I know this is a bit old, but I’ve been trying to catch up with all the new stories after a conference, vacation, broken laptop and loads of work.

RedHat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5) was launched some months ago. I’ve never been a big fan of RedHat in terms of technology. I guess is quite good now, but RPMs scared me years ago and I’m not over it yet.

One of the things I liked is that RedHat proved that the KISS principle doesn’t only apply to software development, but to marketing and sales too. This is their new SLA (service level agreement). Can’t be simpler.

That reminds me of MySQL and their all-you-can-eat support package (MySQL Enterprise Unlimited), easy to understand and with a …

The weather was great here in Seattle this last weekend. Nice and sunny,..

The Google Gears stuff is still on the brain :)

Pulled the source code to take a look at it. The database code is laid out in the "database" directory. It is split up for each browser, with a "common" directory (though little seems to be common). The code is written in C++, with an object type of "GearsDatabase" representing the database itself. The code is lightly commented, but the naming conventions make the code self readable. There is more database code then what is found in this directory though, so there is not a full encapsulation of the database code.

And the real question I wanted to answer for myself?

What about making MySQL work?

We could make MySQL work and reuse the Google code. Not cleanly though... there interfaces weren't …

OK, this is maybe no big news and maybe old, but I needed an excuse to blog something!

Since MySQL 5.1.15 the /etc/mysql/my.cnf has been added as default location after /etc/my.cnf. This is great and something I like keeping /etc a bit cleaner, but it might be tricky for some not knowing!

I found this the hard way and a bit with red cheeks (I'm a MySQL Support Engineer after all..). After installing postfix-mysql Ubuntu package, which also sets up common MySQL stuff, I couldn't connect to my fresh installed 5.1.19. Confused, I saw it was using a socket setting I didn't specify. So, /etc/mysql/my.cnf was read extra to /etc/my.cnf! I said 'doh!' and saw it was good.

Tip: leave /etc/my.cnf there for a while with a warning like "You're living in the past dude! Check /etc/mysql/my.cnf", or something.

Next would be to read /etc/mysql/config.ini for MySQL Cluster too, but work is on its way to …

Just about every open source company I know of is hiring right now.  There appear to be tons of open jobs at MySQL, SugarCRM, Alfresco, SnapLogic, Hyperic, Zend and elsewhere.  This is a good time to be an open source developer.  Also many companies are flexible about location and have openings across many departments including product management, sales, support, training etc.  …

Current plans call for the use of the HTTP protocol to upload and retrieve BLOBs to and from the database. The BLOB Streaming Engine makes this possible by integrating a lightweight HTTP server directly into the MySQL server.

I am currently working on an alpha implementation of this, and would like to give a short demonstration of what is possible using this system.

We start by creating a table using any streaming enabled storage engine (a streaming enable storage engine, is an engine that supports the server-side streaming API):

use test;
CREATE TABLE notes_tab (
  n_id        INTEGER PRIMARY KEY,
  n_text      BLOB
) ENGINE=pbxt;
INSERT notes_tab VALUES (1, "This is a BLOB streaming test!");

Now assuming the MySQL server is on the localhost, and the BLOB streaming engine has been set to port 8080, you can open your browser, and enter this URL:

…

I have been working on a new assignment this week, with the goal to improve performance in a .NET application using MySQL (3.21) for data storage. The application handles a lot of data in what is basically a single user system.

The main rason for the performance problems was heavy searches where indexes did not match. Simply switching the order of columns in the composite key fixed most of it.

In the old version they copied data to a temporary table, to solve the slow query problem. Once we had the indexes fixed, we could drop this solution and use the ase table in all cases. This also speeded it up a lot.

The change to MySQL 5.0 made a few other changes possible
- switch to shared memory for communication between database and application
- buffering of indexes
- query caching
which all ment further improved performance

All in all quite successful so far. …

Even though the conference is long over, I still have unpublished notes sitting on my ~/Desktop, and it only makes sense that I clean it out. These are notes from Ed Presz’s session, titled For Ticketmaster, MySQL Replication is the Ticket! They are as always, pretty raw.

We were all given a handout, which was some corporate spiel, which contained a lot of information about hiring. Their mission is to “sell more tickets better than anyone in the event business, worldwide”.

I found it impressive to note that Ticketmaster managed last year’s Melbourne Commonwealth ticket sales. I guess, even more impressive is that for next year’s Beijing Olympics, Ticketmaster ran a ticket lottery, and 17,843 seat tickets were sold in 75 seconds!

MySQL 4.0.18 is currently used, and they …

The MySQL UDF Repository is moving forward! Although it was only recently launched we've been contacted by quite a few interested parties already.

For example, the MySQL Repository has been mentioned by Ronald Bradford in this week's Logbuffer, the "Carnival of the Vanities" hosted by the Pythian Group. Thanks Ronald!

To facilitate the community process, we've set up a Google Group. The …

Interested in the XPath support in MySQL 5.1?

I have done a little with XPath over the years, but I've never spent that much time learning it in any detail. Since we have added XPath 1.0 support I'd thought I would site back and and learn a bit more about it.

For an excellent Tutorial that covers all of the basics of node discovery it is best to first read:
http://www.zvon.org/xxl/XPathTutorial/General/examples.html

If you only read one tutorial, this is the one to read. It will get you through all of the basics of finding nodes and searching in deeply nested XML documents. I particularly liked this tutorial since the author had went through a lot of trouble to visually explain the results of XPath queries.
…

In my last post I reviewed how to create a test case using multiple connections and it is quickly apparent that keeping track of concurrent connections within test cases is difficult and error prone. Creating a tool to make test case writing easier and more automated is the goal of my Summer of Code project. To start, I have looked at the test facilities of PostgreSQL.

PostgreSQL and their documentation on their test framework was short, but it seems they have a regression test suite to test the functionality of their code.

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/7/static/regress.htm

They use a directory of .sql files that are executed against their database and the results, like MySQL, are compared against an file with the expected result. The tests can be run sequentially or parallel like the MySQL tests but overall their framework …