I have built several web sites and applications in the past, and I have to admit that I am a data junkie. If there is user data or any other data to be captured when someone uses my application or visits a web page, then I like to capture it (I can always delete it later). Of course, you can use a third-party Javascript plug-in for web site analytics (which I also use), but I like to gather information myself.

Most of the pages that I have written use Perl – even for the home page when possible (yes, I am “old school”, and my lack of using modern Perl code is evident). Each time a user clicks to go to another page, I like to capture as much information as possible about their visit.

Perl, PHP and other scripting languages have ways for you to capture the information about your web page visitor. For Perl, this simple script will tell you a lot of information the visitor and your server. In order for this script to work, you …

This is the first of a handful of posts to augment the presentations I gave at Java One and Silicon Valley Code Camp earlier this month.  It seems I significantly overestimated how much content I could effectively deliver in the time allotted, and left a few of my major points untouched.  These blog posts will try to rectify that.

The first major area I failed to cover in depth was really “Extension Points”, starting from slide #56.  There are four major extension points in Connector/J:

• Lifecycle Interceptors
• Statement Interceptors
• Exception Interceptors
• Loadbalancing Strategies

We’ll look at the first in this post.

Connection lifecycle events can be useful for instrumenting or debugging …

We have seen many reports about broken build and freezes which are experienced on Ubuntu 11.10. While the build fix was pretty simple, the freezes took us a bit more time to hunt them down.

The point is that MySQL Workbench relies on glib’s idle signals which are emitted when Gtk’s main event loop has nothing to do. In Ubuntu 11.10, for some reason, for certain types of windows we use, these idle signals are not emitted cause window drawing code constantly reschedules idle redraws.

The bug report which is related to the freezes and compilation problems is at http://bugs.mysql.com/62347

Here is a link to the patch: is http://bugs.mysql.com/file.php?id=17639

If you use MySQL for any number of databases, and if you are not using the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) to manage your databases, then you are missing out on a great DBA tool.

From http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-monitor/2.3/en/mem-introduction.html:

“MySQL Enterprise Monitor is a companion product for MySQL Server that monitors your MySQL instances, notifies you of potential issues and problems, and advises you how to fix the issues. MySQL Enterprise Monitor can monitor all kinds of configurations, from a single MySQL instance that is important to your business, all the way up to a huge farm of database server machines powering a busy web site. “

The query analyzer function of the Enterprise Monitor helps you to analyze/tune your queries. It can tell you which queries are being run the most often, which ones are …

I recently ran into an issue where our request throughput was showing very erratic and spikey behavior despite very smooth response times from the application servers. Using Splunk, we analyzed every log that we had: nginx, haproxy, apache, and the application logs themselves and we were seeing similarly spikey throughput. Because those tools all log upon request completion, there was no way to determine from the logs themselves whether it was one tier of the stack in particular that was delaying request arrival, or if it the spikes were endemic to the traffic we were receiving.

So, we decided to perform some analysis of the raw tcp data on the edge server using a couple of tools. First, was tcpdump, which is a tool that should be in every SysAdmin’s arsenal.

First, grab all the traffic on the interface and write it to a pcap formatted file:

# tcpdump -c 200000 -w output.pcap -i any

This command will capture …

I’ve uploaded both the presentation materials and demo code used in my JavaOne and Silicon Valley Code Camp presentations. Since I ran out of time at JavaOne, I’ll be writing blog posts later this coming week to cover the material I didn’t get a chance to complete there.

• presentation slides
  

• demo code

UPDATE:  I’ve started adding posts fleshing out the presentation materials, which I will index below:

• Extension points – lifecycle …

This has been an amazing week in San Francisco with 45,000 new friends. The MySQL tracks have been warmly received by both the MySQL core in attendance and the Oracle family with its many branches. A special thanks to Sheeri Cabral and Sarah Novotny for their organization of two tracks of Community session on Sunday and their great presentations in the MySQL Database track. It has been a long week filled with all technical levels of presentations, product announcements, and meeting a lot of folks who use MySQL but are just joining our community.

So we start off Thursday with two sessions: NoSQL Interfaces to MySQL Cluster in Goldengate C1 at 9AM and What Causes Downtime in MySQL, and How Can You Prevent It next door at Goldengate C2 (all sessions in the Marriott)

Then we have the following in C2: MySQL Crash Course: Overview of Basic MySQL Concepts at 10:30, MySQL …

I remember my first computer. It was a TI-99/4A. I bought it back in 1982 (I think), and it cost around $300. The entire computer fit inside what looked like a really thick keyboard. It had a slot on the right for cartridges, and I had a cassette tape drive that I used for backing up the BASIC computer programs that I wrote. I thought that it was a great computer at the time, but I really didn’t have anything to compare it to. The games were the best part of the computer (really the only fun part – my BASIC skills were lacking). And even though the games were fairly lame by even 1982 standards, but they were still plenty of fun to play.

I also remember when I saw a Macintosh for the first time. I had followed Apple for some time, but I had never had the opportunity to actually see a Macintosh. I think it was in 1987 or 1988, when I was a student at the University of Georgia. I believe it was a Mac SE, and it had one megabyte of RAM and a …

In 2007, Etsy made a big bet on homegrown middleware to help with the site’s scalability. A half-year after it was taken live, the company decided to abandon it. As a senior software engineer at Etsy put it, “if you’re doing something ‘clever,” you’re probably doing it wrong.”

Read the full article at Arstechnica.com I want to focus on the important lessons from this article, about middleware and using stored procedures in this fashion for a public web application, creating unscalable design complexity (smart and “proper” according to the old enterprise design teachings…) – causing infrastructure, development and maintenance hassles.

In the process they did replace PostgreSQL with MySQL but that’s not the critical change that made all the difference. …

The MySQL Community has been making a lot of new friends at Oracle Open World. 70% of IOUG members already use MySQL and now they are looking to participate in the MySQL Community. We MySQL User Groups members are on par with other long established groups. So to celebrate, come to out Community Reception at the Marriott at 7PM. No need to register online.

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