Just a little heads-up and a bit of MySQL-related technical content for all of you still out there following along…

At Proven Scaling, we take on MySQL performance problems pretty regularly, I’m often in need of good tools to characterize current performance and find any issues. In the database world, you’re really looking for a few things of interest related to I/O: throughput in bytes, requests, and latency. The typical tool to get this information on Linux is iostat. You would normally run it like iostat -dx 1 sda and its output would be something like this, repeating every 1 second:


Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s rkB/s wkB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
sda 0.00 8.00 0.00 4.00 0.00 96.00 0.00 48.00 24.00 0.06 15.75 15.75 6.30


Most of the output of iostat is interesting and reasonable for its intended …

If you're at JavaOne this week, please do visit the "Solaris + AMP" pod (#976). We are demoing the use of SMF and dtrace on Cool Stack. You can see how dtrace can be used to debug and trace the code path through your entire application, starting from the Javascript in the browser, through PHP and finally to MySQL at the back-end. We are also distributing Cool Stack 1.1 on a DVD at the pod.

I will be there on Thursday between 11:00 - 3:00 PM, so please do stop by and say hi. 

Shanti 

If you've used the UNIX find command for more than a trivial find-and-print, you know how powerful it is; it's almost a miniature programming environment to find and manipulate files and directories. What if you could do the same thing with MySQL tables and databases? That was the inspiration for writing this tool. I was about to write several other tools to do some MySQL administrative jobs when I realized I could generalize and make something much more useful and powerful.

I’ve been looking for an open source project to collaborate for some time now, and given the time I’m spending with MySQL lately and the expertise I’m gaining thanks to MySQL training, it looked like an obvious choice.

During the last advanced bootcamp, Tobias found bug #27894, which apparently was a simple fix. Dates in binlog were formatted as 736 instead of 070306 (for 2007-03-06). During the bootcamp I used my lonely nights at the hotel and came up with a patch, and some days later my first contribution was going into the main MySQL code.

The problem

Now I had to find something bigger. One of the things that most annoys me of MySQL is the lack of some way to abort a procedure or …

MySQL replication is cool. Almost everyone, when asked what they like best about MySQL, will mention replication. There can be no doubt that many web companies, Yahoo included, owes much to MySQL replication. How else can you scale the reading capacity of your database so easily?

It's not all rosy, replication has its problems too. It's very simplistic (I like the term brittle, if any errors happen when executing the SQL, it just stops), it can be inefficient in some places (think UPDATE that does a table scan to change one value, though 5.1 starts to address this with row-based replication), and it is single-threaded.

Single Threadedness
Let me stop here for a second. A lot of people spend good money on a nice Master DB, …

Shortly before MySQL Users Conference I announced that I would be cover new ground in table logs management.
I am keeping that promise, and in addition I am also showing some related hacks.

The announced facts from last year usability report were that you can't change log tables at will, as you can do with log files, and you can't change the log table engine to FEDERATED. Both claims, as it turned out, were incorrect. You can do such things, albeit not in a straightforward manner. As a bonus side effect, you can also:

• add triggers to log tables;
• filter log tables depending on user defined criteria, such as query type, user database, or time;
• centralize logs from several servers.
  …

Sun advances OpenJDK with new code and governance board. Dell joins the Microsoft/Novell collaboration effort. GroundWork releases new version with SOA development framework. (and more)

Note: Due to an international flight and limited Internet access in transit, there was no 451 CAOS Links on Monday 05/07/07.

Sun Fulfills Promise of Open and Free Java Technology and Releases Java SE Platform to OpenJDK Community, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Dell Joins Microsoft and Novell Collaboration, Microsoft / Novell / Dell (Press Release)

Sun To Develop New Communications Application Server Through Open Source GlassFish …

I just went through the attendee list for the Open Source Business Conference and loved what I saw. For the first time, OSBC is truly drawing a deep bench of IT buyers. It's something that we have strived for since the first show (well, the second, since the first show was intended to be a vendor strategy event), and which has finally happened. We have CIOs/VPs/Directors from the following companies (and I won't even bother to go into all the CXOs/VPs we have from Red Hat, MySQL, Alfresco, Microsoft, MuleSource, JasperSoft, SugarCRM, OpenBravo, Loopfuse, Zmanda, XenSource, etc. etc. - this... READ MORE

And again we're on our mission to keep XAMPP up-to-date and put the first beta version of the upcoming XAMPP release in our public beta download area.

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

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Update, May, 10th 2007: The Linux beta now also contains the newly released MySQL 5.0.41. Windows beta follows asap.
Update, May, 15th 2007: Windows beta with MySQL 5.0.41 online.

MySQL is indebted to the Software Freedom Law Center for very good advice and insight on how to combine Free Software with a viable business model. SFLC provides legal representation and other law-related services to protect and advance Free and Open Source Software. Founded in 2005, the Center now represents many of the most important and well-established free software and open source projects.

Professor Eben Moglen, SFLC director and FSF legal counsel, has provided us with profound guidance over the years. We have tried to give something back through our work in the GPLv3 Committee B, but our time resources as a small company are limited in comparison to our fellow committee members.

In recognition of Eben’s help and as a token of our appreciation, we’ve made a small …