By Mike Hendrickson

Tim has asked me to take over writing the quarterly report on the state of the computer book market.

As described in the post Computer Book Sales as a Technology Trend Indicator, our research group has built a MySQL datamart containing Bookscan's weekly top 10,000 titles sold. Bookscan measures actual cash register sales in bookstores to you, the individuals purchasing and reading the books. Retailers such as Borders, Barnes & Noble, and Amazon make up the lion's share of these sales.

Book Market Performance

Here's the year-on-year trend for the entire computer book market since 2003, when we first …

It is a good practice to check the integrity of your backups from time to time. You don't want something like this happening to you :)

time gunzip  -f -v entrieva/db4/guestbook_M-070507.tar.gz
entrieva/db4/guestbook_M-070507.tar.gz:
gunzip: entrieva/db4/guestbook_M-070507.tar.gz: unexpected end of file

real    67m56.782s
user    48m40.006s
sys     14m14.584s

Earlier, I blogged about how to install Solaris 10 on Mac book using Parallels. This post contains links to screen casts about installing Open Solaris on a laptop as dual boot.

• Introduction
• Backing up disk
• Partitioning the disk
• Solaris Express Developer edition installation
• …

Reading Linux failing to boot screen on the plane I remembered I saw something similar in my flight to the MySQL Users Conference. It wasn’t so critical, but my entertainment screen got an unexpected reboot and I could see the tux logo and the console for like 2 secons while booting. This was with Northwest Airlines.

So, who said Linux had problems with video?

I left the last post in this series at the point of running make for the bitkeeper client. If you have been following the posts and tried to do that, you will be greeted with the following errors:

bash-3.00# make
cc -O2 -Wall -Wno-parentheses    bkf.c   -o bkf
cc: Warning: option -2 passed to ld
cc: illegal option -Wall
make: *** [bkf] Error 1

The first line shows the compiler options being used followed by a warning and an error. The reason we are getting this error is because cc options != gcc options. We have two solutions at hand at this point:

1. Use gcc (we installed it earlier)
2. Change the compiler options to use cc's compiler options instead of gcc.

Using gcc compiler
To use the gcc compiler instead of cc, do the following:

bash-3.00# CC=`which gcc`
bash-3.00# export CC
bash-3.00# make

…

Michael Chu has posted a review of how to migrate MySQL database with special characters properly.

I love this stuff:

http://avatraxiom.livejournal.com/58084.html

... and frankly I am not going to be as eloquent as Chromatic:

http://use.perl.org/~chromatic/journal/33191?from=rss

Yes, PERL MADE ME WRITE BAD CODE.

The concept that a language makes you write bad code, or difficult code to maintain, is just bizarre.

Ok, if the programming language required you to only use i, l, and 1, as variables I might buy it... but for some reason, which I can clearly articulate over dinner if you are buying, I don't really see perl as the limiting reason.

Perl does not prevent you from setting up coding standards, writing good comments, or structuring the layout of ideas such that someone else can …

MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager version 1.0-pre3 has been released today. Changes list is really short now:

• Major fix in multiple clusters support - now you can use many clusters with one monitoring node (details are in mmmd_mon man page)
• Man pages for mmmd_mon, mmmd_agent and mmm_control scripts
• Startup scripts added/fixed for mmmd_mon and mmmd_agent
• Installation script now requires iproute package to be installed on server.

As always, if you have any questions/suggestions, post them here or in mmm-devel mail list.

Correction on the INSERT DELAYED
In slide 20 I have mentioned that the INSERT DELAYED statement can increase performance on the slave. This is wrong, since the DELAYED keyword is ignored by the SQL thread on the slave server. The INSERT DELAYED statement can increase the overall performance of an application since the control is returned to the client as soon as the row is queued into the list of inserts to execute. The INSERT DELAYED can be used with MyISAM, MEMORY and ARCHIVE.

Q from Filip: Does master & slave have to be the same db-version, and the same Operative system?
Not necessarily, you can have different versions and operating systems

Q from Danilo: Is there a way to load a backup from the master without locking tables or shutting down the master database?
Using Innodb, you can use mysqldump to produce a consistent backup without locking the …

Note: I've edited this post and updated it with more information / fixed some grammatical errors.

Note 2: Sorry to the planetmysql crowd reading this. I can't seem to find a way to make it not show up.





Late last year, I started volunteering for couchsurfing.com. I knew they were suffering from database problems, and I knew that I could help.

I spent a week at the collective in New Zealand, and I helped add a few indexes here and there, but I've never really involved myself as much as I would like to, past the point of diagnosing what problems need to be fixed. I proposing a few potential solutions, but it bugs me at times that I'm not more involved.

This gets me to my point; there are some things I don't like about the project. I mostly keep quiet about them, because couchsurfing.com achieves more good …