Yesterday's article on connection handling and caching techniques spurred a number of comments both on and offline, regarding whether or not the solution I propose is actually a good one. I wanted to follow up with some benchmark results that show the performance difference of caching in files, versus using the MySQL query cache.

A note about lazy loading

Before I go on, however, I did want to point out that Andrew Magrude did have an excellent comment on the previous article, and brought up something I had not thought of regarding the mysql_real_escape_string() function. He correctly states that using the mysql_real_excape_string() function will require a connection to the database, and for folks concerned about SQL injection attacks for various character sets, you will want to ensure that a connection is made to the database before trying to use …

Snapshot of the vmware config used (two running instances required for the example) This is a quick tour of DRBD and how it compares to local RAID and to MySQL replication. DRBD is short for "distributed raw block device", so what it does is essentially RAID-1 over a network cable. You will be able to have two copies of a block device on two different physical machines, one of them the primary, active node and the other one a secondary, passive node.

The DRBD tour in this blog post has been created on two vmware instances with a Suse 10.0 Professional installation on each which I am using to show the most essential features of DRBD. Each vmware has a bit of memory, a network card, a boot disk with a text only Suse 10 installation and a second simulated 1 GB SCSI disk besides the boot disk to demonstrate stuff. The two instances are connected on a simulated local vmnet instance and share the 10.99.99.x/24 network, they are called …

Yes, that's right.  You can start looking for airborne swine!  We have released the first drop of Connector/Net 5.0!  While there were reasons why this release took so long to get out, I'll take a page from Ballmer's book and commit to you that it won't happen again.  In any case, this release has lots of goodies baked in.

• ADO.Net 2.0 support
• Usage Advisor
• PerfMon hooks
• Completely virtualized execution pipeline (this will support use of the client library and embedded server later)
• Faster execution
• Type safe methods on MySqlDataReader completely avoid value boxing
• Procedure metadata caching
• New option for not resetting the connection on pool checkout
• And much more!

There are a few things broken or missing in this first code drop.  Here is the current list.

• Connecting via shared memory or using compression …

The wait is finally over, MySQL Connector/NET 5 is here!

Hi,

MySQL Connector/Net 5.0.0 Alpha 1 has been released. MySQL Connector/Net is an all-managed ADO.Net provider for MySQL.

While this release is suitable for any version of MySQL, it is strongly encouraged that this release not be used on any production data. This release has some features that are not yet complete and a few test cases that are not passing but is being made available to the public to gather feedback for the beta phase. Please see below for a list of the areas that are not complete or are not working.

It is now available in source and binary form from the Connector/Net download pages at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/5.0.html
and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time - if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.) …

MySQL meetings
The first MySQL UG meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria is in history now. You can see some very interesting pictures by clicking here

Slides

The slides about MySQL Falcon(JSTAR) are available here (*.odp in bulgarian)

OpenSource
Let’s spread the world about Balkan’s initiatives about open source and/or Free Software. Yeah, that’s my job ;)) I already wrote couple of times about OpenFest in Bulgaria. Now it’s time for Romania.

Romanian Open Source and Free Software Initiative (ROSI) is growing up faster and faster every day. That is extremely …

Since Zack brough 8 ways to kill good ideas, I thought I'd add two of my own that I see popping up frequently.

1. Insist on following procedure

   People work differently, and those coming up with ideas that they want to try out are usually not good rule-followers. When forced to follow a certain procedure, only because it's company policy or because management want to reduce the risk (which is usually what the procedures are for), the idea will surely not get implemented.

2. Punish failures

On an interview I was once asked the question "do you have many bad ideas?". I answered that "90% of my ideas are usually bad", to which the interviewer smirked and said "Not more? That's pretty good." This was for a job where …

This past week I was in a couple of different strategic planning meetings.  Some sessions were noticeably more effective than others in encouraging creative ideas.  I started to wonder why that is and came up with the top ways to kill new ideas. If you see these tenets taking hold in your organization, then you need to change things up to get people thinking more radically. 

1. Every idea must be perfect
   The enemy of good is perfect.  If you aim for perfection you'll probably never get out of the starting gate.  By making something good (or even "good enough"), you can get it to market and improve it.  As Philippe Kahn used to say at Borland in the 1980's "Shipping is a feature."  In other words, until you get to market, you haven't done anything.  Good ideas that get implemented can be improved.  Great ideas that never get out don't amount to …

Recently Jay Pipes published great article about lazy connecting and caching which reminded me my post on this matter is well overdue.

Let me start with couple of comments about Jays article. First - caching in files should be used with caution. It may be very efficient especially if number of cached objects is small but if you get too many small objects which need to be cached files can become inefficient, especially if you do not care about putting them into different directories on file systems which can't handle too many files in the same directory efficiently. The other problem with files is of course being local to the local node which might be inefficient with many web servers. Putting cache on shared storage could work but that is extra complication. There are cases when file cache works pretty well - …

At OSCON, I met with Ian Murdock, Jim Zemlin and Amanda McPherson of FSG (http://www.freestandards.org), together with our founders Monty and David. We discussed ways of making MySQL Linux Standard Base 3.1 compliant.

Starting MySQL 5.1, we will strive for LSB 3.1 compliance. We’ll make the packages (RPM files, dpkg files) LSB compliant. Tarballs will still exist, but for other purposes, and will not aim at LSB compliancy.

LSB compliancy is planned to make MySQL …

Tonight is census night in Australia, and the 20,000,000 people (including 9 MySQL Employees!) will be filling out questions like what religion we are, how much we earn, how many people live in our houses.

This is a once in every 5 years event, and the first time it's ever moved online - I'm impressed.

I figured they'd wasted the paper by sending the form to my house, so I might as well go old skool, but Groggy didn't get a choice. It turns out that they expected that he have a postcode, when not all of us do.

I thought I'd share some other quirks about data (feel free to comment on any localised ones that I omitted):

• Not everyone has a surname (not everyone has a middle name, and some people have more than one middle name). Thanks: Arjen
…