Today I attended the Drizzle Developer Day which took place in the auditorium of the Sun Campus in Santa Clara.

Many of the the Drizzle core hackers as well as several other people interested in the development attended this event, hacking away and discussing various issues. Jeremy Zawodny gave a presentation about Craigslist's needs for Drizzle, Jay Pipes gave an overview over Google's protocol buffers library. I took a number of pictures, which you can find in my …

Baron was just writing about problems with the Debian init scripts. The basic problem boils down to /etc/mysql/debian-start running mysqlcheck on every table.

Kolbe Kolbe and Harrison Fisk pointed this  out to me last February, and as a result I re-wrote the debian-start.inc script to only operate on MyISAM tables. Additionally, the default config was changed to turn on the myisam-recover option, so even for the MyISAM tables, all we do is touch the table to get MySQL to recover it if needed. (Which I promise you, you really want if you're modifying MyISAM tables on a production server. Don't do that, really, but that's another issue.) The new process essentiall looks like this:

for table in `select TABLE_NAME from information_schema.TABLES where ENGINE='MyISAM'":

  select count(*) into …

Baron was just writing about problems with the Debian init scripts. The basic problem boils down to /etc/mysql/debian-start running mysqlcheck on every table.

Kolbe Kolbe and Harrison Fisk pointed this  out to me last February, and as a result I re-wrote the debian-start.inc script to only operate on MyISAM tables. Additionally, the default config was changed to turn on the myisam-recover option, so even for the MyISAM tables, all we do is touch the table to get MySQL to recover it if needed. (Which I promise you, you really want if you're modifying MyISAM tables on a production server. Don't do that, really, but that's another issue.) The new process essentiall looks like this:

for table in `select TABLE_NAME from information_schema.TABLES where ENGINE='MyISAM'":

  select count(*) into …

Baron was just writing about problems with the Debian init scripts. The basic problem boils down to /etc/mysql/debian-start running mysqlcheck on every table.

Kolbe Kolbe and Harrison Fisk pointed this  out to me last February, and as a result I re-wrote the debian-start.inc script to only operate on MyISAM tables. Additionally, the default config was changed to turn on the myisam-recover option, so even for the MyISAM tables, all we do is touch the table to get MySQL to recover it if needed. (Which I promise you, you really want if you're modifying MyISAM tables on a production server. Don't do that, really, but that's another issue.) The new process essentiall looks like this:

for table in `select TABLE_NAME from information_schema.TABLES where ENGINE='MyISAM'":

  select count(*) into …

I recently added two new packages to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service:

• Maatkit is a collection of essential command-line utilities for MySQL. Each is completely stand-alone, without dependencies other than core Perl and the DBI drivers needed to connect to MySQL, and doesn't need to be "installed" - you can just execute the scripts. This makes the tools easy to use on systems where you can't install anything extra, such as customer sites or ISPs.
• protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol …

Dear LazyWeb, I want to use my Ubuntu laptop (on amd64 BTW) to build an RPM of Maatkit that will work on all RPM-based distros. Is it possible? Or are there enough differences between the RPM-based distros that I can’t do it? Mind you, the finished RPM ought to just have some man pages and Perl scripts, so I don’t think it will be platform- or distro-specific. But I am just not an expert on it.

The second question is, what do I need to put into my Makefile to do this? My ‘make all’ currently builds a .zip, a .tar.gz, and a .deb package — what needs to change to make that include .rpm?

Someone who is willing to help create .spec files, etc, etc will be immediately given commit rights to Maatkit’s SVN repository!

Debian, packaging, …

In a recent article, Matt Asay was musing about the aspects of hosting an Open Source project by yourself vs. using a public project hosting service like SourceForge, GitHub or Launchpad. He concluded that it's important for commercial/sponsored open source projects in particular to do the hosting by themselves, so they can maintain full control and can gain more insight, which hopefully will turn into more revenue at some point.

However, Matt seems to reduce "hosting" to "providing downloads" only:

Control and visibility. Given the importance of customer conversions, it becomes hugely valuable information to know that it takes, say, eight months on average for someone to buy the "Enterprise" version of …

I decided I’d be a good sport and try to do some build work for Drizzle on OpenSolaris to make sure we weren’t accidentally Linux-ifying something. Nevermind OpenSolaris installing an nsswitch file set up to not use DNS by default. Nevermind OpenSolaris reinventing the wheel for package management rather than starting with a package management system already in use by people (or and then fixing the things . Nevermind the GPL incompatible CDDL license… I’d be a good sport and give it (another) try.

I should add, in all honesty, I really do want OpenSolaris to be good. I think monocultures are bad, and I think Solaris can be useful in the growth of the ecosystem.

Step one. Install bzr.

pkg search bzr

Nothing. Wasn’t expecting much. That’s ok. Grab tarball. Unpack.

FAIL

Silly me. There is no sudo, so I had become root first (sure - I’m sure there …

I am happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.8. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

Below is the list of changes since version 0.6. You may wonder what happened to version 0.7 - it had a rather short life cycle as I was informed about a bug that I fixed quickly before I made a wider release announcement of 0.7.

• Fixed a bug in the InnoDB recovery function: the second mysqld process …

I was just reading Jan’s post about how to write a good build system

I’m in the need for a portable, fast build-system.

While I’m not about to write a build system in lua - or anything else, I thought I’d pitch in my thoughts as I’ve been having a similar problem recently. The problem is, autotools is the only system that doesn’t require some prereq to be installed on the system … other than a working build system. The only real downside to autotools (other than needing to learn m4) is that it is useless on Windows.

As Jan says, though, the other systems fall down on the make dist part. This is way important to me, as I also work in my tree alot and I really want to have an automated step to make sure I’m packaging up all the files I need, but not too many. This leads Jan to the …