This will just be a short reminder. If you're planning to create multiple-column indexes in MySQL, remember that the order of the columns matters. As the MySQL documentation points out, any "leftmost prefix of the index can be used." This means that the index can be used for any number of columns in a where clause as long as those columns are at the beginning of the index column list and in the same order.

Lesson for the week: If you really want to stir up an anthill, attack the conventional wisdom of code development best practices.

In other news ...

Another piece of Sun falls off the good ship Oracle

At this point, I could almost follow the practice of Gregg Easterbrook 's Tuesday Morning Quarterback and put this text on Autotext, but in the past week, Oracle cast off another piece of their acquired Sun technology. In this case, it was the integrated build platform "Hudson." Either fed up with the infighting that had led to the spin-off "Jenkins" project, or simply …

So I’ve been doing a fair number of automated load tests these past six months. Primarily with Sysbench, which is a fine, fine tool. First I started using some simple bash based loop controls to automate my overnight testing, but as usually happens with shell scripts they grew unwieldy and I rewrote them in python. Now I have some flexible and easily configurable code for sysbench based MySQL benchmarking to offer the community. I’ve always been a fan of giving back to such a helpful group of people – you’ll never hear me complain about “my time isn’t free”. So, let me know what you want in an ideal testing environment (from a load testing framework automation standpoint) and I’ll integrate it into my existing framework and then release it via the BSD license. The main goal here is to have a standardized modular framework, based on sysbench, that allows anyone to compare their server performance via repeatable tests. It’s fun to see …

Welcome to this week's edition of Developer Week in Review. Sorry we're running a little late. We assure you it has nothing to do with the release of "Portal 2."

The wide world of litigation

Another busy week for the court system, courtesy of the software industry. Software patents are back at the Supreme Court, this time courtesy of Microsoft and i4i. Meanwhile, Apple is suing Samsung over look and feel issues related to the Galaxy Tab, while at the same time ordering $7.8 billion USD of iPad 2 components from Samsung this year. This is …

The elmcity service connects to a half-dozen other services, including Eventful, Upcoming, EventBrite, Facebook, Delicious, and Yahoo. It's nice that each of these services provides an API that enables elmcity to read their data. It would be even nicer, though, if elmcity didn't have to query, navigate, and interpret the results of each of these APIs in different ways.

For example, the elmcity service asks the same question of Eventful, Upcoming, and EventBrite: "What are the titles, dates, times, locations, and URLs of recent events within radius R of location L?" It has to ask that question three different ways, and then interpret the answers three different ways. Can we imagine a more frictionless approach?

I can. Here's how the question might be asked in a general way using the Open Data Protocol (OData):

 …

Spring came in like a lion here in the Northeast, with an April Fools' Day mini-blizzard, even though Lion itself isn't due to be released until summer at the earliest. While I waited for more hospitable weather to emerge, I've been huddled indoors working on a Kickstarter project with my son, and I will now shamelessly plug it: It's a high-powered replacement for the Wii sensor bar, designed to let you sit comfortably at the other end of a room while you use your Wii. You can read more about it here if you're interested.

Meanwhile, there were the usual interesting developments in the developer world.

Google: Now promoting gray as a moral choice

Like most major technology companies, it can sometimes …

Memcached is one of the technologies that holds the modern Internet together, but do you know what it actually does? Brian Aker has certainly earned the title of Memcached guru, and below he offers a peek under the hood. He'll also provide a deeper dive into Memcached in a tutorial at the upcoming 2011 MySQL Conference.

What problem is Memcached meant to solve?

Brian Aker: In an operation like a database or an application …

This is your Developer Week in Review, I'm Casey Kasem. Our first letter comes from a software developer in New England who writes, "Dear Casey. My wife just got accepted into the Experimental Psych doctoral program at UNH, and I'd like you to play something appropriate for the occasion." Well, going out especially for you, here's "I'll be Proofreading Your Papers for the Next Five Years, 'Cause I'll Never Split (Our Infinitive)" (Seriously, congratulations Bonnie!)

And you thought that Justin Bieber tickets were hard to score ...

What's the matter, pal? You say you had your heart set on going to Google I/O, but the tickets sold out in 59 minutes? Well, cheer up, because tickets went on sale this week for the Apple …

I got access to our 12-core Intel server, so I was able to do some better benchmarks to test the different group commit thread scheduling methods:

This graph shows queries-per-second as a function of number of parallel connections, for three test runs:

1. Baseline MariaDB, without group commit.
2. MariaDB with group commit, using the simple thread scheduling, where the serial part of the group commit algorithm is done by each thread signalling the next one.
3. MariaDB with group commit and optimised thread scheduling, where the first thread does the serial group commit processing for all transactions at once, in a single thread.

(see the previous post linked above for a more detailed explanation of the two thread scheduling algorithms.)

This test was run on a 12-core server with hyper-threading, memory is …

Netflix went down over three hours ago, and everyone is on edge here. My son just started reciting the script to "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" in an attempt to keep our courage up. This may be the last thing I ever write, so — Oh, never mind, it's back up again ... Crisis averted, and on to this week's developer news.

We have an App Store Appstore for that!

Amazon this week unleashed their own Appstore for Android devices. Apple took umbrage at the use of the (evidently trademarked) term "App Store" and fired a salvo of …