Through Kristian Köhntopp’s blog, I ran into a funny posting about “The real difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL” on Andreas Scherbaum’s mostly PostgreSQL related blog. I’ve taken the liberty below post a cropped version of the central picture of that blog entry:

The picture shows Susanne Ebrecht and Lenz Grimmer at the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting FOSDEM …

We had about a 70% increase in applications for the Google Summer of Code, in the last 24-hours. This prompted me to post to the summer-discuss list, pimping some new projects. We’re rocking in getting external mentors, for projects that will benefit the community:

• I already pimped Sheeri a few days ago, and she’s got the MySQL Auditing Software up her sleeve
• We’ve also got …

I use del.icio.us a lot. I have one tag topost to save those things I find on the Internet which I want to write about later, but I have around 100 right now, so I was interested in picking random links from that list.

Bad news you can’t do that neither from the del.icio.us interface nor the API provided, so I took a different approach. I downloaded MySQLicious, a set of PHP scripts to mirror your delicious links into a local MySQL database. Once you edit your connection parameters, it’s quite easy to use:

$ ./mirrorlog.php
Update may be needed. Checking now.

Updated http://members.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=*starlightstarbright*
Deleted eacb873e503b1b407c2ec69e541b8838

1 updated.

1 deleted.

You can …

On Thursday/Friday this week, I visited Linbit in Vienna. They are the creators of DRBD. Quoting Wikipedia,

DRBD is an acronym for Distributed Replicated Block Device. It is a Linux kernel module, that, working together with some scripts, offer a distributed storage system, frequently used on high availability clusters. DRBD works as a kind of network RAID.

This means DRBD can give high availability to MySQL users. Through configuring DRBD to be used on your system, you can have synchronous replication between two different servers, giving a MySQL database a failover server to redirect to instantaneously, should the main server running MySQL fail.

For those interested in more detail on how to combine DRBD …

When I work on Apache I need to normally run my regression tests against many different versions of Apache, and I do this across Linux, OSX, and Solaris. I commit, and the bots on different hosts poll the repository for pushes to build against (and the data on the results is then sent via HTTP/XML back to my logging host for me to see).

I had a request this week to add Solaris X86 for testing... now I don't have Solaris X86 and I am not too inclined to add a new machine for it (even if the hardware was to be a donation). But... I do have an EC2 account, and access to a Solaris Omni. It would be easy for me to kick it on long enough in the EC2 cloud, to run through a test and get a result back.

My cost for a test build? 10cents? The Electricity is more then that for me to keep the machine running at home.

Now my regression test for my Apache modules is only about half of what the MySQL regression test is …

In his well-written blog entry Open Development: Diversity matters, Gianugo Rabellino quickly replied to my blog entry from yesterday on Defining “Participatory Open Source”. He sees plenty of common ground in our reasoning, but defends the existence of requirements for neutrality in the definition. I agree with nearly all of his reasoning for why neutrality is important for the development of a community of contributors, but I draw partially different conclusions.

The main reason why my conclusions are different from Gianugo’s is the starting point for my reasoning: There is no inherent conflict of interest between participatory open source and pursuing for-profit business goals, so we must not create artificial …

Red Hat enforces open source project trademark…HP may resell Oracle Linux…Bruce Perens speaks out regarding the GPLv3…and more…

Is Red Hat Acting Like Microsoft?, eWeek, Darryl Taft (Article)

Novell, Red Hat compare desktop Linux programs, Computerworld, Robert Mullins (Article)

The Year of OpenSolaris, eWeek, Jason Brooks (Article)

HP Gearing Up to Resell Oracle Linux, Internetnews.com, Sean Michael Kerner (Article)

…

During last couple of months I had number of consulting projects with MySQL Query Cache being source of serious problems. One would see queries both for MyISAM and Innodb tables mysteriously stalling for few seconds with "NULL" in State column.

These could be troubleshooted to waiting on Query Cache which at the same time had massive amount of entries invalidated by some batch data load job.

When you should worry ? If you set query_cache_size relatively high at 256MB or more. It can be seen worse if your query cache size is in Gigabytes. At the same time check how many queries do you have in cache - Qcache_queries_in_cache - if it is in hundreds of thousands it may take a while to invalidate them. But first of all you should have something which causes massive amount of invalidations like tens-hundreds of thousands queries being invalidated by single insert - this typically happens if you have …

In just about 12 hours, we will close Proven Scaling’s Free Ride to MySQL Conference and Expo 2007 form to new entries, and start deliberating on the winners. Get your entry in now if you want a chance to go to the MySQL event of the year for free!

Guy Bowerman has published on Informix Application Development, the 37th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly compendium of database blogs. Log Buffer always wants more editors and story suggestions, so if you read it, please also look at Log Buffer’s homepage to see how you can get involved. Next week, LB will appear on Padraig [...]