Infrastructure management company dbaDirect, in a move similar to Oracle’s play to intercept Red Hat’s enterprise support for its own distribution of Linux, is now supporting the MySQL open source database with dbaDirect’s usual enterprise services that include on-demand technical expertise, patches and upgrades.

While Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux announcement last year was no surprise and consistent with the company’s history and strategy, the dbaDirect MySQL offering is more on the level of the larger industry (meaning not just companies that throw around a few billion in acquisitions and extensions each year).

With dbaDirect, we now have a mid-sized, typical enterprise IT services company (3,000 corporate databases managed) basing strategy on the …

Earlier today I had a nice IM chat with someone.  He or she is referred to below as Question and I’m Answer.  There where interesting questions and perhaps others find the answers interesting as well.  I seemed a shame to let the information in the chat log go to waste, so I’m posting it here on my blog.
Question: I have a qestion for you about the possibility of creating custom transformations.
Answer: sure
Question: my company already has quite a buit of business logice that is coded in C and/or C++ and this logic then calls some Corba services.  Would it be possible for use to integrate that logic into Kettle?
Answer: Not directly, however, it’s not that hard to write wrappers in JNI (java native interface) and create a plugin for it.
Question: That was my idea.  I was just wondering if there were any other ways
Answer: …

With my very heavy travel load and skilling load I’ve not had time to scratch myself. It hasn’t stopped the brain working overtime on various issues including the classic find a pattern in a string starting with a wildcard character. On a recent gig I saw the true classic.


SELECT columns
FROM users
WHERE username LIKE '%str%'
OR firstname LIKE '%str%'
OR lastname LIKE '%str%'

I went through the various options and comments on leading ‘%’, OR’s, combined columns, FULLTEXT (which doesn’t work in this case), merge indexing etc, however it perplexed me that nobody has really solved this problem, or at least shared their solutions.

I have an idea, a theory and while I’d love to prove/disprove it, I simply just don’t have the time. So here are my notes, hopefully somebody can comment positively/negatively, do some research, or encourage me to pursue it more. …

I've been wanting a query sniper for a while for MySQL (some people seem to call them "query killers"). They're basically programs which inspect the MySQL "show processlist" command and decide to kill some processes if they violate specified rules. I have a prototype of one in python, and couldn't find any other implementations until tonight when I came across Querybane, which is what Wikipedia use to do exactly the same thing.

Now, I need to think further about if querybane does what I want, especially given I can't find the source code. Perhaps it's hidden in the media wiki code somewhere? The only code for a project named "servmon" (it's parent project) that I can find is …

The following checklist was compiled in recent classes. Usage is simple: Check the listed things , and consider the actions on the right.

It's not commented, just use it as a cheat sheet. Check: Max_Used_Connections Action: Max_Connnections Check: Threads_% Action: Thread_Cache_Size Check: Opened_Tables, Open_Tables Action: Table_Cache Check: Created_Tmp_Tables, Created_Tmp_Disk_Tables Action: Tmp_Table_Size Check: Sort_% Action: Sort_Buffer Check: QCache_%, Com_Select Action: Query_Cache_% Check: Table_Locks_% Action: MyISAM -> InnoDB Check: Key_% Action: Key_Buffer_Size Check: SHOW INNODB STATUS Action: Innodb_Buffer_Pool_Size Check: PROCEDURE ANALYSE() Action: ALTER TABLE Check: (Slow) Query Log Action: EXPLAIN

I will be involved in two sessions at the MySQL Users Conference and Expo 2007.

• The Blackhole and Federated Storage Engines: The Coolest Kids on the Block, a four-hands presentation with Kai Voigt
• Lightning Rounds with Top MySQL Community Contributors where I will be the moderator among a group of valued contributors who will tell their experience with MySQL.

This year conference is going to be more user-oriented than ever before. Many sessions by MySQL employees will be co-presented by …

Zend becomes even more interesting every day. PHP, the programming language that powers more than twenty-two million Web sites [Note: 22M is "a lot" :-) ] and boasts over 4.5 million developers, has long been on the rise. But Zend, like XenSource (virtualization) and others that build companies around open source projects, has long been searching for the right formula to maintain maximum openness in its community while still earning a solid return.

With the release of Zend Core 2.0, I believe the company has taken a big step in this direction.

As the company announced today,

Zend Core [is] the first fully tested, supported and enhanced version of PHP. Zend Core is based on the …

People will ask this question again and again when they run at the solidDB Storage Engine. The difference means, of course, the difference against InnoDB--the seminal transactional storage for MySQL. It is natural one would think, at first, that solidDB is just a clone of InnoDB because it does the same job of maintaining a transactional table engine under a unified SQL interface. That is true--and must be true--to some extent. However, when you scratch the surface, you may find some pleasant surprises. For example, built-in in solidDB is online backup producing snapshot-consistent backups in a non-blocking fashion. You may find a snapshot-consistent checkpoint a nice feature too. It gives you the freedom to move around the database files (after server shutdown) without the need to care about log files. There are also two concurrency control methods called "optimistic" and "pessimistic".

It is also good to prepare for more. The Solid's …

I've been designing an algorithm to resolve data differences between MySQL tables, specifically so I can 'patch' a replication slave that has gotten slightly out of sync without completely re-initializing it. I intend to create a tool that can identify which rows are different and bring them into sync. I would like your thoughts on this.

Mandy and I were working together on some accounting for Foo Associates earlier today. We were scratching down notes in an old notebook when I ran across some old bits and pieces from my days at MySQL - random lists of tasks, flight schedules, doodlings and this little snippet of text under the hotel address for OSCON 2002:

Flying into Salt Lake City is amazing. The terrain looks unfinished, like the surface of a moon recently given life. The Great Salt Lake spreads out past the horizon and, when low enough, you can see the weird and wonderful patterns formed by salt, evaporation and algae spreading out like plumes of gas boiling off a star.

Later, driving past the lake with an acquaintance, I remember being nearly equally amazed at the “dead sea creature in the hot sun” smell that rolls off of it.

…