actually just ended up being ?here?s how Informant works, and here?s how auditing, security and compliance needs can be met,? presented in a way that?s useful and valuable to anyone who is interested in auditing or security. …

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.
The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn't work either.

We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems to work much better and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work for you as well. Our performance testing doesn't show any substantial differences between 3.0.11 and 3.0.14. If you want to give it a try, simply download the correct file for your platform and rename it to apc.so in your php extensions directory …

Many folks have reported problems with APC in Cool Stack 1.1 resulting in a SEGV in the CoolTools Forums.
The APC version in Cool Stack 1.1 is APC 3.0.11 and if enabled, extensions such as mysql, dtrace etc. fail with a SEGV. Media Wiki doesn't work either.

We have tested APC 3.0.14 and this version seems to work much better and I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it will work for you as well. Our performance testing doesn't show any substantial differences between 3.0.11 and 3.0.14. If you want to give it a try, simply download the correct file for your platform and rename it to apc.so in your php extensions directory …

In a talk with Raph Levien today he said:

[basically] “… the metric for the success of an open source software project is whether the author now works at Google.”

… nearly everything I’ve ever written fails to pass this test.

Hopefully someone from Google’s M&A department can help me remedy this situation. (hint hint)

Currently there isn’t a good method to control sending individual queries to the slow query log. Typically this isn’t an issue. It becomes an issue when using very short query times and importing sql files. The slow query log doesn’t have a limit on the length of queries it will write to a log. If you’re importing a sql file with inserts that get sent to the log mysql will dump the entire insert query. This can cause the slow query log to grow to gigs in size in a very short time.

I’ve patched mysql 5.0.41 to add a session variable called sql_log_slow (think sql_log_bin) that when set to 0 will prevent queries from that session from being sent to the slow query log. The patch also updates mysqlbinlog to set that variable in it’s output. One issue with this patch is that the executable comment version in mysqldump is set to 5.0.41 but it will error when imported on any 5.0.41 server that doesn’t have this patch. If it’s merged …

If you haven’t taken the opportunity to book a meeting with me in Singapore yet, I suggest coming to the MySQL Meetup that’s happening there on Thursday. More information at the meetup site, but the key bits are:

When?

Thursday, Jul 5, 2007, 7:00 PM

Where?

Delifrance HARBOURFRONT CENTRE 1 MARITIME SQUARE #01-15 WORLD TRADE CENTRE Singapore

I understand the meetup group has been dormant for a couple of years. It’ll be good to re-jig it. I most likely will be very unreachable via email (though I’m assured that there’s some cool Wireless@SG thing happening in Singapore that will give me Internet access even if the hotel doesn’t), so consider calling +6-012-204-3201.

Technorati Tags: mysql, …

Over the weekend we migrated one of our tables from MyISAM to InnoDB. Generally speaking we’re pretty happy with most of our InnoDB migrations.

InnoDB generally uses 2-3x more data on disk but the write ahead log (WAL) buys us so much more added performance that it’s generally worth the switch.

This migration however was a bit more problematic. Importing the data from mysqldump as MyISAM into the new box only took about 2 hours. Converting the data to InnoDB has so far taken 24 hours and using 21G vs the original 6.1G for MyISAM.

I should also note that it’s not complete yet and it’s 3.5x larger than our original MyISAM install.

Clearly the performance will be worse in our situation for InnoDB because I don’t think the buffer pool efficiency will make the write ahead logging fast enough to beat MyISAM on the same hardware.

We’re not the only people who have …