Today, I was looking for a quick way to see HTTP response codes of a bunch of urls. Naturally, I turned to the curl command, which I would usually use like this:

curl -IL "URL"

This command would send a HEAD request (-I), follow through all redirects (-L), and display some useful information in the end. Most of the time it's ideal:

curl -IL "http://www.google.com"
 
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 2010 03:58:55 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Server: gws
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

However, the server I was curling didn't support HEAD requests explicitly. Additionally, I was really only interested in HTTP status codes and not in the rest of the output. This means I would have to change my strategy and issue GET requests, ignoring HTML output completely.

Curl manual to the rescue. A few …

Dear MySQL Users,

We’re happy to announce the second Release Candidate (RC) of MySQL Workbench.
Version 5.2.22 includes fixes for 76 bugs.

In case you didn’t know – MySQL Workbench is a modular product and is fully pluggable and scriptable. If you want to write a plug-in for Workbench 5.2, then stay tuned as we will be updating the documentation in the next week with all the details and examples you need on how to write your own plug-ins.

Plug-ins are great for extending or adding to workbench or for automating repetitive tasks. You can do things like adding to menus, exporting your Workbench models custom tailored for your coding environment, adding your own forms, and more. Python is our preferred scripting language but for simple scripts the Lua language can be used as well.

The first plug-in we added is called MySQL Doc Library. It can be used to read the MySQL Documentation offline and features …

What’s missing from WebM? VoltDB launches. The importance of profitability. 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.”

# Simon Phipps examined what’s missing from WebM, from an open source perspective.

# Mike Stonebraker’s VoltDB officially launched its open source in-memory OLTP database.

# Jim Whitehurst argued that one of Red Hat’s most valuable contributions to open source is its profitability.

# Infobright appointed former Aleri CEO Don DeLoach as its new …

Alfresco launches Activiti project. Funding for NorthScale and Zend. 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.”

# Alfresco launched the Apache-licensed Activiti BPM project, led by Tom Baeyens and Joram Barrez.

# NorthScale announced $10m in series B funding, led by the Mayfield Fund, and a new CEO.

# Zend Technologies raised $9m led by Greylock Partners with participation its existing investors.

# Stephen Walli joined the CodePlex Foundation as its technical director. …

This is part four of an ongoing series about my experiences while writing the MySQL Admin Cookbook for Packt Publishing. All previous parts can be found under the mysql-admin-cookbook label.

This part will be about more software used in the process of writing the book. The last episode covered writing tools, file/version management and backups. What's up now is graphics programs, virtualization and PDF handling.

Outlining

For outlining and structuring thoughts I like mind-maps. I know they are not for everyone, but if you like them and do not want to spend a lot of money on …

We’ve long wondered what might happen to all of that open source software from Sun Microsystems now that it’s at Oracle? Obviously, some pieces continue to live at Oracle (Java, Solaris, MySQL), but there are a number of open source projects that Oracle has either neglected to talk about or have been overlooked, particularly as we focused on user reactions, implications and finally approval of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun.

One significant group of open source technologies from Sun is its OpenSSO single sign-on identity and access …

I like to write tools that make hard things easy, when possible. By and large, MySQL is easy and simple. But some simple things are too hard with MySQL. I want to change that, at least for the things that matter the most to me, and which I think I know how to fix.

I will probably write a lot about this. I have already written a number of rants blog posts about the lack of instrumentation in MySQL, and that is where I’ll probably continue to put most of my energy.

To begin with, imagine this simple scenario. You are a remote DBA. Your client says “New Relic is showing periods of slow response time from the database.” You connect to MySQL at the command line and try to troubleshoot. How do you catch the problem in action, from within the database itself? The following are no good:

• It doesn’t count to see the problem two minutes later by observing the application tier, as New Relic does. That’s too late, and …

Dear MySQL Users,

We’re happy to announce the first Release Candidate (RC) of MySQL Workbench.
Version 5.2.21 includes many improvements and fixes for 62 bugs.

We have introduced a new ease of use feature on the Workbench Home screen – the Plug-in Starter area – top left hand side. The icons listed in that area are used to get quick access to the most popular plug-ins that have been written for MySQL Workbench, either by us or the community.

If you are planning to write a plug-in for Workbench, now is the right time to get started! We will be updating the documentation in the next week or 2 with all the details on how to write your own plug-in.

MySQL Workbench designed in a modular way and is fully scriptable. Whenever you have to perform repetitive tasks or e.g. need to export your Workbench models tailored for your coding environment, writing a plugin to perform this task is the way to go. Python …

I have to admit that FlashCache for Linux looks pretty cool.

It basically lets you use a block device SSD as cache.

Another hack is to mount the SSD as swap and tell InnoDB to use say 100GB of memory. I haven’t tested this but it might be a fun hack :)

We’ve actually migrated away from using SSD in production – at least for now.

The performance just wasn’t THAT great in our configuration. I’m still semi optimistic but not as much as I was a year ago.

I think if I were to do it again I would drop RAID everywhere with SSD and make sure my database layer can correctly route queries to the right MySQL instance.

Each SSD would need to be on its own database server with its own replication thread. …

If you’ve been reading up on the various NoSQL offerings and have wanted to try out one but don’t know how to get started, this is one of the easiest ways. I chose MongoDB for this example because I’m going to start using it for a project that needs features that MySQL isn’t as fast at: namely denormalized data with billions of rows. MongoDB has plenty of drivers for other scripting and high-level languages but I’ll focus on the PHP driver today. If there is interest I can do a write up on Python usage later. This example is limited to CentOS, Fedora, and Redhat 5 servers that use the yum package management system. For more information you can reference their download page: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads

First install the prerequisites:

• sudo yum install gcc php php-pear

Then install the mogo php extension via …