I want to get opinions from outside of my daily circle of people on the best server hardware to use for MySQL. I remember from the conference somebody (Pipes?) mentioning a particular Dell server with multiple disk RAID10 that could supposedly be had for about $6k but I completely misplaced the model number (Frank, did you get my email?).

I know that a multi-disk RAID array with a bunch of fast disks (15k RPM?) is probably the most important method of improving performance, followed by the amount of RAM, so I'm trying to find the best combination/balance of the two. However, server prices on the Internet range so much that I don't even know where to begin to tell a good deal from a bad one. I don't think SSDs can play a role here, because we …

In this post I shall show you how you can set up a MySQL community server on your Solaris installation.

Some useful information:

• Solaris installation: Solaris 10 (32-bit SPARC)
• MySQL 5.1.24-rc is the MySQL community server I am using for the demonstration (You may also try this with MySQL 5.1.25-rc, since the older tarball is not available officially anymore)
  

You will need the following tools:

• GNU Make (gmake): I am using GNU Make 3.80
• GNU C/C++ compiler:
  
  • gcc (GCC) 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-branch+sol_rpath)
  • g++ (GCC) 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-branch+sol_rpath)
    

• Download the MySQL 5.1.24-rc source tarball from  …

In this post I shall show you how you can set up a MySQL community server on your Solaris installation.

Some useful information:

• Solaris installation: Solaris 10 (32-bit SPARC)
• MySQL 5.1.24-rc is the MySQL community server I am using for the demonstration (You may also try this with MySQL 5.1.25-rc, since the older tarball is not available officially anymore)
  

You will need the following tools:

• GNU Make (gmake): I am using GNU Make 3.80
• GNU C/C++ compiler:
  
  • gcc (GCC) 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-branch+sol_rpath)
  • g++ (GCC) 3.4.3 (csl-sol210-3_4-branch+sol_rpath)
    

• Download the MySQL 5.1.24-rc source tarball from  …

Netbeans 6.1 was released recently which includes PostgreSQL JDBC driver. It had been a while since I had done programming as a developer, so I decided to take it for a test drive to refresh my programming skills with it. Well here is the resulting demo application:

Remember it is just a demonstration application. It requires your client (laptop or desktop ip address) to be trusted in  pg_hba.conf  ip adddress in order to work with your database.

Update on Sept 30,2008: Added a new dialog box which includes option for password and also the new L&F called nimbus (JRE6u10 recommended). Here is a quick screenshot:

Contrary to what I said earlier, Falcon has decided to deliberately disable statement-based replication using the same capabilities mechanism that InnoDB uses.

The reason is that isolation between concurrent transactions cannot be guaranteed, meaning that two concurrent transactions are not guaranteed to be serializable (the result of a concurrent transaction that has committed can "leak" into an ongoing transaction). Since they are not serializable, it means they cannot be written to the binary log in an order that produce the same result on the slave as on the master.

However, when using row-based replication they are serializable, because whatever values are written to the tables are also written to the binary log, so if data "leaks" into an ongoing transaction, this is what is written to the binary log as …

Last week there there was a short scheduled downtime for the system, and I've used the chance to upgrade the MySQL servers to a newer version. We've tested it for more than a month before deploying to production, so I wasn't worried about any potential problems.

The upgrade itself went smoothly and was complete in about less than 10 minutes. Speaking of which, this is one of the things I like in MySQL upgrades as opposed to SQL Server.

1. Copy new version
2. Shut down the server
3. Rename directories
4. Start server
5. Run mysql_upgrade
6. Restart server

All of the above usually takes about 2 minutes, and can be reverted quite easily, if you have backup for the data files. This is compared to a SQL Server upgrade, or even a Service Pack install which includes running an installer for what can be 20 minutes or more. Uninstalling is equality lengthy, though both …

How often do you think about the reasons why your favorite RDBMS sucks? Last few months I was doing this quite often and yes, my favorite RDBMS is MySQL. The reason why I was thinking so because one of my recent tasks at Scribd was fixing scalability problems in documents browsing.

The problem with browsing was pretty simple to describe and as hard to fix - we have large data set which consists of a few tables with many fields with really bad selectivity (flag fields like is_deleted, is_private, etc; file_type, language_id , category_id and others). As the result of this situation it becomes really hard (if possible at all) to display documents lists like “most popular 1-10 pages PDF documents in Italian language from the category “Business” (of course, non-deleted, …

It is that time of the year when many PostgreSQL fans gather in Ottawa, Canada for PGCon 2008 next week. This will be my first visit to PGCon in Ottawa. Earlier this year I had presented two sessions "PostgreSQL and Benchmarks" and "Best Practices of PostgreSQL on Solaris" at PostgreSQL Conference 2008 East in Maryland. Thanks to that visit, this time I might recognize many people by face this time around.

Sun is a Gold Sponsor at PGCon 2008. There will be quite a bit of presence from Sun in PGCon. Josh, Max, Robert, Magne, Zdenek, Jim, Mayuresh et all will be present out there.

Josh Berkus is doing a tutorial on  "GUCs: A Three Hour Tour" on …

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.007. This release contains the changes:

* Took out mysql_server_init call where not needed
* Complete re-write of test suit to use Test::More - tons of cleanups!
* Makefile.PL changes to use current user in 'make test' if not defined

The biggest change in this release is a completely re-written test suite now using Test::More. This was something I wanted to do for at least two years. Using Test::More for the test suite makes it so much easier to add, manage and understand the various tests that come with the driver.

The file is:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.007.tar.gz
size: 123516 bytes
md5: 67a4d921acda942aeb0e65a0023f2098

URL:
http://search.cpan.org/~capttofu/DBD-mysql-4.007

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