You would think I’d get very use to seeing the power of the Web and open source in action working at MySQL. However, recently I got another dose of “wow” on the power and speed of both.

As a project for a Master’s program I’m in, I created a new web site and organization. I was amazed at how quickly I got everything out on the Web. I’m not a “host it yourself” kind of guy, so I picked a highly rated web hosting outfit and after filling out a single form and giving them an obscenely small amount of money, my domain was registered and I upload my entire site in under 10 minutes.

As part of this same project, I needed to create Podcasts, so I downloaded Audacity, which is a FOSS audio mixing product. Before long, I had professionally sounding Podcasts which surprised even my friends in terms of how good they sound (all I used was Audacity and a $40 mic headset). One friend commented that a family member had recently …

In this version we updated both PHP versions (to 4.4.7 and 5.2.2), MySQL (5.0.41) and phpMyAdmin (to 2.10.1). In the Windows beta we also fixed the security vulnerability published April 28th.

Get the downloads and more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

Hi,

Been a long time since last I posted.

I just got back from the Cluster Summit in Stockholm.

During this meeting we covered topics such as Design and Internals of MySQL Cluster, Dolphin Express for MySQL Cluster, Road Map discussion, Cluster & Replication Troubleshooting, Benchmarks with new performance patches and of course QA.

Items brought up during the QA Discussion included:

* HA Testing (High Availability)
* Log Events Testing
* Large Data sets
* Backup/Restore
* Configuration Testing
* Functional testing (Regression testing of Standard Functionality)
* Profiling
* Performance

So as you can see from above, I will be busy for some time to come :-)

Many of the above are being done now. We discussed how to take them to the next level.

During this meeting I was asked to take …

If you haven't seen my previous post on the MySQL User Defined Function Repository, take a minute to check it out!!

Today, I did a major structural overhaul of the site, and filled up the roadmap. I have also just added a new library to the project. This library lib_mysqludf_sys contains a number of functions that allows one to interact with the operating system.

• 
  
• sys_exec - executes an arbitrary command, and can thus be used to launch an external …

In this version we updated both PHP versions (to 4.4.7 and 5.2.2), MySQL (5.0.41) and phpMyAdmin (to 2.10.1). In the Windows beta we also fixed the security vulnerability published April 28th.

Get the downloads and more details on the specific XAMPP project page.

I wrote a custom imageless CAPTCHA for my blog a while ago. I didn't write it as a plugin, so I lost it when I upgraded Wordpress a couple weeks ago. Not having this in place to help eliminate comment spam was an eye-opening experience, and vindicated much of what I asserted in my original posts: a naive question-and-answer system is highly effective at stopping spammers, probably as effective as scrambled images. Read on for the details.

My buddy David Pollak, host of a local geekbeer social event, thinks Scala is the next big thing in web programming.  Scala is an object-oriented / functional programming language that compiles down to Java byte code.  It's statically typed but fully supports generics and polymorphism.  And it's published under an open source BSD-like license. 

David's got pretty good street cred; he's built large scale applications in everything from C++, C#, Ruby and pretty much everything else in between.  Over lunch recently he told me in a rather offhand fashion that he used Scala and the related lift framework to write a Twitter clone (called Skittr) in 800 lines that scales to 1 …

Reading this slashdot article today and two CIO magazine articles linked from it.

Such discussions started at right place at right time always attract a lot of flamers and can be fun to read.

What hit me this time is quality of the articles in CIO magazine. If this is what managers suppose to use to make their "informed" decisions about products, not a big surprise huge portion of IT budgets are wasted. It looks like someone who has not got a clue is writing for someone who does not even pretend. I see zero "meat" - mostly using of marketing materials. This applies both to pro-MySQL and against-MySQL articles.

The funniest argument for me was the age of the product. Where does this "older is better" comes from ? Oh yes I know, it comes from the point of view market old timers try to show the value of their …

There are two approaches to do the profiling, i.e. compile-in and sampling.
Compile-in is a method to record the timing of executing each component or function, and the one using the longest time is considered the bottleneck.
Sampling is a method to periodically check what the current active component is, and the one
appearing most frequently is considered the bottleneck.

Compile-in needs to instrument the source code, and may affect the performance due to the overhead of counting and logging. To implement compile-in method, one way is to instrument the source code directly, for instance, using macros to redefine the calls and recompile. We are thinking to use aspect of programming techniques to help the instrumentation so that we can keep the instrumented code and the original code separately.

Sampling involves interrupting the process, and grabbing a stack trace. Sampling may affect the performance …

hackmysql.com is moving to (mt) Media Temple this weekend. Because of Memorial Day, I suspect that site traffic will be really low, so perhaps no one will even notice.