The state I live in (Illinois), has decided that it should do emissions testing on all passenger vehicles (never mind the amount of pollutants that trucks, trains, etc. put into the air).

I own a Volkswagen that is old, but new enough to be tested via the on-board diagnostics. The problem is that earlier in the year the secondary air injection pump went bad (a $1000 fix for a part that basically makes the catalytic converter more efficient for the first 90 seconds after a cold start, so let that be a warning to other VW owners, it‘s pretty common for this thing to fail). So, I had it replaced, as I definitely couldn‘t pass the emissions tests without it.

The big issue now is that before the emissions test can pass, the engine computer needs to report that it‘s tested all of the components of the emissions system. Some of these tests take many miles of driving, or certain environmental conditions (i.e. warm enough to create …

Every day I talk to many engineers and managers who want to be better. Better at developing software, better at shipping software, better at reacting to change in the marketplace, better at preserving backward compatibility, better at integrating new technologies, better at working efficiently, better at preventing and detecting bugs and errors, and so on.

I have often heard arguments that essentially say “all we need is a formal written process and things will be better”. I’ve consistently argued against that mindset, since I believe that principles are much more enduring than rules, and writing many rules often prevents people from doing the right thing.

You should all read this post from Jeff Patton why the best software design and development process is all in your head. Jeff explains so much more eloquently than I could why …

I think the Sysadmin of the Year is a great idea, and I wish I knew about it when nominations were happening! DBA’s and network administrators also count.

From http://www.sysadminoftheyear.com/

The first annual Sysadmin of the Year (SAOTY) contest has been a huge success. Nominations for SAOTY closed at midnight on October 31, 2006 with more than 5,000 sysadmins nominated. The nominations were outstanding and inspiring.

Grandprize: Washington DC Trip to Attend LISA and a $2,500 Splunk Professional License
Michael Beck — Emerging Technologies Group, USA

1st Place: MacBook
Sean Thomas — True Prism Technologies (Ulanji)

Runnerup: Splunk License
Darren Barry — US Air Force

Micah Anderson — Eggplant Media Workers’ Cooperative
Dawn Lovell — CenturyTel
Mike Jennings — Rackspace

…

I bought a new personal laptop a few weeks back, and I’ve been using it enough to final post a short review. I’ve run linux on several different laptops over the years, and it’s always been kind of tough. Even supergeeks endure a lot of teasing at conferences about getting wireless networking configured.

This time, I went with System 76, who offer laptops with Ubuntu preinstalled. Definitely the right choice! I chose a Gazelle, which is not quite as sleek as my previous MacBook. It is blazing fast. I was amazed at how quickly I was able to be productive with Ubuntu preinstalled and working perfectly: NetworkManager means my wireless connection works even better than on the MacBook, suspend to RAM and hibernate to disk worked flawlessly, and it compiles MySQL in about 13 minutes flat.

…

I started this post a month ago, but after Kaj’s discussion on the same topic at the MySQL Camp I figured it was time to post.

I had dinner with a friend recently (a very smart friend), and our conversation lead him to ask “What’s different with MySQL?”. One of the things I tried to describe was the “Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture” (PSE) potential for the future that I expect will set MySQL apart from all other Open Source and even commercial databases.

Here are some details of the example I tried to provide, given somebody who understands enough of the general principles of RDBMS’s.

Consider the ability that information (intelligent data) is available within a Relational Database via the appropriate tools and language (e.g. SQL) but it is not physically constrained to Tables, Columns …

Mike Kruckenberg posted recently a tip he found to create easy text bar charts using the REPEAT function, that he found at:

http://www.squarebits.com/blog/2006/11/generate_simple.html

Today I stumbled across this link:
http://www.webcheatsheet.com/php/dynamic_image_generation.php#diagram

Which, using PHP, creates a graphical bar chart using the data in a MySQL database and a small bit of math.

Both are very neat!

Spoke with Brian the other day on what was required to get NDB to be a pluggable engine - and started hacking.

The tricky bits invole dependencies of things like mysqldump and ndb_restore on some headers to determine what tables shouldn’t be dumped (hint: the cluster database used for replication).

Also, all those command line parameters and global variables - they’re fun too. It turns out InnoDB and PBXT are also waiting on this. In the meantime, I’ve done a hack that puts config options in a table.

Currently blocked on getting the embedded server (libmysqld) to build properly - but i now have a sql/mysqld binary with pluggable NDB. All libtool foo too.

Hopefully i’ll be able to post soon with a “it works” post

Inspired by PeterZ’s Opening Tables scalability post, I decided to try a little benchmark. This benchmark involved the following:

• Create 50,000 tables

• CREATE TABLE t{$i} (i int primary key)

I wanted to test file system impact on this benchmark. So, I created a new LVM volume, 10GB in size. I extracted a ‘make bin-dist’ of a recent MySQL 5.1 tree, did a “mysql-test-run.pl –start-and-exit” and ran my script, timing real time with time.

For a default ext3 file system creating MyISAM tables, the test took 15min 8sec.

For a default xfs file sytem creating MyISAM tables, the test took 7min 20sec.

For an XFS file system with a 100MB Version 2 log creating MyISAM tables, the test took 7min …

It seems, people are clammering for a more consolidated help guide for SQL Performance tips.

Jay Pipes at the MySQL Camp ran a session Interactive Top 10 SQL performance Tips. There was plenty of input and discussion, and at the time Sheeri simply typed them into a wiki page for later work.

Well it seems even that rough list is popular at Del.icio.us ranking near the top of the Hot List on the front page. I saw it earlier and it was second or third, but didn’t think of taking a screen shot until now, but it’s still high.

I’d say that we could easily …

At our MySQL Camp Jay and Brian pitted off in the Umbrella Joust. Not sure if there was a winner, or a looser, but in the end no blood was split (except Leslie, but that’s another story).

See these and more camp photos at Flickr.