By tim

There were a number of detailed blog entries covering some of the sessions from my O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at OSCON. I thought I'd point to them for the benefit of those who weren't there. On ZDNet, Russell Shaw covered Danese Cooper's interview with Bill Hilf of Microsoft, my conversation with Jim Buckmaster of Craigslist, and my conversation with Ian Wilkes of Second Life. In each case, he captured some good quotes. A sampling:

Bill: "We are dealing with close mindedness inside and outside..."

Ian: "I did a count recently, and over an entire cluster there are five million user processes going on at any given time. There's geographical mapping at the front end, but at the back end …

Ahhh, finally back from OSCON. There was a mixup with the hotel rooms and I accidentally did not get reservations for my last night in Portland (Saturday). I checked four hotels and they were all out of rooms, and I was a bit freaked out about the possibility of spending the night on a couch in a lobby at the airport or a hotel.

Luckily, Scott Mathews from Dice.com offered to let me sleep on the floor of his hotel room. Lucky for me, that is. Unlucky for Scott, who had a fairly severe allergic reaction to the small tumbleweed of cat hair that was attached to my luggage. Unfortunately for Scott, he didn't realize the situation until the morning, when it was too late to do something about it...

Oh, and then the train system broke down when a tram accidentally disconnected the power line on the steel bridge going into downtown, causing a domino-effect breakdown of the system. So, into a town car Scott and I went, and off to the …

I'm leaving MySQL starting 1st of August. This is surely not news for my collegues and friends who knew this is comming.

We're starting our own company which will provide MySQL Consulting services. We'll focus on MySQL Performance Optimization but will be able to help pretty much with all MySQL related issues. We can also act as your remote MySQL DBA or help you scaling your LAMP Application.

In addition to that I'll get back on Entrepreneurial track and work on few Web Projects. Some of you know before joining MySQL I was co-founder and CTO of well known Web Statistics company in Russia and I loved it a lot. I will keep you posted as soon as I have something to show.

I will continue being part of MySQL Community, hopefully getting even more time for this. I will update this blog, hang around on forum, speak on conference as well as work on …

It seems to be a good time for people with experience in managing MySQL servers or developing applications based on MySQL: our MySQL Jobs Forum has plenty of openings. So if you are a seasoned MySQL DBA or developer, make sure to check for opportunities there, if you are considering a career change.

In addition to a proven track record on your MySQL experience, being MySQL certified should give you an extra advantage when you apply. The good thing about this certification? You can study for the exam by taking training courses, or all by yourself. Once you feel ready for the exam, you can head to any of the more than 3,000 …

In 4.0 the default character set is latin1. When converting to 4.1 this relationship is preserved. In many cases as in the case at flickr.com we store utf8 data in latin1 columns. So, think of the situation as latin1 being the container for utf8. This screws up a lot of thing especially when Java is used. We have to hack the driver to tell it even though the server is returning the data is latin1 it's really UTF8.


So, what is a good way to convert to true utf8 character set with a unicode collation.

Rebuild the data! This is the way that I'm doing it to also shrink the innodb datafile. There is a lot of free space.

Now remember we have utf8 data in a latin1 container column, so we need to make sure that we get a dump of the raw data. MySQL will double pad the data with default options converting the latin1 charset to utf8, which is garbage.

mysqldump -hHOST -uroot -p DB TABLE …

I just saw this article on how Linus Torvalds on the one hand and Hewlett-Packard on the other hand reacted to the Free Software Foundation’s (FSF) second draft of its GPL v3 license.

Just like Linus, I, too, have said all along that digital rights management (DRM) is not categorically illegitimate and thus must not be ostracized as a whole. While Linus still seems dissatisfied with the FSF’s proposed GPLv3 in this respect, the aforementioned article quotes Hewlett-Packard (HP) saying that based on a preliminary analysis, there’s been a lot of progress on that front.

But the article also reports that HP wants the FSF to soften its stance on patents. I can only hope that the FSF will continue to stand firm on this issue. It’s obvious that certain companies with huge patent portfolios have a certain agenda, but you can’t please …

Andy Leonard pens the following blog entry:

Database Professionals: An Enterprise Requirement

There are quite a few organizations that feel they can get by without a DBA on staff. They believe they are cutting cost, not realizing that they are incurring it. Andy covers the situation from a development perspective. I'll speak from an operational one.

I can think of an example from a couple of years back where a friend who had a consulting company gave me a call. A private college near where I lived had a data corruption issue that affected their student records (oops). They didn't have a DBA and the system administrator thought he had implemented the database backups properly. Now, it's not hard to institute database backups. However, it does require a bit more thinking that …

MySQL is adding more tools to monitor its internals with every new release, but one thing it still lacks is a way to find out who is locking what, and therefore which transactions block which other ones. This is such a vital feature that I’m considering writing my own patch to the source! Still, it is possible, to a limited extent, to find out who’s locking resources. In this article I’ll explain how you can do that.

MySQL is known for its stability but as any other application it has bugs so it may crash sometime. Also operation system may be flawed, hardware has problems or simply power can go down which all mean similar things - MySQL Shutdown is unexpected and there could be various inconsistences. And this is not only problem as we'll see.

MySQL has angel process mysqld_safe which will restart MySQL Server in most cases. It is great, unless you have run into some bug which causes it to crash again - such crashes qucikly following one another are kind of worse because they explore many less tested code paths in MySQL and so problem potential is larger.

So lets look at the problem which happen during the crash which might need to take care of or which may seriously affect MySQL Performance.

MyISAM Corruption - If you're writting to MyISAM tables there is very large chance of them becoming corrupted …

The PostgreSQL community has done an excellent job implementing an extensible, distributed, and community-driven build farm (called pgBuildFarm), and, frankly, I'm jealous.

Benefits a Build Farm Brings (say that 10X faster)

Besides sounding cool, there are a number of very tangible benefits that a distributed build farm brings to a code project:

• Automated, consistent, and redundant tests of both common and obscure platforms
• A centralized, publicly available testing interface, which allows for an easier ability to see where failures occur, and where stable builds occur.
• Reduced costs associated with build and test tracking, which leads to quicker turn-around for builds and a more robust testing framework
• A chance for the community to be more involved in the build and testing process, resulting in a greater …