The latest from the MySQL community

This is a follow-up piece to an earlier rant:

We are hitting a few walls with a CouchDB deployment and both Damien and I are a bit puzzled. This posting tries to attract someone with a clue to help us out. Our problems might result from not understanding the documentation correctly, but with evidently inaccurate material, we stand little chance

Long story short: We’ve got it all sorted out.

Memory Hogging Spidermonkey

Sam Ruby relayed a hint by “a Mozilla Developer”. Invoking Spidermonkey with the -b parameter and a value of 1000000, we are able to keep the memory footprint constant. We haven’t measured how this impacts performance, though.

Crashing …

I was browsing around the web and ran across this article at xml.com, XML Moves to mySQL. Being a heavy XML user, I had to read the article. It looks like MySQL is expanding the built-in support for XML.

This article isn't very detailed but it links to Using XML in MySQL 5.1 and 6.0 at mySQL.com which is very detailed.

I like the ability that is built in to support loading XML from files. That's a feature I wish Oracle would work on. Even in 11g, that functionality is still limited.

MySQL also adds ExtractValue() and UpdateXML() support. If you're manipulating XML much, you know that these two functions are needed.

From what I know of MySQL and what I read here, MySQL is just getting started …

In the last round I wanted to replace everything with a lua implementation. Today, I want to take a step back and only replaces the autotools :)

On one side this follows the idea of cmake a bit more and on the other side it takes in account that make is isn't the evil guy here. Let make do the make job, let lua generate the makefile.

Ok, to put it in other words: we don't care who is building our code in the end. May it be Prime Mover, gnu make or nmake on windows.

It turns out that this task is more tricky in the end. Especially if you are crazy and want to build it Makefile.am files. Yes, the Makefile.am from automake as input to generate the Makefile. For now I go the route of a central Makefile that has everything (somewhat following the "Recursive Makefile considered Harmful" paper).

Let's see how much this hurts.

With new versions of XAMPP for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X we wish you all a merry christmas, snow on your server farm and a warming processor in everyones heart!

In all three Xmas gifts we updated MySQL to 5.0.51, PHP to 5.2.5 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.3. But we didn't update Perl because the new 5.10.0 seems to be a development version, and in XAMPP we only support "stable" versions.

Santa Downloads and more details on the specific platform's XAMPP project page.

I'm getting in early, I had just started building my benchmarks for my talk on Amazon EC2 at the MySQL Conference and Expo next year when I discovered exactly why they say you need to run a test more than once; results can be completely unpredictable. Take for example the Sequential I/O performance on EC2, versus my home machine:



The first 3 tests were a 36G Seagate Raptor 10k RPM, a 160G Seagate SATA2 7200RPM, and a 320G Seagate IDE 7200RPM disk, running in the same machine I had at home. The last three were Amazon EC2 images. A few observations from these results:

• The char write test seems to max out my CPU (not on graph - see raw data), so that probably explains why it's consistent across all disks.
• My home machine is almost dead on consistent, whereas Amazon EC2 looks more like a roller-coaster
• The …

With new versions of XAMPP for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X we wish you all a merry christmas, snow on your server farm and a warming processor in everyones heart!

In all three Xmas gifts we updated MySQL to 5.0.51, PHP to 5.2.5 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.3. But we didn't update Perl because the new 5.10.0 seems to be a development version, and in XAMPP we only support "stable" versions.

Santa Downloads and more details on the specific platform's XAMPP project page.

I was just reading Jan’s post about how to write a good build system

I’m in the need for a portable, fast build-system.

While I’m not about to write a build system in lua - or anything else, I thought I’d pitch in my thoughts as I’ve been having a similar problem recently. The problem is, autotools is the only system that doesn’t require some prereq to be installed on the system … other than a working build system. The only real downside to autotools (other than needing to learn m4) is that it is useless on Windows.

As Jan says, though, the other systems fall down on the make dist part. This is way important to me, as I also work in my tree alot and I really want to have an automated step to make sure I’m packaging up all the files I need, but not too many. This leads Jan to the …

Today's entry is provided by Jay Pipes.

Name

Jay Pipes

Blog

jpipes.com

Biography

Jay Pipes is the North American Community Relations Manager at MySQL. Coauthor of Pro MySQL (Apress, 2005), Jay regularly assists software developers in identifying how to make the most effective use of MySQL. He has given sessions on performance tuning at the MySQL Users Conference, RedHat Summit, NY PHP Conference, OSCON, SCALE, and Ohio LinuxFest, amongst others. He lives in Columbus, Ohio, with his wife, Julie, and his four animals. In his abundant free time, when not being pestered by his two needy cats and two noisy dogs, he daydreams in PHP code and ponders the ramifications of …

2007 was an off year for me when it comes to blogging. Not a surprise, since my first blog after returning from my trip to Argentina was entitled “Am I done blogging?”

Seeing that I’m a self proclaimed “Data Dynamo and BI Geek” and even google agrees (search term “BI Geek” yields me at the top) it seems only fitting for me to see how bad 2007 was… You know, by the numbers.

First, pop the top on the wordpress database schema. (5 minutes)
Second, write a simple SQL Query based cube (blogmart.mondrian.xml) on top of my blog data (posts, categories) (15 minutes)
Third, do some analysis in JPivot to see how …

2007 is almost over and what a year this has been for Wave2!

My programming preferences have gone full circle, from beginning the year playing snakes and ladders (Python), I spent the summer drinking coffee (Java) and finally settled down surrounded by Camel’s, Lama’s and Parrots (Perl). Bizarre but never dull!

Steady progress has been made all round and as always the Open Source community has proven a valuable resource. Not a day went by where I did not discover something new or think of a new idea that could be built using Open Source Software. I only wish I had more time in the day!.

My Christmas present came early this year in the form of a MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Study Guide. I have been putting off the final MySQL certification while waiting for the book to arrive, and now it is in my hands the only thing preventing me from taking the …