After seeing Frank’s script in “Finding out how far behind are slaves” I figured I would post some nagios plugins I wrote a while ago, that we use at our company. They’re already up at http://www.nagiosexchange.org/, the 3rd party repository for nagios plugins.

So I figured I’d point you to:
Replication Lag Time
and
InnoDB Free Space

I’ll note that backups from a slave server can cause replication lag time to fall behind, for 2 reasons — …

Guiseppe Maxia recently posted on Filling Test Tables Quickly. However, he only gave examples for numbers, words and dates. This article will deal with randomly inserting images into a database — particularly useful for testing images stored in the database versus the filesystem. This article was inspired by Guiseppe’s article.

[note: there will be a post soon with my presentation on storing images in the MySQL filesystem, and there will be ample opportunity for discussion then, especially since everyone making a claim will have tested their system, given this code.]

Getting images into the database is not easy. All the tutorials I have read have used a programming language to get images into a database. Using cat and similar unix tools, I have attempted to be able to insert an image into a …

One of the things I did this weekend was knit the pattern I’d made for Sakila, the dolphin in the MySQL logo. Click on the image for a bigger picture:

The only problem is I have no idea what to do with it. I have more of the orange and blue yarn. I thought I would make it into a purse but it turned out much wider than I expected. I could make it into a big handbag but I don’t think I’d use it. Any suggestions?

The pattern itself:

dolphin: (56 sts wide by 59 rows)
When I say "k to stitch marker and remove", I mean knit to the stitch marker, and take the stitch marker off.

cast on 56 sts.
knit 2 rows

I had to tweak the pattern mid-knit, so I *think* this is the correct pattern. If the count looks OK for …

Matt Asay wrote an article about open source leakage. It’s quite good, and got me thinking.

First I thought, “Open source companies do not ‘lose’ revenue to non-paying customers, they just do not gain revenue from them.” But that’s based on the model of open-source software I have in my head that open source software usually starts out as a free, collaborative effort, and if enough folks get enough steam and come up with a business model (aka “a way to get paid”), then they form a company around the open source software.

Simplifying that model: open source software is free until it’s not.

Saying there is leakage does not do justice to the fact that the river flowed freely until the company came along and dammed up the river. Sure, maybe there’s a big leak, but there’s a lot more not leaking …

Weta Digital, the company on Peter Jackson films
Heavenly Creatures (1994) nominated for
The Frighteners (1996)
in 1997, Peter Jackston started working on King Kong, but Universal canned it because there were a lot of monster and disaster movies.
Contact (1997) with Robert Zemeckis — the zero-gravity ride was done by Weta Digital
Then they did the Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001-3)
Van Helsing (2004) (just a few bits and pieces)
I, Robot (2004) nominated for best digital effects — technology for armies in Lord of the Rings was used here.
King Kong (2005) and trying to get what Peter Jackson wanted.

(make a chart!)
Size of a movie is based on a shot (camera doesn’t cut away). Visual effects movie typically had 500-1000 shots.

Jim Starkey

Falcon is based on the netfrastructure db engine
Netfrastructure has been deployed in mission critical apps for >4 years.
Extended and integrated into mysql environment.

What Falcon is NOT:
InnoDB clone
Firebird (open source derivative of Interbase db that Jim wrote years ago)
Firebird clone
Standalone Database Management System (it was, inside of netfrastructure engine)
Netfrastructure (netfra is much more with jvm and search, though these features may roll out later)

What Jim’s learned in 20 years
Disks are slower than CPU and memory than they were 25 years ago.
MVCC=Multi-generational concurrency control (how Jim named it, but someone changed it to “version”)
Putting record versions on disks are problematic
Web applications are better and for the future (religion) [I agree, though, for …

Sergei Golubchik

Plugin API is new in MySQL 5.1, so you can plugin your own API commands.

Built-in versioning
Easy to maintain and distribute
Generic — allows you to load any functionality into mysqld

Plugins can add new status variables for SHOW STATUS
For the future, plugins will allow you to add new commandline options, new server variables, and new SQL keywords.

Plugin administration:
INSTALL PLUGIN foo SONAME 'bar.so'
UNINSTALL PLUGIN foo
SHOW PLUGINS
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PLUGINS
–plugin-dir=/path/to/dir

Plugin types:
Storage Engines
Fulltext Search Parsers
code changes text before it goes to the FULLTEXT data
can be used to search non-plaintext data formats, such as pdf, doc, mp3
can be used to parse …

Brian Aker — Director of Architecture

MySQL Server
SQL-Based, aiming to be SQL-03 compliant. Stable, scalable, easy to use, modular, high-performance RDBMS.

Client Library Support
Libmysql c-library (think OCI)
JDBC — type IV
ODBC
Perl DBD::DBI
PHP (built in)
ADO.Net, OleDB, Ruby, Erlang, Eiffel, Smalltalk and more provided by third parties.

So great because you can connect in many ways to different storage engines
Architecture

sql/ is for kernel
mysys/ is the portable runtime library. MySQL is ported to 52 platforms
(was 53 but Brian deleted OS/2 last week ). The portable runtime library wraps commands like pwrite, unlinking and renaming files so that operating system doesn’t matter.
mysql-test/ is for your test cases — run “mysql testrun –record”. Can take SQL from web …

by Mitch Kapor

Wikipedia uses MySQL as their backend. Wikipedia is known among geeks, but hasn’t quite hit society at large, but probably will soon. What lessons can we learn from Wikipedia? People who hear about the concept of wikipedia say “It can’t possibly work — an encyclopedia written by volunteers, that is completely open?”

But we know it does. It’s increasingly becoming the web page of choice for a wide range of factual topics. [as a side note, I go there when I hear of something and know nothing about it, and I get a good overview]

The mainstream media has been skeptical about Wikipedia, and makes stories about it. People sometimes will put untrue facts in Wikipedia, so mainstream media siezes on it as proof that Wikipedia doesn’t work. But we know that that is the exception, not the rule.

So how and why does it work, if it’s so counter-intuitive? Most people have erroneous assumptions …

So last night, during a break in the quiz show (where Prokrasti Nation had a good showing, as did the other teams — Recreational Evil, Peeps, and Safe Hex) we bid on the T-shirt that had the signatures of all the speakers at the conference. All the proceeds were to go to the EFF, so it’s a good cause.

They announced it was cash only, so I looked in my wallet. $33. Well, the bidding quickly went over that, and when it reached about $100 they said it didn’t have to be cash only. Around $300 Brian Aker said that they’d give whoever won credits in a new command, SHOW CONTRIBUTORS. Well, when they said that I knew I HAD to have my name in the source code.

I mean, dude, my NAME in the SOURCE CODE!!! But then again, this is an open source application, I could just spend some time and write a patch.

I’ve been saving for my wedding next June (14 months away) so when I bid …