One of many things I really enjoyed working as a Sales Engineer back at MySQL Ab and Sun was that I was paid full time to encourage companies to use open source for their database layer. While Linux has already become the norm for the operating system on servers, and open source alternatives exist for app servers, it wasn't until a few years ago we really started seeing major traction of that in the database layer. And I was happy to be a small part of it!

I'm not really a salesy person. I mean I'm good at evangelizing something I believe in, addressing customer business needs and such. But you couldn't get me to lift a finger just to meet a quota, if I didn't really believe in the product. Which is what good sales guys can do. (Also known as "selling what you have in the truck".)

But thinking back at my time selling MySQL, I felt it was a great privilege to be paid a salary to travel to companies around Europe and spend a day …

English translation of first and only chapter of last part 4 "Techniques, used for debugging of Production applications" just published.

Chapter 11. Techniques, used for debugging of Production applications.

Unfortunately is not always possible to find error while testing. Often they only happen when high load.


How do you know about such problems?


One of most important sources of information about problems is error
log file. There you can find information such as server crashes,
connection errors (if option log-warnings=2 turned on), about options
which were specified in the configuration file, but had not turned on
because error and some others. There is a rule for working with error
log file: if something unexpected happens check error log first. Error
log file also contains information …

For a long time, the MySQL Documentation Team has been providing CHM files for most MySQL documentation we publish. Like many other formats, CHM-format docs can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/doc. CHM (Compiled HTML Help) has been the de facto standard help file format on Windows since 1997, but the technology behind it is outdated and has all kinds of quirks. The successor format introduced with Windows Vista is AP Help, but it hasn't taken off in practice so far. So, with CHM being outdated and AP Help spread anything but widely, lots of vendors have started providing documentation on Windows in PDF or HTML format.

Building CHM-format documentation is a challenge of its own. I'll not go into details here, so let me just state that it requires a dedicated Windows box (or VM), and while it can be automated using Power Shell commands, there's no way to find …

For a long time, the MySQL Documentation Team has been providing CHM files for most MySQL documentation we publish. Like many other formats, CHM-format docs can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/doc. CHM (Compiled HTML Help) has been the de facto standard help file format on Windows since 1997, but the technology behind it is outdated and has all kinds of quirks. The successor format introduced with Windows Vista is AP Help, but it hasn't taken off in practice so far. So, with CHM being outdated and AP Help spread anything but widely, lots of vendors have started providing documentation on Windows in PDF or HTML format.

Building CHM-format documentation is a challenge of its own. I'll not go into details here, so let me just state that it requires a dedicated Windows box (or VM), and while it can be automated using Power Shell commands, there's no way to find …

For a long time, the MySQL Documentation Team has been providing CHM files for most MySQL documentation we publish. Like many other formats, CHM-format docs can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/doc. CHM (Compiled HTML Help) has been the de facto standard help file format on Windows since 1997, but the technology behind it is outdated and has all kinds of quirks. The successor format introduced with Windows Vista is AP Help, but it hasn't taken off in practice so far. So, with CHM being outdated and AP Help spread anything but widely, lots of vendors have started providing documentation on Windows in PDF or HTML format.

Building CHM-format documentation is a challenge of its own. I'll not go into details here, so let me just state that it requires a dedicated Windows box (or VM), and while it can be automated using Power Shell commands, there's no way to find …

Not much new this time: just summary of part 3 published and fixed mistake in chapter 10 (thanks, Shane!).

Summary.

In the third part we discussed methods of application debugging in cases when query plays secondary role in the problem.

I'd like to bring your attention we only discussed most frequent cases while MySQL server has a lot of parameters which of them can affect application. Analyze parameters which you use. One of the methods is run problematic query using MySQL server running with option --no-defaults and examine if results are different for MySQL server run with parameter which you use. If results are different analyze why parameter affects it and solve the problem.

...

Rest of the chapter is …

This chapter is about possible reasons of "Lost connection to MySQL server" error not discussed in previous one.

Chapter 10. Lost connection to MySQL server during query

You can see error "Lost connection to MySQL server" not only because
too small connect_timeout, but because other reasons too. In this
chapter we discuss these reasons.


$php phpconf2009_4.php

string(44) "Lost connection to MySQL server during query"


Most likely error log will show what happened:

...

Rest of the chapter is here

Compliance. Funding. Financial results. Copyright assignment. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Compliance
# The Linux Foundation launched the Open Compliance Program, including tools, training, and consulting.

Funding
# VentureBeat reported that Joyent has raised $7m in a second round of funding.

# Basho Technologies secured $2m from angel investors in a Series C preferred equity financing.

# …

In this chapter we discuss timeouts which can lead to "MySQL server has gone away" and "Lost connection to MySQL server" errors.

 Extract here is short, because there are a lot of code quotes which I can not properly format here.

Chapter 9. Misterious vanishing of the server.

Often this looks like:


$php phpconf2009_3.php

string(26) "MySQL server has gone away"


Code:

...

Rest of the chapter is here

So I sometimes get asked if we funnel back bug reports or patches back to MySQL from Drizzle. Also, MariaDB adds some interest here as they are a lot closer (and indeed compatible with) to MySQL. With Drizzle, we have deviated really quite heavily from the MySQL codebase. There are still some common areas, but they’re getting rarer (especially to just directly apply a patch).

Back in June 2009, while working on Drizzle at Sun, I found a bug that I knew would affect both. The patch would even directly apply (well… close, but I made one anyway).

So the typical process of me filing a MySQL bug these days is:

• Stewart files bug
• In the next window of Sveta being awake, it’s verified.

…