WebSite: www.cacti.net

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating …

WebSite: www.mysql.com

The world’s most popular open source database.

I fixed a serious BC issue that I introduced in the last releases of the MySQL drivers, that would cause issues with servers that do not support InnoDB. I switched to forcing the InnoDB table handler. The fix is to simply not force any table handler and use the server default. There were also some minor bug fixes in several of the other drivers. More importantly however I am pretty happy with the nested transaction API as well as improvements to the debug callback mechanism.

I have mentioned the nested transaction support previously. Since then we have added support for SAVEPOINTs. This feature allows you to define a savepoint within a transaction to which you can rollback to, instead of rolling back the entire transaction. By default the nested transaction API will automatically use SAVEPOINTs to give really tight control in an entirely transparent fashion.

I have also …

I got asked (being a Java developer) about what was involved in creating an Eclipse Plugin for Mercurial. Well in true Google style, why invent when somebody probably already has. A quick check finds Mercurial Eclipse by VecTrace.

Now until last week, I’d never heard of Mercurial, so this is really an introduction to somebody that has no idea.

What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects.

Ok, so big deal, I use CVS. I also use Subversion (SVN) for my Apache contributions, and also for MySQL GUI products. Why do we need another Version Control Product? Mercurial is a Distributed Software Configuration Management Tool. …

Igor is doing great work on moving forward the XML based database schema format originally developed by Manuel Lemos as part of Metabase that is used in MDB2_Schema. The idea is to add the ability to also handle UPDATE and DELETE statement next to the currently supported CREATE, DROP, ALTER and INSERT statements. This format is even supported by DBDesigner4 and the DatabaseSchema ez component. For the uninitiated if you: The idea behind this schema format is to make it possible to define a single database schema that can be used to create, alter and initialize databases in any number of RDBMS. For example currently MDB2_Schema supports MySQL, PostGreSQL, Oracle, SQLite, MS SQL Server, Interbase/Firebird.

While Igor and I were discussing things we discovered that we …

Greg Lehey wrote today Is MySQL getting buggier?. The underlying question of his comments is a more fundamental and passionate topic, and especially for me. That is “Software Quality”.

The quintessential question is this. “How do you determine the ’software quality’ of a product?” And then quickly followed by, “How do you benchmark this with other software products?”

The short answer to second question is simple. You can’t. The reasons why become apparent in addressing the first question. (There’s a mathematical term for this two question situation, another one of the million things to research and remember one day).

15 years ago as part of my masters research I worked on “Improving Software Quality and Software Productivity”. At the time when I started, I found that these were generally considered …

As I wrote earlier in Using the MySQL Test Suite I found an issue with using the current MySQL Sakila Sample Database as a test with mysqltest.

I was running an older version of 5.1.7 beta so I figured the best course of action was to upgrade to 5.1.11 beta.

Well the problem still exists, and I found that the cause was due to the syntax of the DELIMITER command. Assuming the creation of the schema tables, here is an example of what I found.

Running in an interactive mysql session the following works

DROP TRIGGER ins_film;
DELIMITER ;;
CREATE TRIGGER `ins_film` AFTER INSERT ON `film` FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
    INSERT INTO film_text (film_id, title, description)
        VALUES (new.film_id, new.title, new.description);
  END;;
DELIMITER ;

On a side note, why does DROP TRIGGER not …

Paul has released Version 0.95 of his PBXT MySQL Transactional Storage Engine.

Here is what I did to get it operational under CentOS 4.3.

su -
useradd pbxt
su - pbxt
wget http://www.primebase.com/xt/download/mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5.tar.gz
tar xvfz mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5.tar.gz
cd mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5
./configure --with-debug=full --with-pbxt-storage-engine --without-query-cache --with-mysqld-user=pbxt  --prefix=/home/pbxt/mysql
make
make install
scripts/mysql_install_db
cd /home/pbxt/mysql
./bin/mysqld_safe --user=pbxt --basedir=/home/pbxt/mysql &

Now, lets test and confirm PBXT is operational.

bin/mysql -uroot mysql
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this …

MySQL provides two different tools to test the MySQL Server with SQL statements. One is mysqltest and in 5.1 mysqlslap. Both of these tools have quite different purposes. This is a quick review of the usage of mysqltest.

Current Usage

Under Linux deploys, the README in the mysql-test directory gives you all the information you need to know to run.

To run the full test suite.

cd /opt/mysql/mysql-test
 ./mysql-test-run

Rather easy, it does take some time, and I was surprised to find a number of tests marked as ’skipped’. The general purpose of having tests in a product is to provide coverage of software functionality, and tests should always be forward …

On the education front things are moving forward nicely. I now have confirmation that the only thing that stands between me and a degree in computer sciene is finishing my thesis paper. The paper itself is already well under way. I have all the literature research done and I have written the first 2 chapters and I am fairly far with the third chapter. I just send out a ton of email interviews. The general topic is open source in the relational database market. I will publish the paper on this site once I am done.

I am also now officially MySQL 5.0 developer certified. I did the beta exams back in march/april and I passed. Overall the exam felt much more close to real world knowledge than the Zend PHP exam I took last year. I learned a lot of the nitty gritty details of MySQL I have not run into so far. Unfortunately even MySQL 5.0 still has a fair amount of stuff like this. That being said the …