Mark Wong’s entry titled “Following up a couple questions from the presentation at PSU on January 8, 2009” just caught my eye:

What is ‘iopp’?

It’s a custom tool to go through the Linux process table to get i/o statistics per process. It is open source and can be downloaded from:

http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~markwkm/iopp.git;a=summary

If you know me, you know I [...]

A while back a Sun engineer posted an article claiming that the best way to scale MySQL is to shard your database in many instances on a single server, each of which runs in threads that individually have low performance. The Sun way has always been to get high throughput with high latency. [...]

Since a few months we are monitoring our infrastructure at Days of Wonder with OpenNMS. Until this afternoon we were running the beta/final candidate version 1.5.93.

We are monitoring a few things with the JDBC Stored Procedure Poller, which is really great to monitor complex business operations without writing remote or GP scripts.

Unfortunately the migration to OpenNMS 1.6.1 led me to discover that the JDBC Stored Procedure poller was not working anymore, crashing with a NullPointerException in the MySQL JDBC Driver while trying to fetch the output parameter.

In fact it turned out I was plain wrong. I was using a MySQL PROCEDURE:

DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE `check_for_something`()
READS SQL DATA
BEGIN
SELECT …

This is actually old news, but I never thought to file a bug report (until now) or say anything to anyone about it. If you use mysqldump to dump and restore a MySQL table that has INSERT triggers, you can get different data in your restored database than you had when you dumped. [...]

This post is for people who are trying to roll back unwanted modifications to their MySQL database.

You cannot use the binary logs to undo unwanted changes to your data. The binary logs are for redoing statements, not undoing them. If you have a backup, you may be able to restore the backup and [...]

Sun has invited me to showcase Maatkit at the dot-org pavilion at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. At this time it’s really hard to say what I’ll be demoing! Development on Maatkit is accelerating and I don’t look for that to change, so who knows what we’ll have done by then. [...]

I’ve been thinking about the business of what’s variously come to be called commercial open-source and enterprise open-source. I’m interested in the gestalt — the product, development processes, marketing, licensing and so on.

MySQL has tried many different ways to earn money. These include dual licensing, support subscriptions, a knowledgebase, consulting, an Enterprise/Community split, [...]

Today I recommended that a customer begin using MySQL 5.1 for development of their new product. There is virtually no risk of doing this, and in fact, the risk of not doing so is quite material. Upgrading the database later would be silly when you could start using it now and find out [...]

Here's another ode to a small but fundamental aspect of Oracle, following the same theme as The Humble IF Statement. This time, let's look at the COUNT( ) function. I think when you look at it the right way, it opens up the whole story about database performance.What's the first thing you do when poking around an unfamiliar system? I'll bet it involves SELECT COUNT(*) queries in one way or

With all the furor over MySQL 5.1 GA, its release schedule, its quality, etc etc I think a fundamental claim is being left un-examined. Lots of people are saying that if you leave out the new features in 5.1 and look only at the features that existed in 5.0, it’s better quality.

The implication is [...]