Now this is the late "Part 1 of 2" (Part 2 was published first). Took me longer than expected, but I finally got it done.

In the beginning there was Windows...

I have been working with all versions of Windows starting with 3.0 on a 386SX16. Over the years I have gained extensive knowledge about many aspects of the inner workings, the weaknesses and strengths. Up to now I have been using Windows XP as my "main" operating system. It certainly has its flaws, but all told it is a fine piece of software.

I also believe to have a somewhat profound insight into Linux. I started with Debian Potato and have since used both newer Debian versions (Woody and Sarge) as well as several flavors of Red Hat (beginning with RH9, up to FC5) and some SuSE, too. Right now I am using Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06 to write this. However the majority of the …

I was working with a customer today, and I noticed they used varchar(10) to store an ISBN. This got me thinking, is that the most efficient way of storing an ISBN?

Some quick googling revealed that it is always 10 characters in length, so while a varchar would take 11 bytes to store this, a char will only take 10 bytes (the extra byte in the varchar is required to maintain the length). But an ISBN is not a string, it's a number. To store a 10 digit number, I need a BIGINT(10) ZEROFILL; that brings it down to 8 bytes.

A bit more googling, and I find out that the tenth digit in the ISBN is actually a checksum. I think to myself for a second that if I can recreate that checksum, I can move down to an INT(9) ZEROFILL, which means 4 bytes. 4 bytes for storing what was previously 11 bytes!

Of course, I had to share my excitement with one of my colleagues, who …

As part of building Tailrank we need to build a high availability and high performance MySQL cluster capable of running on cheap commodity hardware and in high performance environments. Unfortunately MySQL really falls down in a lot of areas especially when you make it do real work.

Luckily this is Open Source which means we can fix things.

We've developed a load balanced JDBC connection pool (named lbpool) meant to be used in production environments:

Right now we're at beta1 which means you should not deploy this in production environments without testing. That said its being used on Tailrank.com right now and is very rock solid. We've had it in production for 60 days now.

Here's a brief intro (but you should def read the full site).

The lbpool project provides a load …

We used to maintain a list of MySQL User Groups on the MySQL Developer Zone, which made it a bit inconvenient for new User Groups to get listed there. We've now moved the User Group list and some additional info to the Wiki on MySQL Forge (which also has received a facelift, thanks a lot to Colin and Ronald!). If you know of any other MySQL User Groups not listed there, feel free to add them! We are also looking forward to seeing more helpful hints on how to successfully start and …

A quick note to anyone building PHP with cURL or http extension support as well as one of the MySQL extensions (mysql, mysqli and pdo_mysql). The MySQL binaries found on mysql.com are built against yaSSL as opposed to the more common openssl against which libcurl (usede by cURL and HTTP extensions) is linked. The conflict between the two libraries causes curl initialization of the SSL layer to fail preventing startup of the PHP extensions.

To fix this problem you can either use older mysqlclient binaries (5.0.18 works) or compile MySQL yourself against openssl, either of these two will allow a working build of PHP with MySQL and curl support.

Lenz, Colin and I have made some pretty big improvements to MySQL Forge as of late, including user interface updates and RSS/Atom feeds. If you navigate to MySQL Forge in Firefox, you will now notice the ability to add Live Bookmarks to the site. OK, so that's cool.

However, if you are like me, and use a feed reader (like Liferea) to manage your ever-growing pile of syndication feeds, you can adjust the syndication feeds for the Forge quite easily. The main URL for the feeds is:

http://forge.mysql.com/feed.php

The Atom feed is:

http://forge.mysql.com/feed.php?p=atom

From those two base URLs, you can filter the feed based on two query string (GET) arguments currently:

i

The type of item. …

First, the reason I haven't been blogging as much

I haven't been blogging nearly as much recently because my blog software has become almost unusable. I have been getting on average 500 spam comments and trackbacks per day, which makes actually posting comments to my blog pretty much useless, since they get lost immediately (damn those spammers!)

I plan on switching over to a new version of Wordpress in the coming week or two (hopefully before OSCON, but no promises). If anyone has read this blog for a while (over a year), you'd know I have gone through a number of blog software solutions, including Wordpress, Seredipity, and my own home-grown solution (a miserable failure in terms of functionality). I am going to try the new version of Wordpress and see if it helps. I mean, the purpose of blog software should be to enable the writer to write, as easily as possible, with few distractions (like spam). Hopefully the …

One of my "part time" roles is a sysop on the Quest MySQL Pipelines, as I have mentioned on here before we don't get many posts unfortunately and I can only assume that's because MySQL have such great forums of their own.

Anyway, Quest produce a product called Spotlight on MySQL which is a rather cool looking monitoring tool for MySQL. Personally I haven't had the chance to use it but the development team are currently looking for feedback on Spotlight on MySQL, with particular interest in if there is need for replication support.

So if you have anything to add pop over to the forum and let the guys know in the Spotlight on MySQL section.

http://pipetalk.quest-pipelines.com/default.asp?boardid=mysql

Jigsaw is an interesting new company that has started to pop up on a lot of people's radar lately.  You can think of Jigsaw as "social networking 2.0" for professionals.  It's got a very specific focus: business contacts. And even though that might sound narrow, their ambition is huge: develop a worldwide database of contacts at every business organization on the planet.  Think about it.  How useful would it be to have a universal directory of business contacts that was always up-to-date?  Pretty darned useful.

As with other Web 2.0 companies, Jigsaw gets really interesting as it deals with scale.  Managing a few hundred thousand or million contacts is not that hard a problem.  But as you start to add zeros to the numbers, then it becomes a seriously hard problem.  Luckily, they have a …

Today I found a bug in MySQL administrator. When I tried to create a new table, there is no information about the names of storage engines :

———
MySQL version: 5.1.12-beta-nightly-20060718-log
MySQL Administrator: 1.1.10
OS: Linux Fedora Core 5
———

The other think I found is the declaration of a new storage engine I think this is ‘early Falcon’

CREATE TABLE `tester`.`testFalcon` (
`id` TINYINT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` CHAR NOT NULL ,
PRIMARY KEY(`id`)
)
ENGINE = JSTAR;


...
{"Falcon", "jstar", MYX_DBM_TE_FALCON,
"Transactional engine for modern scale-out applications.\n"
"Supports MVCC (multiversion concurrency control)."},
Copyright (C) 2004 MySQL AB
....


Logs “on demand”

By default this query returns: …