So I'm in Boston at LinuxWorld this week (though not today) and have met a number of interesting people so far. Of particular note, I had a great conversation with Clint Oram, co-founder of SugarCRM, regarding community relations, forges, and open source in general. He's one smart cookie, which is one of the reasons he's doing a session at this year's Users Conference about optimizing SugarCRM to work best with MySQL

One of the things we discussed was the success of SugarForge and ways in which the (very alpha) MySQL Forge and SugarForge might be able to share content. For instance, the MySQL Forge wiki could have a number of articles tailored to …

• Open source is not a marketing toy.
• Open source is not a way to get people to visit your site or to push your legacy tools.
• Open source is not just choosing one of the OSI approved licenses.

These are not the reason why people trust in open source applications.

• The reason is that peer review results in superior code.
• In code that is flexible that we can integrate as needed.
• Code we can poke and discuss.
• Code we trust because we know technical reasons are the single most important steering guideline.
• This process is why we think it is worth our time to provide free QA, support and advocacy for open source applications.

Now why am I ranting like this?
Zend has officially proposed a PHP IDE for eclipse (PHPEclipse is not an official Eclipse project) and they are certainly poring in development resources which cost them …

Assume nothing. Your assumptions are wrong, that’s why there’s a bug silly!

If valgrind had a time machine function it’d be totally awesome. But it doesn’t so currently extra work and thinking is required. doh!

I’ve had to fix a few small bugs in the release of phpbms. So I’ve put my bzr archives up

bzr clone http://www.flamingspork.com/src/bms.upstream/

and

bzr clone http://www.flamingspork.com/src/bms.stewart/

Hopefully there’ll be another release soon that incorporates these fixes - some are on the sourceforge page and some are in the source repo.

BUT... Create the sub-tables exactly as you would for a MERGE table. Note the indexes.

create table chunk1 (num int, data varchar(255), key (num));
create table chunk2 (num int, data varchar(255), key (num));

Create a VIEW that is simply a UNION of the data sets of the sub-tables.

create view chunk as select * from chunk1 union select * from chunk2;

Create another VIEW that aggregates the sizes of the sub-tables.

create view counts as
      select count(*) as records, 1 as chunk from chunk1
union select count(*) as records, 2 as chunk from chunk2;

Now a cool thing - use the counts VIEW to implement round robin INSERT operations for automatic load balancing between chunk tables. Extra cool if the FEDERATED engine is used for the sub-tables:

<?php
function next_chunk() {
    $rs = …

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.