Ever wondered how threads exchange data between themselves?

This sharing and exchange of data is made possible by inter-process communication, or IPC for short. There are several different types of inter-process communication for instance (IPC,System V IPC and POSIX IPC). In addition Solaris provides an additional advanced Solaris IPC.

According to Wikipedia:

Inter-Process Communication (IPC) is a set of techniques for the exchange of data between two or more threads in one or more processes. Processes may be running on one or more computers connected by a network. IPC techniques are divided into methods for message passing, synchronization, shared memory, and remote procedure calls (RPC). The method of IPC used may vary based on the bandwidth and latency of communication between the threads, and the type of data being …

There have been a few posts on PlanetMySQL regarding primary keys and the importance of choosing the right one. This is even more important when the table uses InnoDB. You've read different posts of why it is so important. Now, I'm all about benchmarks and showing the details. So I'll take a table from my previous posts about MySQL 5.1 partitioning and show what I found.

This table was created under MySQL 5.1.12-beta:

CREATE TABLE `big_table_test1` (
`entity_id` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col1` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col2` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col3` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col4` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col5` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`col6` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`ymdh` datetime NOT NULL DEFAULT '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
`imps` bigint(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
`clicks` int(11) …

In Oracle and MySql, to get the column name and data type of a table, you can use:

desc MyTable

or

describe MyTable

The equivalent of desc in Sql Server is sp_columns. Therefore, run the command below will get similar results:

sp_columns MyTable

Today we have released MySQL Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 1.0.2 GA --a downloadable plug-in for Visual Studio 2005 that allows Windows developers to quickly build MySQL data-driven applications with Visual Studio. With this plug-in, developers will be able to create, modify and manage MySQL database objects with an easy-to-use interface from within the Visual Studio IDE. This product is delivered as a package compatible with Visual Studio 2005 and delivers the following features:

• DDEX (Data Designer Extensibility) compatibility
• Ability to work with MySQL objects (tables, views, stored procedures, etc) from within Server Explorer
• Support for MySQL versions 4.1 and higher

IMPORTANT
This product will only work correctly with Connector/Net 5.0.2 and higher.

This release does not include the ability to work with the DataSet designer but we will be making a beta …

Solera Networks Announces Open Source License for DataEcho Web Forensics Software, Solera Networks (Press Release)

Software Freedom Law Center Files Brief with Supreme Court Arguing Against Software Patents, Software Freedom Law Center (Press Release)

Is XenSource Virtualization Ready to Go Wide?, LinuxInsider, Jay Lyman (Article)

The cloudy future of mobile Linux, Computerworld, David Haskin (Article)

Financial …

The central component of most operating systems is the kernel. The kernel manages the resources of a system. In addition, the kernel facilitates and manages the communication between a system's hardware and software components.

Two levels of execution are provided by hardware: kernel mode execution and user mode execution. When in kernel mode, the software program can access all the instructions and every accessible piece of hardware. A program is in kernel space if running in kernel mode and in user space if running in user mode.

The Solaris kernel is a monolithic kernel, much like most Unix systems, as compared to a microkernel.

The software said to be running in …

Was really surprised today when heard really funny rap song about “kill -9″ Unix command:

• Video is here.
• Lyrics is here.
• Audio record is here.

Welcome, reader, to the 23rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly, human-edited review of the database blogosphere. No time to waste, so let’s start with some announcements. Xaprb, the producer of innotop, brings to our attention the latest release of mysqlreport, “one of (his) favorite tools for quickly comprehending the overall state of a [...]

Here's a mystery festive stored procedure. Don't run it on any critical servers.

MySQL's user variables have interesting properties that enable the useful techniques I wrote about in recent articles. One property is that you can read from and assign to a user variable simultaneously, because an assignment can be an r-value (the result of the assignment is the final value of the variable). Another property, which sometimes causes confusing behavior, is un-intuitive evaluation time. In this post I'll show you how to make sure your variables get updated at the time they're used, instead of potentially reading and updating them at different stages of query execution. This technique enables a whole new range of applications for user variables. As a bonus, it also avoids extra columns of output created by variable manipulations.