Why a New Utility?

A couple of months back, Tim Procter, Sheeri Cabral and I were discussing about how best to diagnose a MySQL server and/or tune its performance, automating the process as much as possible. The Performance Advisors from MySQL Enterprise do this, but most of our customers don’t have a subscription and Pythian’s collective experience is not necessary reflected by its rules.

In our daily work, we have used Major Heyden’s MySQL Tuner, Mark Leith’s Statpack and our own tools to review a MySQL server configuration parameters. However, all of these tools had limitations in regards of what we wanted to achieve. Our major …

Last weekend, I finally got some time to look around Drizzle. I had already compiled it on my laptop, but hadn't really looked at the code.Then, I thought that looking over some of the blueprints on Launchpad, would be a good way to get familiar with the code base. After a quick search, I found move function/time/ functions into plugin(s)

This blueprint is basically to create UDF plug-ins for the different time related functions. There was no priority assigned and it was on the low hanging fruit milestone. Which was perfect for …

Several months ago, I started a little project at work, called Mockload. It started as a fun way of using the MySQL Proxy, to test our monitoring agent, as well as the rules engine and graphs on the Service Manager.

Why?
I needed a tool that would be easy to use, and improve over time. And that it would allow our QA team to send custom values to the service manager. The goal was to pretend having some very busy MySQL servers.

And what better tool, than the MySQL Proxy itself to pretend being a busy MySQL Server!
The way our agent collects the MySQL related data, is by issuing different sql queries. So, I thought that I could have a MySQL proxy instance in between …

Microsoft contributes to Linux. Acquia raises $8m. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Microsoft contributes to Linux
Microsoft announced that it is to contribute device driver code to the Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Prompting us to publish a CAOS Theory Q&A. Answering one questioning we failed to ask, ZDnet reported that Microsoft’s Linux contributions should find their way into the 2.6.32 release.

Acquia raises $8m
Mass High Tech …

While doing some work for the MySQL MMM project, I got distracted and browsed around for a bit. I started searching for MySQL on google code, and then expanded that search into launchpad, sourceforge and of course forge.mysql.com.
I found that there are literally thousands of FOSS MySQL projects on these sites. No surprise really, but still not something we stop to think about every day.
I thought I would share that with you here so you can go and have a look for yourself to see if you see anything that might be useful to you. Of course if you do, please blog …

There’s actually no single “correct” answer! It all depends on

1. where in a stack the component lives;
2. the state of the market for that component region;
3. sometimes even geographic location of the user comes into play.

Yes, for OSS projects modularity is handy in terms of handling contributions, but modularity may not be the best way to deal with a problem in a certain market state and situation!

Research has shown (see, for example, “The Innovator’s Solution” by Clayton Christensen) that the “integrated” region over time actually shifts to a subcomponent of an original integrated component that has since gone modular. An interesting example of this for MySQL its pluggable storage engine interface since version 5.1. MySQL is more modular now, but individual storage engines are tightly integrated for performance reasons, and in some cases they are even proprietary. …

If you get the source code through the …

We have an ongoing Drizzle milestone called low-hanging-fruit. The idea is that when there’s something that  could be done, but we don’t quite have the time to do it immediately, we’ll add a low-hanging-fruit blueprint so that people looking to get a start on the codebase and contributing code to Drizzle have a place to go to find things to do.

Some of my personal favourites are:

• Remove sprintf
• Convert …

After I wrote about reading a master.info file using the MySQL Proxy, I went ahead and added the missing piece. Creating a master.info file using the MySQL Proxy.

A bug?
As I went back to lib/mysql-proto.c looking for a function that I could duplicate and modify to add the to_masterinfo_string() function, I realized that I missed a few master_ssl_* fields. It turned out that I was not exporting all the fields from the master.info file.

This time, the bug fix was easy enough. After modifying the test case to account for the missing fields, I added a …

This time I'll write about a nice featured we now have on the MySQL Proxy.

Parsing master.info
The master.info is a file that the MySQL server creates when you are running a slave server, you can read the manual for more details.
And now you can use the MySQL Proxy to read that file and parse the data from it.

Background
It all started when Jan emailed the proxy discuss mailing with the Changelog from 0.6.1 to 0.7.0. The part that got my attention was:
"...
Core
[skip]
* added parser for master.info files"
... "
As I was working on a Lua script that did some simulation, I …