Arjen's Journal

Arjen's Journal
Open Query: MySQL, Open Source & other ponderings

Date:	2008-11-16 07:57
Subject:	@ OpenSQLCamp
Security:	Public

Yes, I too am at OpenSQLCamp... others are great at the live blog-reporting and instantly putting photos online.
I am taking some photos, but I've kept my laptop in the bag for much of the day as really emails, IRC and IM can wait and it's just great to actually have full focus on the talks that are going on and walk around and chat with people.

Today is "hackathon" day so the laptop will definitely be out for coding.

Also looking at Tokutek's challenge for inserting 1 billion rows. Chatted with someone from the company at the camp about that. I've got some code lying around that can serve as a good base for tackling this. We'll see.

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-14 09:56
Subject:	Welcome to America...
Security:	Public

Sitting at LAX waiting for my onward flight. Breaking with LAX tradition, there weren't huge long waits at the passport or customs checks, I was not harassed, abused, or barked at. Impressive change!

Walking through a corridor, there's a "welcome to USA" above, with photos of the US president and vice president (currently the talking gloating bush and his evil brains Cheney), but thinking about the fact that soon someone will get a stepladder and put Barack's picture up there just made me smile ;-)

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-14 00:29
Subject:	To OpenSQLCamp
Security:	Public

Packing for OpenSQL Camp 2008... dropping Phoebe off at daycare in the morning, and straight on to the airport. No worries, her mum will pick her up in the afternoon ;-)

Decided on a lightweight approach, handluggage only. Got a little suitcase that satisfies the requirements and actually used it earlier this week for a Melbourne trip.... then realised that I actually have a Tom Bihn professional laptop backpack from about a decade ago, and it's actually also within the size specifications. Just need to make sure it stays light enough, but the backpack should be lighter than the suitcase.

If you're coming to OpenSQL Camp too, see you there!

Brisbane Australia - LAX - Washington DC - Charlottesville VA. The flights will be a joy and a pleasure, I'm sure. 26 hours travel time in total (with airport waits included). If I appear incoherent on arrival, please add chocolate + water and I should be ok ;-)

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-12 19:52
Subject:	Open Query is hiring!
Security:	Public
Tags:	careers, consulting, development, hiring, jobs, mysql, open query, open source, oss, ourdelta, support, training

Arjen & gang are looking for skilled and enthusiastic colleagues!

Essentials

guru level practical skills in MySQL schema/query design, server administration and tuning;
expertise with common dev and deployment infrastructure (mainly Linux but also other *nix and Windows);
freedom to travel without restriction;
self-motivated, ability to work independently (from anywhere - good Internet access required);
excellent written/verbal English, comfortable public speaker.

Being a small, company, the range of possible work tasks can be quite diverse, although you are not required to be able to do everything. That said, your application will be more highly regarded if you exhibit a broad range of skills and interests, both directly technical and otherwise.

Desirable abilities

shell and Perl scripting;
C/C++ programming;
PHP programming.

Range of possible tasks

teaching highly interactive Open Query course days for MySQL and related technologies;
remote and on-site consulting on MySQL and related technologies;
development of training materials, tutorials, how-tos, short articles, blog posts;
development of internal and external supporting tools, documentation;
Assisting OSS projects with MySQL expertise;
Speaking and helping out at user groups and conferences.

Part-time, fulltime or part-time contract possible. Yes, we're flexible, but we do take commitments seriously. Applicants with training focus main focus Australia/New Zealand, possibly located in Melbourne; but if you're based elsewhere, do talk to us anyway!

Technologies

MySQL
Eventum (PHP) issue tracking
Drupal 6 (openquery.com.au)
WordPress (ourdelta.org)

Detailed applications (resume in plain txt please) to:
l e a r n (at) o p e n q u e r y (dot) c o m (dot) a u
Asking questions is encouraged!

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-06 13:36
Subject:	OurDelta build for MySQL 5.0.67 with patchset d7 now available
Security:	Public

OurDelta build for MySQL 5.0.67 with patchset d7 is now available, in source (new!) and packaged binaries for RHEL/CentOS 4 and 5, Debian 4.0 Etch, Ubuntu 8.04 LTS (Hardy) and (new!) Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid).

If you already installed the OurDelta repository information, yum update or apt-get upgrade will install the updated packages for you. Please do review the special notes on backward compatibility.

See the full release post.

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-05 15:25
Subject:	President-Elect Obama
Security:	Public

Thank goodness.
Thank you, American voters!

