I got fully immersed in performance tuning on the databases at work this morning. There was a seriously overloaded MySQL machine. No time like a crisis to have the new guy try his hand at resolving a performance issue. I was in a meeting for part of the time where I couldn't do much more than watch and I noticed over time that there were anywhere from 2 to 10 queries stuck writing to temp tables. This was happening over and over for more than an hour. Somewhere halfway through the meeting a query came through that was taking many minutes, mostly stuck in a mode of writing to a temp table.

Upon further inspection I noticed that the myisam_sort_buffer_size was set fairly large, but the sort_buffer_size was quite small. To my knowledge, the myisam_sort_buffer_size is for table maintenance and optimization, but isn't used during normal database operations. The sort_buffer_size is used for sorting for normal operations. After getting consensus …

I would just like to thank all those who have downloaded and tested PBXT for their help and suggestions. I have updated my to-do list to include all the issues raised so far.

Although my own performance tests indicate that PBXT has great potential, the more general MySQL performance tests show that the implementation is still in its early days.

Of course, there is still a lot to be done. Everybody knows there is a big difference between a running program and a production system. It is the most challenging part of writing a program. But also the most rewarding because it will eventually see the program being put to useful work.

Some people at MySQL have expressed surprise that an effort to develop a new engine has come out of the community. Personally I think I was more surprised that I am already part of the community!

I guess I am used to the turf wars that pervade most other large …

phpBMS

Basically I want something to generate invoices for me. This should greatly help in a bunch of things - namely not being a retard and fucking it up every month.

Primarily I want to just be able to *not* have a whole bunch of spreadsheet files (one for each month of work plus one for each months expenses) and actually have something that works and takes a lot of the pain away for me.

Then I can do queries to fill out stuff for the tax office.

I think phpBMS fufills this for me. In fact, I’m very much inclined to migrate to it right now.

It stores all its data in a MySQL Database (which is nice, as I use that - and like it). It also means I can do arbitrary queries (in fact, the queries it does are viewable via the Web UI - funky!)

It’s even buzzword compliant with AJAX.

Ruby on Rails is hot technology. Its got the essence of Web 2.0 written all over it, right?

Seeing that it supports MySQL out of the box, we like it. We of course want to enhance our support of the Ruby on Rails team, and make sure the RoR users have a rocking time.

As a consequence of this, I’ve been playing with RoR, and will definitely write up more thoughts here at some stage. This is just a quick note to mention that I’d be going to the Silicon Valley Ruby Conference, from April 22-23 2006. Anyone else plan on being there?

Capgemini UK plc has developed a nationwide "Look-to-Book" seat reservation enquiry system for Great Britain based on MySQL Cluster and Dolphin Interconnect technology. Designed to meet challenging performance requirements in throughput and response times, the system can be accessed from sales points, call centers and Internet applications -- and is capable of performing in excess of the 600 transactions per second required.

I had a blast playing with MySQL 5.1.7 and exploring the latest cluster stuff last week. This week I find out that I'm getting a new iPod for it. That is just sheer goodness. Thanks MySQL.

And yes, I do love to rock.

Last week I was contacted by a person looking for a non-MySQL employee who would spend an hour or so talking to a group of employees at a large international company exploring MySQL. The request was to have someone that's been using MySQL "in the trenches" for some time to get on the phone and have a friendly but honest conversation about how MySQL works. I can think of a dozen people who would be excellent, and perhaps more qualified, but I'm going to give it a shot. Jay's in town for LinuxWorld (and conveniently staying at our place) so I might have to pick his brain about any deep MySQL "internals" questions.

I got a bunch of details on the phone today and it looks like the meeting will be a lunchtime (in my time zone) phone call with a handful of long-time Oracle DBAs who manage databases on the order of hundreds. The organization would like to move into using open source tools and thinks …

The JAX Innovation Award is intended to honour and recognise the most remarkable and outstanding European contributions in the world of Java and Eclipse. These contributions can include products, open source projects, ideas, concepts, publications, or break-through technological innovations. What's your most favourite innovation or project?

You can submit your proposal online or by downloading and filling out forms provided from this page. The winner can win a 10kEUR prize, which will be presented during the JAX, Enterprise Architecture, and Eclipse Forum Europe …

I just started QueryBrowser on my SuSE 10.0 PC (the version that's installed by default) and wondered, what version it would be. Looked into Help/About and was extremely surprised to see 1.2.7 as version number.

The current Linux version of QueryBrowser as stated on dev.mysql.com is 1.1.18.

I guess that the version number of QueryBrowser's Help/About dialog is wrong, but does somebody know exactly, what happened here?

Maybe this message looks like a little late for you, but for me it's true. Today I finally got an xDSL internet connection, which starts a whole new epoch for me.

So far, I only had an ISDN connection with a maximum transfer rate of 7 - 8 KB/s. Every 8 hours, the line has been disconnected automatically, so no big downloads were possible - and even smaller downloads made it impossible to surf through the web comfortably. That was extremely limiting and there were many things that I could only dream of.

Now, these times are over! Today I have already downloaded more data than I usually did (or could) in a whole month before - I'm just installing SuSE Linux 10.1 Beta9 in a VMWare server (both just downloaded), and Ubuntu 5.10 is almost finished. Many more things are planned - also to take a close look at MaxDB, as it won't be a problem anymore to quickly download all the things that I need. Downloading new versions of …