Introduction

StackOverflow is an amazing site for coding questions. It was created by Joel Spolsky of joelonsoftware.com, Jeff Atwood of codinghorror.com, and some other incredibly smart guys who truly care about user experience. I have been a total fan of SO since it went mainstream and it's now a borderline addiction (you can see my StackOverflow badge on the right sidebar).

The Story

Update 6/21/09: This server is currently under very heavy load (10-200), even with caching plugins enabled. Please bear with me as I try to resolve the situation.

Feel free to …

Three great beta deliveries in one week!

MySQL Connector/.Net 6.0.2 beta, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL.

MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.4 beta, a new release providing  C++ API for connecting client applications to the MySQL Server. If you know JDBC, this should be familiar to you.

MySQL Connector/C 6.0.0 beta, a new version of the C API for accessing MySQL database servers

Use them and let us know what you think.

Learn more about Connector/C++ here.

Learn more about Connector/C …

Three great beta deliveries in one week!

MySQL Connector/.Net 6.0.2 beta, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL.

MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.4 beta, a new release providing  C++ API for connecting client applications to the MySQL Server. If you know JDBC, this should be familiar to you.

MySQL Connector/C 6.0.0 beta, a new version of the C API for accessing MySQL database servers

Use them and let us know what you think.

Learn more about Connector/C++ here.

Learn more about Connector/C …

Three great beta deliveries in one week!

MySQL Connector/.Net 6.0.2 beta, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL.

MySQL Connector/C++ 1.0.4 beta, a new release providing  C++ API for connecting client applications to the MySQL Server. If you know JDBC, this should be familiar to you.

MySQL Connector/C 6.0.0 beta, a new version of the C API for accessing MySQL database servers

Use them and let us know what you think.

Learn more about Connector/C++ here.

Learn more about Connector/C …

I wrote a User-Defined Function that implements the FNV (Fowler-Voll-No) hash function for MySQL. I’m not the first person to do this — in fact, I was inspired by the Google patches for MySQL. But my implementation is a little bit different from most, in a very important way that leads directly to much higher performance, especially suited for the Maatkit tools.

A bit of background: FNV hashing is a very fast hash algorithm that operates in fixed memory. It is widely used in lots of important areas in computer science. My implementation requires absolutely no malloc() calls, which is a darn good thing because I am not to be trusted with malloc(), having spent too …

Yesterday I starting testing PBXT using the DBT2 benchmark. Following the implementation of durability and SELECT FOR UPDATE for the engine I was more interested in the benchmark as a test for stability and concurrency than performance. I was not disappointed...

Which bug first?

Well I immediately ran into 3 bugs. Isn't it funny how bugs often come in batches, which leaves you thinking: "Oh sh.. where do I start?". Here's my advice: start with the bug that is most likely to disappear if you fix the others!

A simple example, you have 2 bugs: an unexpected exception is occurring, and you're loosing memory. First look for the memory loss, because it may disappear when you fix the exception (because you may be loosing memory in the error handler).

Take things one problem at time:

Another thing: once you have decided for one of the bugs, stick with it (no matter how hard it gets) …

I've written before about how to figure out which connection is holding the InnoDB locks for which other connections are waiting. In other words, how to figure out who's blocking you from getting work done. The short and sweet: turn on the InnoDB lock monitor and use innotop to look at the locks held and waited-for. This has some disadvantages, so I made a patch to solve the issue the way I like it. The result is significantly more ability to find and solve InnoDB lock wait issues.

Last week I wrote about my efforts to measure MySQL's replication speed precisely. The most important ingredient in that recipe was the user-defined function to get the system time with microsecond precision. This post is about that function, which turned out to be surprisingly easy to write.

I'm happy it turned out to be that simple, but the amount of such bugs and devastating consequences are humiliating.
Bug#7209 is a case of an intermittent failure when the best brain of Support department and dozens of man hours had to be spent to track the issue down to a repeatable test case. And the cause is such a trivial design mistake:

typedef struct st_hash {
  uint key_offset,key_length;           /* Length of key if const length */

  uint records,blength,current_record;
  DYNAMIC_ARRAY array;                          /* Place for hash_keys */

  /* cut */
} HASH;

gptr hash_search(HASH *info,const byte *key,uint length);

gptr hash_next(HASH *info,const byte *key,uint length);

Now, where does hash_next get the current position of the search? In …

I had a conversation with Daniel Dittmar, one of the developers on the SAP team today. I am trying to get familiar with the MaxDB codebase, and it's difficult to do without at least a bit of explanation. The inline English documentation is written by native German speakers, so it's often difficult to discern. Having this map will help me quite a bit. I hope it helps some others as well.

Thanks very much to Daniel for putting an evening in to documenting this.




12:56 < cj> DanielD: can you point me to some docs on the maxdb source code?
12:56 < cj> why are the different parts named with such short and
difficult-to-remember names? :)
12:57 < DanielD> partly, because if you work with them day in, day out, you
remember them anyway and they are easier to type
12:57 < cj> :)
12:58 < DanielD> what documentation there is, is either …