1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-05 10:10
Subject:	new OurDelta build in progress...
Security:	Public

We're building a MySQL 5.0.67 with OurDelta d7 patchset. This includes some mysql bugfixes, patch fixes (reserved words and backward compatibility) and a few new (and IMHO very interesting) patches. You may have seen a lot of bug/issue/feature completion on launchpad earlier today. The release post will contain full change info.

After successful testruns, we're now just tweaking the scripts responsible for the new build process, so everything is automated and repeatable. Peter Lieverdink is once again doing great work in Debian and bash scripting land.
To have a clean result, we'll restart on all platforms at the end of the tweaking - since all builds feed off the same patched tarball now. Won't take too long. This release will also include a proper source package for each distro, making things much easier for those wanting to indulge with the sources ;-)

Oh, and we've added Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. That actually brings the number of binaries to 20 already:
Etch, Hardy, Intrepid, CentOS 4.6 and 5.2. Delta and Delta-Sail on each, and the i386 and x64 arch. 5x2x2=20.

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-03 15:52
Subject:	microslow patch, now with fractional seconds
Security:	Public

Thanks to everybody who responded to microslow patch - backwards compatibility. After some more poking around in the code, I've managed to resolve the issue and it now both eats and displays fractional seconds. That means that on input it's now backwards compatible with a stock MySQL build. And it can now also accept say 0.05 (for 50 milliseconds, if I have my zeros right ;-)

You can find the branch containing the new patch here.

The full updated functionality is documented at http://ourdelta.org/docs/microslow and will be included in the next upcoming OurDelta build (d7), so that we may forget about the d6 build which as we know had quirks in various patches that broke backward compatibility, introduced new reserved words, and such. Anyway, still wasn't too bad for a first public build; but I reckon it's well worth the effort fixing it all up before the next build!

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-03 08:20
Subject:	microslow patch - backwards compatibility
Security:	Public

Years ago Percona created the microslow patch, allowing greater granularity as well as additional detail to be captured in the slow query log. Brilliantly useful!

Just one problem, and for OurDelta we've been pondering how it can best be resolved: the original patch changes long_query_time to mean microseconds (millionths of a second) rather than seconds, so an existing config file would have to be modified.

One possible solution, which is currently in a branch preparing for the next OurDelta (d7) build, checks the input value and if it's <600 it presumes seconds were specified and multiplies accordingly. This works both from cmdline/my.cnf as well as when using SET. The SET actually also accepts fractional seconds (i.e., a float).
So the allowable range becomes 600 microseconds upward, with 1-599 seconds specified in two possible ways.
I understand that companies like eBay wanted to check for queries taking 50 milliseconds; that'd be 50000. Ok.

What I (personally) like about this method is that it's backward compatible with both stock MySQL builds as well as Percona builds, while automatically resolving the backward compatibility issue if you drop in an OurDelta build. An existing configuration will work as expected.

However, it's still a bit of a hack. So this is a call for input... how do you think it should work, or do you have a fabulously neat solution to the whole problem?

Just a few points that have already been brought up:
We could have the cmdline/my.cnf accept fractional seconds also.
We could (also) allow unit identifiers like ms and us/mu to indicate milliseconds and microseconds.
Both ideas would break (or rather, not resolve) backward compatibility with some builds out there; it would be backward compatible with stock MySQL builds though.

Finally, a related issue is how the setting should get displayed in SHOW VARIABLES. The original patch shows microseconds.

Opinions and ideas, please! Thanks!

6 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-11-02 14:46
Subject:	US court throws out most software patents(?)
Security:	Public

Very very interesting, if this article indeed a true account of what happened and the new situation. Quote:

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) in Washington DC has decided that in the future, instead of automatically granting a patent for a business practice, there will be a specific testing procedure to determine how patentable is that process.

The decision is a nearly complete reversal of the court's controversial State Street Bank judgement of 1998, which started the stampede for patenting business practices.

Perhaps in that brave new world, startup-wannabees will focus on actually getting something to market? That'd be great!

Update: Australian-based Brendan Scott of Open Source Law has written about this also: Bilski Decision Swacks Business Method Patents (US), with some additional links.

3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-31 13:56
Subject:	This week in OurDelta - Vol 2
Security:	Public

This week we've been working on...

