About six months ago, on the recommendation of my accountants, I bought an accounting system, Mind Your Own Business. It runs under Microsoft, and I find it painful in the extreme. In the end, I decided not to use it.

On the other hand, what I was using before doesn't really cut it: as a died-in-the-wool UNIX man, I used a set of home-grown awk scripts to manipulate records which look like this:

TA#20060129#4##(2) Transfer in Brisbane
M#20060129#15.95##(3) Dinner
A#20060129#25##(4) Departure tax##NZD#0.928
M#20060129#41##(5) Lunch (Arjen, Grog)##NZD#0.928
M#20060128#25.95##(6) Dinner##NZD#0.928
M#20060126#9.5##(8) Lunch##NZD#0.928

UNIX people will recognize “intuitively” that these records consist of fields separated by a hash mark, # (and not a pound sign, £, which would be very …

A recent question in a newsgroup was

Given this table in MySQL 4.0, how can I run a single query to sort the records by the number of pipes in myfield?

id(int) -------- myfield(varchar)

1 --------- |number1|number2|
2 --------- |number1|
3 --------- |number1|number2|number3|
4 --------- |number1|number2|number3|number4|

Suppressing my urge to say something about the data structure, I suggested this clever solution from a test sample I deduced from the request:

select * from mytable;
+----+-------------------+
| id | myfield           |
+----+-------------------+
|  1 | 10|1|12|9         |
|  2 | 1|2               |
|  3 | 19|5|59|91        |
|  4 | 111|31|10|1|12|9  |
|  5 | 1|2|7             |
|  6 | 95|59|91          |
|  7 | 123456789|2000000 |
+----+-------------------+
 …

Since I started using PHP 5.x.x I started to experience incorrect time reported back through PHP using for example date(). I checked phpinfo() and found out that the default timezone was detected as America/Chicago. This was not the case as the server was configured for Canada/Saskatchewan (CST). I found out that I ended up having to directly set my timezone in php.ini file. I put the following in my php.ini file, then restarted Apache and the problem was resolved.

date.timezone = “Canada/Saskatchewan”

I’m not sure if this is a bug in PHP not detecting the timezone correctly. I tried searching through known …

By tim

At an OSCON panel yesterday, there was a really interesting conversation between Danese Cooper and Dain Sundstrom. We were talking about what happens when money arrives at an open source project (either in the form of corporate sponsors or commercialization of the project itself.)

Mitchell Baker pointed out how hard it was for AOL to understand that she was still the project leader when they laid her off from Netscape. It took a concerted effort by the remaining Netscape developers to help them realize that she was still their leader, despite AOL's new organizational plans. I had been …

Earlier this week I delivered a presentation at OSCON 2006 entitled "Making Sales While Making Friends: Lessons Learned from Open Source Businesses." I've been involved with commercial open source since 1998, and have learned a lot over the years (including how to fail spectacularly and slightly more gracefully). I'm in the middle of a string of successes, though, and figured now was the time to pretend to know-it-all. You can view my OSCON 2006 presentation here. It was an extension of some JBoss analysis I did recently, as well as an attempt to pass on some of the lessons I've learned so that the next round of open source …

Damian Conway is giving the funniest public flogging I have ever seen. He is single-handedly kicking the ass of Web 2.0, Sxip, patents, patent vulture firms, snake oil crypto, Microsoft, Google, r0ml and all the rest of us all at the same time.

Great quotes include:

• We have a patent on replacing the letter in a name with x, but still pronouncing it the same way.
• Every time you read the name Microsoft, you will see a kitten. We call it “Pavlovian Marketing”
• We thought that we might call it … firefly, fireangel, firebuffy. Then it became obvious - the new browser is called FireWhedon.

I sure hope that O’Reilly recorded this session.

Update 1

I just registered cxap.{biz,net,org} - now to go ask Damian what he would …

Since it is two weeks ago since my last post, I thought it would be a good idea to give a quick update on the development status.

At present, I've tackled all include and linking problems I faced (C++ is rather new to me). The insertion interface is ready, and the API for clients and sensors is near completion.
Last things remaining are the selection interface, an example client and an example sensor.

In a couple of days I hope to publish a package containing the first version.

Blog: http://sqlbusrt.blogspot.com/

Project website: http://sqlbusrt.sourceforge.net/

This is the first in a series of articles I?ll write on how to use innotop, the MySQL and InnoDB monitor I?m developing. This article explains how to install innotop.

I'm again returning to InnoDB scalability and related bug #15815 as it hurts many users and customers using multi-cpu servers.
Short intro into problem:
On 4-CPU box 1 thread executes full-table scan select query for 8 sec,
but with 4 threads - each thread executes query for 240 sec.
It is very strange as threads use only SELECT queries and ideally there should be no
any problem in concurrent enviroment, especially for CPU-bound workload.

I did the profiling which show the problem is with "buffer pool" mutex, which protects innodb_buffer_pool.
In details, for each scanned row InnoDB calls block_get / block_release functions
which aquire/release the block related to the current row. And the problem functions
block_get / block_release use mutex_lock(buffer_pool_mutex) / …

Just a quick reminder that the MySQL BoF is tonight from 8pm to 9pm in room D135. We'll have refreshments and you'll get to talk with the MySQL developers and have a good time. It probably won't be as crazy of a time as Monday's MySQL reception was... but nevertheless, come join us for a good chat.