One week ago today I started work at OmniTI as a sales engineer for their Ecelerity MTA offering.

I’ve met and caught up with a great bunch of coworkers, learned a great deal about the new software I’ll be supporting, and generally had a really good time.

I think it is too early to really draw a comparison with working for MySQL, but it is a nice change of pace to sit in an office for a couple of weeks with the human interaction that goes along with it.

So what is Ecelerity? It’s a high-performance, extensible, clusterable MTA (mail transfer agent). Ecelerity is used by companies that need to send high volumes of mail such as Techtarget with their newsletters and reports. Where Sendmail may typically see 100K emails per hour of throughput, Ecelerity is marketed at one million messages per hour and sees several times that amount in the wild.

I’m in Maryland till Thursday then off to Seattle till Sunday, …

I will be free for dinner on Tuesday evening, July 25th, and I’d love it if you’d join me! Watch this space for details, although the update will be Tuesday, likely late afternoon.

(and of course let everyone know I’ll be doing my “So you’ve inherited a MySQL instance on unix” workshop — how a beginner can find out info/security checklist for everyone — Wednesday at 4:30 pm.)

I’m playing with the latest 5.1.11 beta in a master/slave replication situation. Given a lack of H/W lying around I’m configuring a mixed H/W setup to leverage an existing office’s after hours CPUs running Windows XP for my slaves. So here is my test setup.

Server

Linux - 192.168.100.170

The following are the relevent my.cnf settings

[mysqld]
port=3307
server-id = 1
log-bin=mysql-bin

Confirming the server. I did some test commands prior to confirm the position.

$ mysql -uroot -p mysql
Your MySQL connection id is 47 to server version: 5.1.11-beta-log
mysql> show master status;
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| File             | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| mysql-bin.000001 |     1759 |              |                  | …

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 …