The re-jigged build system, so we have a single patched baseline source tarball that's then used for all the different builds, as well as being available for you to download and build yourself.
Noarch distro rpm for all CentOS to more easily drop repo files into YUM.
The repo/download mirror system, it'll be ready to go from the next build (domain/paths will change slightly). Add your name to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/285200 if you'd like to be a mirror.
More documentation for existing (and new) patches. Currently WordPress mucks up the tabs when inside the docs pages, if you're a WP guru who can fix this, please get in touch!
Fixing up existing and updated patches. We really don't want new reserved words introduced, and if it's absolutely necessary it should be documented. Likewise, any enhanced feature should be backwards compatible if it relates to (for instance) existing configuration options. This is nearly done, and then we'll do a new 5.0 build. Other "new" patches are set for the next build after that.
Porting patches for 5.1. Since we don't want you to lose any of the new features when trying 5.1, we're porting the 5.0 patches that don't yet have a 5.1 version. This does require some work, more volunteers are most welcome! In some cases a port will be waiting (or needs to be synced) for the work in 5.0.
Bugs. Arjen found a bug in MySQL's mysqld_safe behaviour (any version since 4.0). One active community member submitted a patch very quickly. This is what happens when there's prospect of getting a contribution included in a build reasonably quick: people feel enticed to participate. And that's great! We now reckon the fix needs to be in my_print_defaults not mysqld_safe, but the example is still valid.
Grabbing the new Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid) images to set up build environments for it. Lots of people will stay with 8.04 LTS (Hardy) since that is a Long Term Support edition, but Intrepid is bound to be popular anyway.
Pondering the InnoDB recovery code. Surely this can be made faster without a major rewrite. Sure there can be rollbacks also and that's another matter, but dealing more efficiently with the redo would make a serious difference already. Do feel free to experiment and send in your patch!

3 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-31 11:25
Subject:	Easy HD upgrade on my MacBook, Arjen's OS toolchain
Security:	Public

When I left MySQL, my main machine was my old black 32-bit macbook which had to be kept attached to power supply (you know how difficult that is to guarantee, with the mag power adapter!) because of the earlier cordial-in-the-night incident (insurance covered that but the replacement was MySQL's of course).
I wanted a new 64-bit macbook, but was holding out for the new chipset that would support 4GB. It arrived, but local stores couldn't get it yet whereas the Apple store had it in stock - caveat, only the stock version could be shipped fairly quickly. Fine for RAM I was sourcing 2x2GB sticks for it elsewhere already. The HD was a tad painful, going down from upgraded 120G in my old one to about 100G in the new stock version.

Now, for OurDelta testing foo I have a nice box in my office with lots of cores, RAM and diskspace. So when I'm home or at least online, that also works fine for development work. Not so much when "elsewhere".
Sun's VirtualBox with Ubuntu works fine under OSX, albeit 32-bit only (for some tech reason VirtualBox on OSX does not support 64bit guests) so I've been using that. The reason for choosing a Linux VM over OSX and for choosing Ubuntu over other distros is....
OSX has some quirks which sometimes cause hassles when using it as a development environment. So rather than battling that, I decided to just get on with actual productivity.
Ubuntu is nicely up-to date with stuff and knows about the toolchain that I use. The seamless integration of VirtualBox is nice, so you don't have to do keyboard or mouse capture and the guests' desktop background just disappears: I have ubuntu's menu and other windows just floating inside OSX on one of my spaces. I can work on things offline, and thanks to the glory of bzr I use commit locally all the time.

With doing this extra stuff on my MacBook, and the growing collection of Phoebe photos and music, diskspace was quickly running out. Changing HDs on a macbook 13" is very easy: you get a new 2.5" SATA and an external USB or FireWire bracket. Costs less than AUD 250 including GST.
Start from OSX DVD1 (hold C when booting to start from CD/DVD), go a few steps until the top bar shows menu options that include Disk Utility. Put a partition on the disk (GUID, hfs+ journaled case-insensitive). Then select Restore, put the "old" volume in source, new volume in destination, and let it do its thing. It does a copy then a verify. Reboot, this time holding Alt so you get the boot menu. The new disk should show up, giving a reasonable indication that it's got the goods and will probably boot ok.
Now open up the MacBook (battery out, 3 screws for the metal plate covering RAM/HD) and pull out the HD. The "bracket" is screwed into the HD with 4 screws that have a 6-way head but that's not difficult to work with and you can use some pliers anyway. Swap HDs, re-insert, stash away the little pull flap, and close 'em up.
Boot, and be happy. Once again, "It Just Works" ;-)

I got a 320GB Seagate (in Seagate lying-speak of 1G=1000M), and a USB bracket because none of the FireWire ones were SATA; never mind that though, it just took 40 minutes to copy 100G over USB, and same for verify.
The new disk is 7200 RPM also. Being that speed and bigger, apparently it gets a bit hotter too, but not too bad.
Everything seems to be doing ok so far!

