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This is a personal account of my effort to clean up my web presence. My web pages of personal and semi-professional nature needed weeding, and I ended up moving from sporadically maintained multi-lingual blogs and manually edited HTML pages to a set of Google Sites. Generations of cruft are being superseded by a solution based on a weighted balance of contemporary ease of use, versatility and my limited available time.

Before joining MySQL AB in 2001, I had lived through a set of personal web pages that I had set up with PHP. My mental mode was one of combining some fun PHP coding, a bit of editing of pics, and manual uploading of HTML files with scp with emacs editing on the server, that I hosted at my then-employer Polycon Ab. Once at MySQL, I continued in the same mode, but from 2005 onwards started blogging on …

“I believe that one should benchmark before making any technology decisions.” An interview with Pieter van Zyl creator of the OO7J benchmark. In August last year, I published an interesting resource in ODBMS.ORG, the dissertation of Pieter van Zyl, from the University of Pretoria:“Performance investigation into selected object persistence stores”. The dissertation presented the OO7J [...]

GreenSQL has just released a new document,

Microsoft SQL Server Security Best Practices :

http://www.greensql.com/content/sql-server-security-best-practices

SQL Server Security Best Practices

The binary version for MySQL Cluster 7.1.9 has now been made available at http://www.mysql.com/downloads/cluster/

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.1.9 (compared to 7.1.8) can be found in the official MySQL Cluster documentation. In addition, there is a great BLOG posting from Johan Anderson explaining how to use the new table added to ndbinfo to tune DiskPageBufferMemory when storing tables on disk.

Inspired by Stack Exchange’s Architecture in Bullet Points. I have to admit that I was happy to see that we stack up pretty well, being a Ruby on Rails site. There’s no denying that Ruby is slower than C#. …and we could talk about Microsoft SQL Server vs MySQL as well.

It’s a little bit of an apples to oranges comparison. We’re a members only site that is mostly not indexed in Google and we’ve got a low unique visitor count and a high average time on the site. Also, we’re very, very budget conscious.

Traffic

• 173 Million Page Views per Month (not including guests + sign in page views)
• 1600 350 Rails requests per second (at peak times, requests for static files not included) whoa huge error there, 1600 reqs/sec just hitting Rails would be impressive. There were some static files …

I’ve written some new Nagios checks for HandlerSocket. check_handlersocket is a part of http://code.google.com/p/check-mysql-all/, and is meant to be called locally on the HandlerSocket server (usually via NRPE), but the perl-Net-HandlerSocket module must be installed. Feedback is welcome, usage is as follows: Usage: check_handlersocket -K [options] Options: -K, --check= The check to run --columns= Comma-separated [...]

This month is a special month. It’s not because of Valentines day or even the exciting day where we see groundhogs. No, this month is special because I’m have a book contest where you, the reader, get to win something free for doing absolutely nothing more than posting a comment saying that you want one of the several books I have available in the contest.

So without getting into boring details I’ll keep this short. I’ve been reviewing a lot of books lately and I think it’s time to get some books into people’s hands to enjoy themselves. This month the giveaways are all Python oriented.

So, all you have to do is take a look at the following titles and post a comment here saying that you want one of them. At the end of the month two readers will be chosen via a random list sorting python script I’ve whipped up for just this purpose. You will then get an email from the publisher who will send a brand new e-copy of the …

Do you know MySQL? Can you talk to an audience of your peers? Then new opportunities are waiting for you.

There are many speaking opportunities for you to speak to folks who want to hear about MySQL! People want to hear what you have learned the hard way, serendipitously discovered, researched rigorously, or your best practice. You may have groups in your area that are looking for you to present. MySQL is a very popular subject at all sorts of conferences and you do not need to be guru-level to be a speaker.

If you live near the following cities or plan to visit them, please check out these calls for papers!

Baltimore? Railsconf Call for papers end Feb 17th.

Graz? Grazer Linuxtage Call for papers ends March 1st.

…

…with a bit of strategic thinking

They come back, every now and then. Subqueries are far from being perfect at MySQL and they can give you some serious headaches.

Skilled MySQL developers know it better. They avoid subqueries as much as they can. It is not that subqueries do not work, it is just that the optimizer sometimes is, well, “not that optimised”.

So you may stay away from subqueries with some good SQL review. But what happens when the subquery is automatically generated by a script or a tool? If you can change the statement, I’m afraid you need to find some serious workarounds that vary case by case.

Here is an example that I found few weeks ago when I visited one of our customers.

Our customer used Magento for its site. Magento used a couple of queries that I will report here as sales and sales_items, …