It's been a while since I posted anything to this blog. Now there is a cause to rev up - my talk about the client library internals was accepted.
The puzzle how to deliver anything more than superficial in scope of a 45 minute presentation remains to be solved, and perhaps not without help of the blogosphere.

Can someone please tell me why I have to suffer a UAC prompt elevation to set environment variables for myself?  And please don't try and justify it by telling me the UI for setting user environment variables is in the same place as system environment variables thus requiring an elevation.

Yet more evidence that Vista is simply half-baked.

So recently my wife and I bought a new ‘used’ car ….

The car came with the OEM CD changer. While the cd changer did the job it was not sufficient for me…..6 disc cd changers are so 90’s aren’t they???

So I started to research other options to replace the cd changer.

I wanted something simple that would be scaleable and most importantly, whatever I chose needed to Integrate into my current soundsystem which includes an on board GPS system. It also had to be relatively low cost.

So with these requirements, I set off to search for a replacement for my 6 disc CD changer…

I stumbled onto a Digital Music System. Which consists of either a 40 gb hard drive or can be upgraded to 80 gb or 120 gb.
I chose the 40 gb version. This hard drive can be connected to my PC at home and I can load 1/3
of my music collection onto this drive before filling it up. This system met all my other …

Curious about Digium's AsteriskNOW distribution? Mark has the following video up on YouTube showing how to install it.




(...and yes someday I'll get around to doing something like this for MySQL... its just hard to get a camera, a free afternoon, and a car that someone will let me blowup)

MySQL has no built-in functionality to calculate a table's checksum in any storage engine but MyISAM. Table checksums can confirm that two tables are identical -- useful to verify a slave server is in sync with its master. Fortunately, it's easy to calculate a checksum on non-MyISAM tables with user variables. This technique works on any storage engine with any version of MySQL, doesn't require the BLACKHOLE storage engine, and avoids locks caused by INSERT... SELECT on InnoDB tables.

I am so sick and tired of engaging into flame wars comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL especially when people haven't used both databases together. Both databases have their own strengths, however, if your application is not tuned for the underlying database, you are out of help.

Why do people hate MySQL so much without looking under its hood?

In my opinion, none is the right tool for *every* job.

• 5 reasons why you should never use PostgreSQL
  
• PostgreSQL vs. MySQL
• PostgreSQL vs. MySQL vs. Commercial databases
• …

Cool! I can now generate Xcode project files and build all of mysql (except NDB) from within it. I think it appears to compile faster. Now I can try to see if I can be more productive using Xcode... starting with some debugging.

I’ve added a LCA2007 section to my Gallery with a bunch of photos I took at and around the conference. Feel free to have a look. I’ve posted a bunch of these to flickr already, so you’ve likely seen some if you follow my flickr feed.

Note that this gallery install is usually running a top-of-tree mysql cluster install on a box that has a bunch of other load on it… so things may work, may not - whatever :)

Those of you listening in on Planet MySQL - you should be able to spot a few other MySQLers around there, and there’s photos from the MySQL miniconf.

I spent almost all day trying to find and fix really strange bug in one of our server-side applications written on Perl. And as I’ve figured out later, there is huge problem in Perl core libraries or, even, in interpreter.

Problem is following. If you are trying to use “threads” module with “Thread::Semaphore” module like it is mentioned in official Perl documentation (perlthrtut), you’ll get 4kb memory leak on every $semaphore->up call. So, simple test-case like following would cause huge memory leaks (100 Mbytes per second on my test server):

(more…)

Many moons ago I pushed in an example "daemon plugin" to the server. This week I have Calvin Sun, our team lead for Storage Engines, visiting me. I've been going over the plugin architecture and other internal pieces of the server with him. I'll be posting more about our joint work in a later post.

While going over the plugin structure with Calvin I noticed that the daemon plugin example doesn't give much of an example of what you can do. So I hacked a little more on it :)

You can find it here:
http://download.tangent.org/daemon_example-0.1.tgz

What it now demonstrates is how to create a "heart beat" file. Daemon plugins are raw plugins inside of MySQL, you can literally do anything with them. For hacking the server they are an excellent way of making use of your full imagination.

The Example creates a …