The latest from the MySQL community

I'll be giving a talk at mysqluc2007. The talk will be entitled, Federation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries per day. Personally I think it's a pretty catchy title, and full of info that might be helpful for many other organizations.

I've won 2005 (1st year that they offered this award), and 2006 Application of the year award for the uses of mySQL. Three years in a row would be cool! This will be my second speaking engagement at mysql uc. The 1st one was entitled Friendster back in 2005. It says I'm a Sr. Support Engineer, I have no idea what that is, really I'm the Database (DataLayer) Architect / Database Administrator, or Technical Yahoo - in Yahoo Land. I'm not to big on titles because doing is much greater then being(tm).




Hope to see you there.

We used to use Google mini to index our site to serve search results to our users. It worked great for a while until sometime back it just stopped indexing. It would get a fatal error and stop index after couple urls. It was also not so kind about sending me an email to let me know that it has stopped indexing. It was still serving pages which were indexed prior to this so we didn?t realize it wasn?t indexing new content.

And than one day we logged in to the admin console to see whats going on with it and found out it wasn?t indexing. I checked the logs and found out that it was stopping due too too many 4xx errors. After looking at logs on our web server I found out that it was stopping because Apache was giving back 406 response code which is described at w3.org as:

The resource identified by the request is only capable of generating response entities which have content characteristics not acceptable according to the accept …

Stewart was hoping the MySQL MiniConf (hereinafter called mysql.conf.au) would rock. In fact, it actually did.

At any one time, we had over 60-75 people in the room. It was a standing room, with full attendance at all the talks!

As soon as I get all the slides, I’ll place it up at Forge.

[Update 28/1/2007: New Version and new website.]

Amit Singh ported FUSE to MacOS X. This is just cool. Thanks!

I created a little Cocoa GUI around sshfs to manage and mount your remote drives via ssh conveniently from a program and not from the commandline. This is early alpha software and may break things. It is not heavily tested and could sleep with your wife while beating your kids, so BEWARE! Additionally, the software it interfaces with is in its early stages as well and it includes a custom kernel extension (written by Amit, so I trust it). You have been warned. It's so new that it doesn't even have an icon. But sssssh!

See this announcement for …

I just made a snapshot of the development branch of the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor, and released it as version 1.3.0. This code will eventually become version 1.4. Here’s what’s new. Version number policy Odd-numbered releases, such as 1.3.0, contain the code that will eventually become a stable release – in this case 1.4. Not all the features are there, and not all of them work perfectly, but it’s a development snapshot for community review and feedback.

In this episode, the second part in a two-part series about Falcon, the new storage engine provided by MySQL, we talk about what happens when commit, going over and explaining the serial log and indexes.

Direct play episode 6 at:
http://tinyurl.com/yympcn

Subscribe to the podcast by clicking:
http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=206806301

You can Direct download all the oursql podcasts at:
http://technocation.org/podcasts/oursql/

Links:
Falcon features:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/falcon/en/se-falcon-features.html

Falcon …

I believe this is a huge optimization for a heavily implemented Web 2.0 idea.

This article makes simple work of groups of queues. An example of this would be “the most recent 10 people to view an article,” so each article has a queue of up to 10 items in it. This method eliminates the need for multiple SQL statements or using TRIGGERS to check to see if the queue is full.

I bow down to Baron Schwartz, aka Xarpb, for his article on how to implement a queue in SQL:

http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2007/01/11/how-to-implement-a-queue-in-sql/

I am very excited because this also works for groups of objects, and we’re about to implement something at work that needs this idea. The idea of “the most recent x things” or “the top x things” is huge, especially in social networking, and probably one of the most often …

I had dinner with Fabrizio, a good friend and CEO of Funambol, the leading mobile open source company. He was in Salt Lake to ski and was kind enough to call me so that we could hang out.

Fabrizio said some things about open source that rang true with me, which I had not considered before. I'll list two principles he mentioned, and will discuss each in turn:

1. Don't upsell your community, and

2. Sell open source to those who don't like/trust open source.

At first glance, Fabrizio's principles fly in the face of most open source businesses out there. But when you scratch the surface of his thinking you see that it actually undergirds the most successful open source businesses. Let me explain.

Fabrizio's first principle - …

I’ve just recently released a new version of libmygis, a library for dealing with various GIS formats. Its main purpose is importing ESRI Shapefile data into MySQL’s GIS, but it is useful for much more.

There are many new small features in libmygis 0.7, but the biggest new feature is projection support (and automatic re-projection) via the PROJ.4 cartographic library. With support for projections and the ability to read Shapefile PRJ files, libmygis is getting much closer to having full support for the Shapefile format.  This means you can easily import Shapefiles in any projection into MySQL and deal with it in pure lat/lon, which is what you’ll need in order to interface with outside tools such as …