This morning I'm just grabbing the newly released Intrepid (Ubuntu 8.10) server i386/amd64 (for build) and i386 desktop (for the laptop VM) to take a peek at. Should be popular, although Hardy (8.04 LTS) is a Long Term Support release so I expect lots of people to use that version for quite a while, also.

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-26 08:09
Subject:	Off to Melbourne (again), consulting/training clients
Security:	Public

Off to Melbourne again, consulting for MySQL HA and performance tuning with a few different clients Mon-Thu. I was in Melbourne already last month, and will be there again in a few weeks for custom training. Hmm, is there a (flight)pattern there? ;-)

Also visiting Stewart this afternoon. Good company, good food.

Might have a few moments to hack on OurDelta patches along the way, and with the glory of bzr I can even do regular commits while offline to gain that quintessential backup to recover from potential sillyness. Die svn, die!

On the subject of clients, Open Query can now quote some well known local names, such as CSIRO Parkes Observatory, EDS/HP New Zealand, and TransACT. There's a difference between having a client and getting okidoki to mention them. Quoting clients -particularly local ones- is important as other potential customers sometimes look for references: in terms of dealing with a business that's new to them, but they often also try to seek out names of other local companies they possibly identify with to aid their adoption of MySQL.

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-26 07:09
Subject:	OurDelta looking for a logo
Security:	Public
Tags:	mysql, ourdelta

Ideas welcome!

General idea... base: Delta symbol (with thicker line on right hand side - a delta it's not a regular triangle), plus one or more of the following:

something depicting deltas: incremental small changes;
something depicting a river delta: where streams come together before flowing into ocean;
something depicting community: people working together, participating, communicating.

If you can draw even a little bit, rough scribbles are most welcome! We have a good artist who can turn that into magic. And, you don't have to go with the above... come up with something else suitable!

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/284161 where we're tracking this; you will find other suggestions from people, including ideas that have been dismissed for visual or other reasons.

2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-22 16:24
Subject:	This week in OurDelta - Vol 1
Security:	Public

It's been about a week since the initial launch of the first 5.0 packages and the OurDelta website, so it's time for some first impressions and an update on what's going on right now...

Immediately lots of hits on the site (from 67 distinct countries), most downloads and repo retrieves started happening a few days later.

Interest spiked even more when we put up the Debian 4.0 (Etch) packages, apparently there was serious pent-up demand there!

Lots of positive responses from clients, user groups, global MySQL community, and in fact also from within Sun/MySQL. That's very nice, as it provides confirmation we're doing something worthwhile!

No negative responses, blog posts or articles that I know of (and yes I did search around a bit through Google, Technorati, etc) which is of course nice too, but rather unusual and thus surprising. Isn't there always someone who doesn't agree? ;-) and anyway, a bit of dissent and discussion is healthy.

We submitted sessions for OpenSQLCamp, the linux.conf.au Open Source Databases Miniconf, and the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009 call for papers. Not just about the project, but also about using the toolchain and delving into MySQL Server code for non-gurus.

Noteworthy: MySQL Performance Blog is a popular site and so quite a few referrals came from Baron's post there.

As expected some bug reports were received, mainly to do with packaging details. Steve Walsh, Peter Lieverdink and others have been very active sorting out these issues and they'll be included in the next builds.

No OurDelta-related external bug reports about server operation itself, while people have reported running the builds in production. Excellent!

The ourdelta-developers mailing list got a fair number of new participants. Do join too!

#ourdelta IRC channel (on Freenode) not massively busy but alive and well, today Peter Lieverdink added an IRC bot to notify of OurDelta bug updates from Launchpad there, which is very useful too.

We received kind offers for mirroring the download/repo files, James Iseppi is working on the rsync and other details for that.

While organising our infrastructure for better patch management (Quilt) and the build workflow, we did find some bugs in existing patches. Most have been fixed, some are still being discussed. It's nothing major but, for instance, we don't want patches to create any new reserved words as that can break existing applications.

The above has slowed down our upcoming release of 5.1 somewhat. The intent was to make sure that all relevant 5.0 patches would also be available for the 5.1 builds, so that an upgrade would not lose you any features you've now come to like! Some porting work is involved there because not all are available for 5.1. With the other bugs getting fixed first, that's eating up some time. We believe that's ok though, as the resulting quality is higher.

