There's an interesting article called "Open Source 2007" that appears in Educause Review magazine.  The irony is that the article was published in 2004 and was somewhat avant garde at the time.  While it's hard to make predictions (especially about the future!), it's clear that most of the ideas on open source have come to be accepted.  Brad Wheeler, CIO of Indiana University and an open source advocate with the research and statistics to back up his views, makes a compelling case for why open source will has already become mainstream. Adoption of open source software --both infrastructure and applications-- has accelerated faster than many have predicted, though perhaps it has become more accepted in commercial markets and among high-tech companies than in academia. 

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The folks at del.icio.us must have made it harder to get on to the del.icio.us/popular page over the past few months.

When I first was listed on there you simply needed 10 bookmarks within the past 24 hours. I was looking at the article I published yesterday MySQL Optimization Hints and noticed that it has 28 bookmarks over the past 24 hours, and has not yet been listed on the popular page.

It appears that they still require only 10 recent bookmarks, but they have shrunk the window for what they call recent. It must be down to 10 bookmarks within 12 or 6 hours. Does anyone know the specifics?

Let me present some credentials, I've been a longtime Redhat user. I switched to using Redhat somewhere around the 6.0 releases, before that I used Slackware. Sitting around for my use is OSX, one Solaris machine, and one box running Trixbox (which is CentOS underneath).

Everything that I do in a production fashion is running Fedora Core.

Have I had problems? Not really. I keep fairly current so I've not needed the Legacy Project. In the one case I do need it, for an RH 8.0 box, I consider the existence of the 8.0 box to be a problem (one I am actively trying to solve).

Why do I need it? Because I picked some software to use on the box that won't run on a modern FC setup. I bet on the wrong horse and I only stick with it because its a lot of effort to get off that horse. I'm working on it and I hope by the end of the month I can kill the 8.0 box, but I am not holding my breath.

While I …

There was several changes in InnoDB to fix scalabilty problems, so I ran benchmark to check
new results and also compare overall performance of InnoDB in 5.0 and 5.1 before and after fixes.

Problems in InnoDB that were fixed:

• Thread trashing issues with count of theads 100+. In this case
  performance of InnoDB degraded dramatically. The problem was in the mutex impelementation
  and was fixed in 5.1.12 (more info about InnoDB mutexes)
• Scalabilty issue, the well know bug 15815, that was fixed in 5.0.30 and 5.1.14.

So I took for tests:

• 5.0.27, the release with both problems
• 5.0.32-bk (snapshot from 26 Dec 2006) - with 15815 bug fix
• 5.1.12 with fix of …

Distributed development teams are becoming more and more commonplace - truly distributed teams with individual members living around the globe, not just a big company which happens to have independent teams in several different countries. The MySQL development team is organized this way, as are many other projects.

A new paper is available from Andrew Bennetts about distributed development: Coding in a Distributed Team: Testing, Reviewing, Sharing and Merging Code Without Going Crazy. This is definitely worth reading for anyone who does MySQL development even if you don’t consider yourself a developer - there are ideas in this paper which can make the life of both developers and operations folks much better.

Andrew speaks from personal experience working on …

This is not freshest news ever but I simply have not yet had a time to comment on it.

I already wrote about interesting benchmarks Tweakers.net have done for MySQL and PostgreSQL with different CPUs. I was in contact with Tweakers.net team to see if they miss something obvious in MySQL settings as well as to let them know the fix is now out for Innodb scalability bug and they can rerun the test to see if there are any difference.

Recently Tweakers.net published comparison of MySQL 5.0.20a vs 5.0.32bk as well as matching PostgreSQL 8.2 results

Same as in previous test PostgreSQL is winner with large margin especially when it …

As I have seen some concerns about the release schedule of MySQL Community Server and the availability of MySQL Enterprise Server sources, let me recap and detail some of the plans, which haven’t changed since the introduction of MySQL Enterprise Server in October:

1. MySQL 5.0 Community Server sources and binaries are available from our download pages. The latest version is 5.0.27, released in October.
2. MySQL Enterprise Server is released more frequently than MySQL Community Server. This means that we’ve seen also 5.0.28, 5.0.30 and 5.0.32 being released for MySQL Enterprise Server. Even numbers are for Enterprise, odd numbers for Community.
3. MySQL …

If you modify the innodb_log_file_size, MySQL will fail to restart and InnoDB will complain about the size of the changed log file.

The proper way to increase the innodb_log_file_size:

1. shutdown mysql server
   
2. make backup of data and log files
3. remove InnoDB log files
4. set new value for innodb_log_file_size in my.cnf
5. start mysqld
6. check error logs to ensure everything went fine.
   

Also see:

1. Choosing proper innodb_log_file_size
2. innodb_log_file_size (forum post by Jay Pipes)
3. …

I recently read O'Reilly's SQL Hacks book. It's an interesting and rewarding mixture of tips and tricks for novice to expert users. I give it 3 out of 5 stars. Here's why.

I wrote recently about using events and the new processlist table in MySQL 5.1 to keep track of the number of connected processes.  Although having the PROCESSLIST available as an INFORMATION SCHEMA table is usefull, it seemed to me that having SHOW GLOBAL STATUS exposed in a similar fashion would be far more useful.  So at the MySQL UC last year, I asked Brian Aker if that would be possible.  I know how many enhancement requests MySQL has to deal with, so I was really happy to see that table appear in the latest 5.1 build (5.1.14 beta). 

This table, together with the EVENT scheduler, lets us keep …