A couple of months ago (December 1st for those playing along at home) it marked five years to the day that I started at MySQL AB (now Sun, now Oracle). A good part of me is really surprised it was for that long and other parts surprised it wasn’t longer. Through MySQL and Sun, I met some pretty amazing people, worked with some really smart ones and formed really solid and awesome friendships. Of course, not everything was perfect (sometimes not even close), but we did have some fun.

Up until November 2008 (that’s 3 years and 11 months for those playing at home) I worked on MySQL Cluster. Still love the product and love how much better we’re making Drizzle so it’ll be the best SQL interface to NDB :)

The ideas behind …

It’s no secret that I love linux.conf.au. My first was linux.conf.au 2003, in Perth and I’ve been to every one since (there are at least two people who’ve been to every single one, including CALU as it was called in 1999).

I’ve been on the board of Linux Australia for some insane proportion of the years since then (joining in 2003). Linux Australia is the not-for-profit community organisation that puts on linux.conf.au. It’s all volunteers and amazingly enough we have more than one group of people wanting to put on linux.conf.au each year!

This year, we Marched South to Hobart.

Here I detail what I saw, what I wish I …

In 2 years (ish):

• the majority of consumer bought machines (which will be laptops) will have SSD and not rotational media
• At the same time, servers with larger storage requirements will use disk as we once used tape.
• At least one Linux distributoin will be shipping with btrfs as default
• OpenSolaris will be looking interesting and not annoying to try out (a lot more “just work” and easy to get going).
• Unless Sun puts ZFS under a GPL compatible license so it can make it into the Linux kernel, it will become nothing more than a Solaris oddity as other file systems will have caught up (and possibly surpassed).
• There will be somebody developing a a MySQL compatible release based off Drizzle
• Somebody will have ported Drizzle back to Microsoft Windows… possibly Microsoft.
• X will still be used for graphics on Linux, although yet another project will …

Jonathan puts it in slighty different words, and doesn’t gaurantee The White House to everybody.

I do wonder when we’ll get a Drizzle or NDB using president though….

The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it - and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on 500,000 …

This is not the first case of open source and life saving tied together. For example, Matthew Swift, one of the …

FedEx rang on my door today, delivering a large cardboard box. The Sender? Sun Microsystems, my new employer!

Upon opening it, I discovered the following:

Continue reading "A nice welcome package from Sun arrived today"

Brian “Krow” Aker’s Idle Thoughts - Solaris, Linux, it is GNU folks…

Brian hits the nail on the head… The way you get a usable system is install all the GNU tools.

This is how I go from fresh Ubuntu install to building MySQL:

apt-get build-dep mysql-server

apt-get install bison

(now go and build).

(and i could do this graphically if I wasn’t so stuck in my ways)

For Solaris? umm… there was a point where I could get Solaris to apply security updates and Brian could get all the stuff needed to build a MySQL Server. Together we had the knowledge needed… but neither was as trivial as with Ubuntu and combining knowledge was too much - I just gave up and went on to more productive things.

Even on an existing Solaris system… getting your PATH right is a trip into some weird fantasy land seemingly …

I must be awake for about 24 hours now, things are getting a bit blurry. But I have arrived at our MySQL Staff Meeting here in Orlando safely! My flight with Northwest airlines from Frankfurt via Detroit was uneventful - the plane was pretty empty so I was happy to have two seats for myself! The board entertainment program was neat, I really prefer video on demand over scheduled movie broadcasts (I watched "The Nanny Diaries", which was quite funny, and "The Fantastic Four", which had some nice CG effects).

While standing in the immigration line in Detroit somebody in the line next to us waved to me - it was Tobias "Flupps" Asplund, one of our trainers! Quite a funny coincidence, he just had arrived via Amsterdam. We actually were on the same flight from Detroit …

Following my successful linux.conf.au talk “Eat My Data: How Everybody Gets POSIX File I/O Wrong“, I started to feel the need to easily be able to have my data eaten.

Okay, not quite. However, when you’ve written your software properly, so it uses fsync() correctly, opening files with O_SYNC or whatever - tests take longer as you’re having to wait for things to hit the rust.

So….. LD_PRELOAD=libeatmydata.so to the rescue! With a POSIX compliant fsync() (that does nothing) and filtering on open(2), it can take your test run times down dramatically.

The only time you shouldn’t use it for your tests is when you end up crashing the machine to test durability (i.e. when the OS doesn’t have the opportunity to cleanly write out the data to disk).

See the …