While working on one such issue (getting rid of startup warnings from one patch on 32-bit builds) we encountered an existing MySQL bug which had been hiding somewhat mislabeled. While the visible symptoms were benign, Antony Curtis was able to add insight to the root cause of things, which indicated that on some platform more serious problems could occur in the server. The story is essentially about old code and old platforms, but just in case, we made a patch and it'll be in the next OurDelta build - to make sure it definitely can't cause any trouble. All info and the patch have also been submitted to the MySQL bug, and the MySQL QA and bugs people have been very kind and helpful.

Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling submitted a patch, and David Stainton from Spinn3r supplied two more that he'd extracted from the big Google patches.

Other excited individuals have been delving into the repositories to play with various bits, or are doing some benchmarks. All good stuff!

Thus, you may agree, plenty going on so far and not at all bad for a first public week of a new project - and as is usually the case, a release doesn't mean the work is done for a while, instead it immediately creates more! ;-)

1 Comment | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-19 18:41
Subject:	MySQL reserved words, Google SHOW *_STATISTICS patch
Security:	Public

In MySQL, not all keywords are reserved words, and because of the way function parentheses are handled by default, function names aren't reserved words either.
Reserved words are nasty, as they can't simply be used for identifiers: database, table, and column names.
I say "can't simply" because you can of course backtick anything and use it as identifier, even stuff with spaces; but that doesn't mean you should ;-)

While working with the OurDelta (and earlier, Percona) builds, I found that the Google patch with the magic SHOW USER|CLIENT|TABLE|INDEX_STATISTICS commands actually produced all those *_STATISTICS keywords as reserved words (see this bug). It shows up easily in v2 of the patch that also makes this info available through INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables. You quickly find there that unless you backtick the tablenames, you get syntax errors. Not-so-nice.

Now, the MySQL parser is sometimes a bit of a voodoo monster, but I remember the above issue from back when I was in Docs - we fixed up a script to generate the table of reserved words in the manual. It first grabs all %token defines (sql/sql_yacc.yy) and then substracts anything under the keyword_sp: label. Well, way back then it wasn't that label since that was introduced with 5.0 stored procedures. But the idea is still the same. So going by this old knowledge, the newly added keywords from the abovementioned patch were just missing from the second list. Just need to check it out.

I branched the ourdelta tree from Launchpad, had Quilt (more on that magic tool in another post!) only apply the patchlist up to this one, and made the modification I thought would do the trick. And behold, success! The updated patch is pushed in https://code.launchpad.net/~arjen-lentz/ourdelta/ourdelta-userstatsv2 and will be merged back into the OurDelta trunk for the next build.

So the above can now serve a) as a useful how-to for anybody adding keywords into the parser, but b) there's also real-world sense for fixing up the userstats patch. With the original patch inside builds that are used by more people, someone could suddenly find their app broken if they happen to have a table named user_statistics or client_statistics; or, actually a table named slow. What, `slow` ?

Yep, along the way I found that the FLUSH SLOW QUERY LOGS functionality is actually also hiding in this same patch file ;-) We might split that into a separate patch: it's useful, but doesn't belong with userstats.

2 Comments | Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-16 12:49
Subject:	More OurDelta: Debian Etch build of 5.0.67.d6, Launchpad, IRC
Security:	Public

Build of MySQL 5.0.67.d6 for Debian Etch done and available, simply click to the new Debian page for the info to set up your repo. Thanks to Peter Lieverdink (cafuego on the #ourdelta IRC channel) for the fast work!

Also, because sometimes instant banter is useful, there's now a #ourdelta channel on Freenode. Naturally, real discussion should just happen on the ourdelta-developers team and list. It's really easy to join.

Your interest (from 53 different countries according to Google Analytics!) and response has been great! Among the feedback, saw a few bug reports on minor issues in the packaging, most of which have already been addressed for the next build (bug handling progress is all visible on Launchpad). And discussion about various patches that are "around"; some mails came to people directly but we try to encourage using the oursql-developers team mailing list.

Post A Comment | Add to Memories | Tell a Friend | Link

Date:	2008-10-14 08:20
Subject:	OurDelta builds for MySQL (5.0.67.d6)
Security:	Public

With the build system, repos, patches and launchpad sorted, we can release! First up from OurDelta is a build of 5.0.67, using patchrev d6, for i386/x86_64. This is basically Percona patchset 5 with a few fixes plus the Sphinx storage engine. It even passes the testsuite ;-)

RHEL/CentOS 4.6/5.2 RPMs and YUM repo info
Ubuntu Hardy DEBs and apt-get repo info