A little while ago, I was the brave soul tasked with making sure Drizzle was working properly and passing all tests on Solaris and OpenSolaris. Brian recently blogged about some of the advantages of also running on Solaris and the SunStudio compilers - more warnings from the compiler is a good thing. Many kudos goes to Monty Taylor for being the brave soul who fixed most of the compiler warnings (and for us, warnings=errors - so we have to fix them) for the SunStudio compilers before I got to making te tests work.

So, I got to the end of it all and got pointed to an OpenSolaris x86 box where the drizzleslap test was timing out. The timeout for tests is some amazingly long amount of time - 15 minutes. All the drizzle-test-run tests are rather short tests.

To make running the tests quick, I usually LD_PRELOAD …

Some weeks ago Luke Kaines stated his observation that “requiring copyright attribution is a greater sin than providing commercial add-ons”.

His perspective was based on the theory that requiring copyright assignment restricts the developer community, a theory that was apparently repeated by Dave Neary during the recent OSBC event (I missed that session due to our CAOS client lunch).

Daniel Chalef of KnowledgeTree provided some evidence of Dave’s perspective and also the contrary view that the assignment of copyright is critical not just for vendor-dominated projects but also for community projects such as The Mozilla Foundation, The …

Continuing on from CPU, we turn our attention to Memory. One of the first steps when addressing a MySQL performance tuning problem is to perform a system audit of the physical hardware resources, then identify any obvious bottlenecks in these resources.

In auditing, I start with the ‘free’ command, the already used ‘vmstat’ command, the /proc/meminfo and /proc/sys/vm/swappiness files to get an indication of memory and swap resources. While we are looking at the Memory, the configuration of Swap is also very important. I will discuss this in more detail later.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3955       3838        117          0        402       2366
-/+ buffers/cache:       1069       2886
Swap:         1027          0 …

On early Tuesday morning, I made a quick trip to Paris, France, to attend and speak at the Solutions Linux / Open Source 2009 Conference. I've never been to this conference before and was quite surprised about its size - it's actually the largest Open Source event in France and it reminded me a lot of LinuxTag in Germany. Many well-known vendors (e.g. Sun, Novell, Canonical, Bull, etc.) were exhibiting. The also was a large "DotOrg" section for various Open Source projects and I was very happy to see that LeMUG.fr, the official MySQL User Group of France, had a table there, too! A big Thank You goes to Pascal Borghino, who manned that table on his own most of the time and answered questions about MySQL. I …

Assuming you have successfully compiled Drizzle, and you are ready to start for the first time, here are some beginner differences with those familiar with the current MySQL 5.1 GA version. Note: drizzle is actually an original fork of the 6.0.x codebase however the code looks very little like mysql anymore.

Getting started differences

The first default MySQL installation step scripts/install_mysql_db is gone, and there is no replacement. The ‘mysql’ schema no longer exists. Talking about schemas, ‘test’ is also gone by default.

While a bin/drizzled_safe exists to start drizzle, this presently doesn’t operate as expected. You should start drizzle with sbin/drizzled &

They still have an empty …

Taking the work already done with vmplot.sh, a useful tool for MySQL performance tuning by Yves and Matt at BigDBAHead, and in true Open Source fashion I’ve enhanced and modified for my own purposes.

These changes include:

• Error checking for ‘gnuplot’ command on the system
• Eliminate the first row of sample data, as this is often not a complete sample for the vmstat duration.
• Created a HTML output file for easy browser viewing
• Changed Memory scale values from Kilobytes to Megabytes
• Resizing png’s for optimal 1024×768 display output (2 per row)

Download vmplot

And I get:

So more specifics of what I did.

Install gnuplot.

$ yum install gnuplot

Create vmstat sample …

Microsoft and TomTom settle patent claims. Alfresco makes progress and shifts its strategy. The Open Cloud Manifesto is published. Support for free software. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Quietening the patent drums
Cnet’s Ina Fried had the scoop on the news that Microsoft and TomTom had reached a settlement in their patent dispute. The news story was quickly followed by Microsoft’s official statement, as well as a note from the Software Freedom Law Center that the situation is not completely dealt with. Jay Lyman delivered the 451 CAOS …

I don’t know if it is because of my science background, I am a physicist, I do like graphs, especially when I do performance tuning. With UNIX like operating systems, the vmstat command give you an easy way to grab many essential performance counters but, generating graphs from vmstat output with tools like OpenOffice Calc is time consuming and not very efficient. In order to solve this, I wrote a few scripts using gnuplot but they are not very easy to work with. Then, doing some benchmarks with DBT2, I found the vmplot.sh script and… I like that one. I just hacked it little bit to make it keeps the graph on screen, adding the “-persist” parameters to the gnuplot invocations. The script will produce 7 graphs that will be displayed on screen and save in png format in /tmp. The graphs it produces are the following:

• CPU: graphs idle, user, sys and wait time
• …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …

In a Financial Times report today about RedHat's quarterly earnings, Sam Ramji of Microsoft takes note of MySQL and its influence as a key component in the general move towards open-source software:

Larger deployments of open-source to firms that already run the technology in a small way might be the most that happens, due to the fact that recessions make IT managers worry about risk. For the same reasons, a recession is not the time to switch a workforce to a new technology.

Microsoft is counting on that, while accepting that every leading company will soon be running at least some open-source software.

“It’s a heterogeneous world,” said Microsoft’s Sam Ramji. While Microsoft continues to warn about the legal and economic perils of relying on Linux and similar systems, Mr Ramji’s role is to make sure …