There are some proposed changes in the Australian copyright law that are just too weird.

Australia has its newish free-trade agreement with the US, and so is now harmonising some of its laws. Unfortunately, things are being tightened without the corresponding "fair use" clauses that are part of the equivalent US legislation, and some flawed US stuff like the DMCA is also finding its way into the Australian proposals... laws have a fairly long cycle. The DMCA may get fixed at some point, but a new Australian law will take years again to pick up any such changes.

So, about the new copyright proposals:The proposed changes include allowing individuals to record a television program but only allowing a single viewing before it must be deleted.
The proposed laws also make it illegal to lend recorded programs to friends …

In recent articles I explained how I've optimized queries on some large tables at my current employer, and how I've written archiving and purging jobs to trim the tables down to a manageable size. This article explains how I re-indexed some of those tables without taking the server offline.

For those still interested, there is now an official job posting at the MySQL web site at http://www.mysql.com/company/jobs/tech-writer.html:

The MySQL documentation team is looking for another technical writer. For this we need the best and the most dedicated people around. You may work from anywhere in the world as long as you have the necessary skills and technical facilities to communicate across the Internet. Projects are coordinated from Germany, but our team members are expected to work independently.

You should be prepared to work intensively with our developers when writing new documentation (in English, so you should be a native English speaker), or changing existing documentation. Of course, you should have in-depth knowledge of MySQL, and we’d appreciate if you were MySQL certified. As a technical writer, you should have proven experience …

One of my first major tasks at MySQL has just been completed - a major rewrite of the Connector/ODBC (C/ODBC) documentation.

There were three major focuses for the rewrite:

1. Bring the documentation up to date. We had a mix of information on the latest release (currently 3.51, but 5.0 is currently in development), but many of the sections didn’t reflect that new version. There is also new information on how to install the driver on Mac OS X.
2. Restructure the information. This is something I’m doing across the board on the Connectors docs, as I try to re-organize them all into a more coherent, and compatible, structure. For example, I’ve collated all of the tips about using C/ODBC with different applications into their own section, organized by application. I’ve also extended the information; for example we now have a …

It's no secret that MySQL is widely deployed in most leading web sites.  Everyone knows how successful the LAMP stack has become and that companies like Google, Yahoo, Sabre, Evite, Citysearch all use tons of open source software (including MySQL) to scale their operations.  As important as all of these companies are, I'm most proud of the fact that MySQL is used at Wikipedia.  This is one of the top web sites in the world and not only is it built on open source software (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Lucene) and the MediaWiki project. 

Wikipedia is famous not just for being a highly scalable open source project, but more importantly, it is an open and collaborative repository of human knowledge.  There are more than 1 million articles in the english language edition of Wikipedia and there are smaller versions in more than 100 languages.  And all of …

Arjen’s MySQL Community Journal - HyperThreading? Not on a MySQL server…

I blame the Linux Process Scheduler. At least it’s better than the earlier 2.6 days where things would get shunted a lot from one “cpu” to the other “cpu” for no real reason.

Newer kernel verisons are probably better… but don’t even think of HT and pre-2.6 - that would be funny.

Did you know that... using a CPU with HyperThreading turned on actually makes your MySQL database server slower?

Reason... Well, with real multi-core or multi-CPU, MySQL's connection threads get nicely spread. With HT it looks like you have multiple cores, but you don't really. This possibly causes more overhead given MySQL's multi-threaded architecture? Perhaps others have more insightful clarifications. Anyhow, HT makes things slower on a MySQL server system. Just turn it off and you'll see!

Wouldn't it be cool if the open source RDBMS of the world got together to define a common protocol for debugging stored procedures? This opens up the possibility to share GUI tools and more importantly expertise in making it work to begin with.

This idea dawn on me after reading a thread on stored procedure debugging on the pgsql-hackers list. The other day I was talking to Derick and he mentioned that MySQL also have had an interest in his DBGp debugging protocol. Avid readers of my blog know how fond I am of the idea of using common standards in this area.

So maybe we can get a brought alliance of open source RDBMS developers to work on a common standard? I have been hoping for some solid cooperation materializing …

continuing the recent thread about contenttypes in django I thought I would talk about a feature which got added in the magic removal branch, which doesn’t have as much attention as I think it deserves.

signals and the dispatcher.

signals are way of telling the rest of the world that something happened. If you are interested you simply listen for it (connect in django speak).

take for example my tagging application currently in use on zyons. one of it’s features is that it let’s users store their own tags.

One of the performance improvements I added to this was the creation of a ‘summary’ tag which aggregates which the …

Ramblings » Blog Archive » a bug on failure failure

I blogged about MySQL Bug 17928 a little while ago. Well, I’ve submitted a patch that fixes the problem. I wrote rather a rather detailed explanation in the Changeset comments (and I encourage every body who commits code anywhere to do the same). You can see the patch over on the commits list (or here if you don’t want to sift through the archives).

In all theory it shouldn’t be hard to enable multiple simultaneous backups for Cluster. How useful this would be is very debatable. Arguably of little use of all (it’s a REDO log backup). Of course, testing for this (as we test Node Failure) would start to get horrific. Any good arguments one way or the …