The latest from the MySQL community

I think the briefest way to sum up the difference between a good developer mindset and a good sysadmin mindset is “a good developer thinks, ‘how will this work?’ and works accordingly. A good sysadmin thinks, ‘how will this break?’ and works accordingly.”

Developers think in terms of “edge cases” and “off by 1″ errors, which start from a default of things working. This is good as a design skill; developers need to think algorithmically, pondering a main way of something functioning and then dealing with anomalies.

However, sysadmins tend to install systems and maintain them with scripts, as opposed to building new software — usually. Sysadmins deal with systems when anomalies happen, so they must have a mindset of “how will this break?” vis-a-vis — “how will this break and how can I be notified of the breakage before my boss/the customers call?” which leads to “what if the notification system …

http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2007/appreciation.html

Now, Billy Joel is one of my all-time favorite pop musicians. I saw him in concert and nosebleed seats at the Boston Garden cost me USD $100 per ticket, and I bought 4 tickets (my twin brother is a die-hard Billy Joel fan, they were a holiday surprise 2 years ago!)

Billy Joel regularly sells out sports arenas. I can only imagine how much Oracle paid to have a concert with him.

And don’t get me wrong, the rest of the list is also stellar. Which only adds to my disbelief.

MySQL shows customer appreciation by not grossly overcharging.

MySQL: Because you’re smart enough to buy your own damn concert tickets.

(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)

I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.

I looked around for other places of work, and had a wonderful interview at an awesome company to boot. However, they were also a product company, and I’d decided that I wanted to move to a service company. That is, a …

(The Executive Summary: I left my job last week, and I start working at The Pythian Group on Monday. Go to their website if you’d like to work with me, or with people just as knowledgeable as me.)
I get inquiries all the time about consulting. Folks are madly searching for experienced MySQL DBAs. The lure of a new environment is always tempting, however, working for any one environment has its quirks. In October I realized I was coming up on having worked 2 years at my job. That’s not a very long period of time, but it certainly was long enough for me to learn the environment and get stuck in a rut — mostly my rut was doing more systems work than database work.  More »

It's been a while since I said anything about the progress on the book. That doesn't mean we are not still working on it, though.

As Peter wrote a while ago, he is basically wearing the hat of a very advanced technical reviewer at this point. We've finished writing all the chapters from his detailed outlines. He has worked through about half the chapters, and I'm continuing to spend my evenings and weekends and holidays (yes, nearly all my free time -- just ask my wife!) writing some new material (an appendix on EXPLAIN, for example), finishing unfinished things marked with TODO in the text, and revising chapters after Peter reviews them. Vadim is working on benchmarks. For example, he just finished some benchmarks for something I profiled with SHOW STATUS. I thought that would be good …

Every few years, a wave of people claim that the relational model falls short of modeling data structures of modern applications. This includes some really smart people recently such as:- Jim Starkey- Brian Aker- MIT researchersThis trend of criticizing the relational model started almost immediately after E. F. Codd published his seminal paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data

Our company, Percona is even more Virtual than MySQL AB - we have no offices and 100% of staff members work out of their homes (or traveling, onsite with customers etc). We also probably have just couple of cities where more than one Employee lives.

Working as a virtual company has a lot of benefits both for company and employee - office expenses savings, saving time spent commuting, flexible work time, access to more talents but it also has challenges as we typically able to communicate more efficiently with people we personally met and there are also many things which are better made or discussed in the groups. While working for MySQL I learned the great solution to this problem is periodic meetings - company wide or group wide organized both for sake of working together as well as team building as having fun together.

So we're having first company wide meeting at Egypt next …

A while back, I built some PPC64 (powerpc 64-bit) packages for MySQL. They were built on a POWER5 box, running Fedora Core 6, with glibc 2.5, using a Bitkeeper snapshot (public bkbits, 5.0.45 tag). All tests pass on ppc64, for what its worth. I’ll do periodic builds for Linux/PPC64 as and when its required (i.e. someone pings me or I need them for some reason).

Grab them from: ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/people/byte/mysql/

Hat tip to dwmw2 (for power5, bombadil) and Bryce (for ftp.linux.org.uk).

Technorati Tags: power, power5, mysql, linuxppc, …

After I wrote the post: How do I dump all tables in a database into separate files? I got emails from couple people asking how to import the individual table files back in to MySQL. First way to import each sql file created by the post is to import each file individually by [...] …

Bug ID: 6493264 Solaris libc should provide posix_memalign

At least it’s acknowledged as a problem :)

Although I now have to go and implement it in the NDB portlib.

I wish we could drop support for everything other than linux 2.6… would make this stuff a lot nicer.