I’ve recently been migrating my wiki/documentation for Kontrollbase to Trac. For those that are not aware, Trac is a web-based documentation/wiki/Subversion tool that is used by countless number of software projects. Subversion, of course, is a software collaboration and code management repository that manages branches/tags/trunk files with revision control. It’s one of the most heavily used open-source code repositories available. Given that I use SVN (subversion) for all of my software applications and am now using Trac, the book “Managing Software Development with Trac and Subversion” by David J Murphy comes as a useful and great resource for integrating these two useful tools. …

Website health checks are a crucial service to an operations team. In addition to in-house monitoring and service state reporting it’s also important, even critical, to have an impartial third party to run checks to test your customer facing services. There are a lot of companies in this arean that would be glad to have [...]

After some testing and setup we have decided to use Eventum for our support ticketing needs. This featureful system will be in use for all of your support questions related to Kontrollbase – the MySQL analytics and performance tuning web application, as well as Kontrollkit – the collection of server automation scripts. You can read [...]

Piper Jaffray has published a 300+ page study on the cloud computing industry based on a recent survey undertaken of 100 CIOs. Bottom line, cloud computing is expected to grow significantly over the next five years. 

    Survey respondents expect the mix of cloud computing to escalate strongly to 13.5% in five years. This equates to a five-year CAGR of 19.2%, or 23.9% when we also incorporate IDC’s forecast that total software budgets will grow 4.7% annually. In other words, software spending will grow gradually in the next five years, but the mix of spend allocated to cloud-based applications will likely surge rapidly. Another way to think about the data is that the Cloud Computing market is expected to grow five times as fast as the broader software market: 23.9% vs. 4.7%.

If anything, I think the prediction is conservative and the impact could be much larger in magnitude when mainstream …

I've been working in a fully distributed work environment for almost 8 years now (I joined MySQL AB in April, 2002). Therefore I've been reading Toni Schneider's blog post about the "5 reasons why your company should be distributed" with great interest – he raised several points that I fully agree with and which I covered in my talks about "Working for a virtual company - how we do it at MySQL" at last year's next09 conference (slides, video) and at …

Updating the MPL. Funding for Lucid and eXo. StatusNet. And more.

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Updating the MPL
# ZDnet reported that the 10-year-old Mozilla Public License will be updated by the end of 2010, while Mitchell Baker explained the process.

Funding for Lucid and eXo
# Lucid Imagination raised $10m in series B funding from Shasta Ventures, Granite Ventures and Walden International.

# eXo Platform raised $6m from Auriga …

In my last blog post, I showed how we can get some raw performance information from /proc into the MySQL database using a LOAD DATA INFILE (LDI) command.

I've modified that LDI call slightly to set the `other` column to equal the sum total of the CPU counters for those rows which begin with 'cpu'.

original:
other = IF(@the_key like 'cpu%', NULL , @val1);

new:
other = IF(@the_key like 'cpu%', user + nice + system + idle + iowait + irq + softirq + steal + guest, @val1);


Top provides a useful output that looks something like the following:

top - 04:59:14 up 14 days,  3:34,  1 user,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
Tasks: 216 total,   1 running, 215 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  0.0%us,  0.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 99.9%id,  0.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8172108k total,  5115388k used,  3056720k free,   315180k buffers
Swap:  2097144k total,        0k …

System administrators familiar with the Linux operating system use the tools in the 'procps' toolset all the time. Tools which read from /proc include top, iostat, vmstat, sar and others. The files in /proc contain useful information about the performance of the system. Most of the files are documented in the Linux kernel documentation. You can also check man 5 proc.

Most performance monitoring tools invoke other tools like iostat to collect performance information instead of reading from the /proc filesytem itself. This begs the question, what can you do if you don't have access to those tools? Perhaps you are using a hosted Linux database and have no access to the underlying shell to execute tools like iostat or top? How could you gather information about the performance of the actual system without being allowed to run the tools?
…

I'm happy to announce that my talk "Making MySQL administration a breeze - a look into a MySQL DBA's toolchest" has been accepted for this year's edition of the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, which will take place on April 12-15, 2010. The session is currently scheduled for Wednesday 14th, 10:50 in Ballroom E.

My plan is to provide an overview over the most popular utilities and applications that a MySQL DBA should be aware of to make his life easier. The focus will be on Linux/Unix applications available under opensource licenses that ease tasks related to user administration, setting up and administering replication setups, performing backups and security audits.

Of course I will cover the usual …

I recently received a question from Robin Schumacher at Calpont, the makers of the InfiniDB analytics database engine for MySQL: "How would you recommend we try and get bundled in with the various Linux distros?"

Since this question has come up several times before, I thought it might make sense to blog about my take on this.

First of all, please note that there is a difference between "being part of the core distribution" and "being available from a distributor's package repository". The latter one is relatively easy, the former can be hard, as you need to convince the distributor that your application is worth devoting engineering resources to maintain and support your application as part of their product. It's also a space issue – distributions need to make sure that the core packages still fit on the installation …