Software Carpentry is running a 2-day software skills boot camp in Boston, June 24-25th 2013, for women in science, engineering, medicine, and related research
areas. Registration is $20.

Boot camps alternate short tutorials with hands-on practical exercises. You are taught tools and concepts you can use immediately to increase your productivity and improve confidence in your results. Topics covered include the Unix shell, version control, basic Python programming, testing, and debugging — the core skills needed to write, test and manage research software.

This boot camp is open to women at all stages of their research careers, from graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to staff scientists at hospitals and in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

When you setup a monitoring system for SQL Server, you often use thresholds to determine when an instance is healthy. You might say that you want to be alerted when CPU use is over 90% or when there’s only 10% of disk space left. The trouble with these thresholds is that they will often throw off false positives, or send you an alert when really nothing is wrong. Simple thresholds often have to be tuned to the individual instance, since a server with 10 TB still has 1 TB of space left at 90% disk use.

Baron Schwartz blogged about this issue in an article and he’s been creating software that monitors MySQL beyond simple thresholds, after stating that they do not work in most cases. He makes a good …

I am doing a reporting proof-of-concept (POC) for my company. Business intelligence (BI) is often the last thing that gets thought of during an application’s life cycle because it’s only really necessary after you get customers. Before that, the main focus is on application features. Soon after launch, your coworkers and your customers start asking questions about usage and adoption, and customers start to ask for summary information on their data as well as just dumping their data. If you’re the only guy in charge of the database, this is often overwhelming.

Thankfully, we now have many options for what’s called self-service BI. The developer or DBA sets up the basic data models (say Orders) in an automated tool like SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and then allows an information worker to select the columns, perform joins, and add filters to create reports. This basically cuts down miscommunication that can often happen between …

Those who are familiar with me know I've a dream.

5 years ago I decided to leave a systems integrator where I was doing great. Why? I wanted to be in a company with the same growth prospects that Oracle had in the 80s. I dreamed to be in the Oracle of 30 years ago and, as time travel wasn't affordable, I decided to join MySQL AB to help expand the business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
A few years later my dream came true, but in a slightly different sense. Sun acquired MySQL and was later swallowed by Oracle giving me the opportunity to join the company I wished I could have helped build.

Oracle is an amazing …

I’m sitting here in the lounge at SFO thinking back on the last week, the majority of which has been spent meeting my new workmates and attending the Percona MySQL conference.

For me it has been as much of a family reunion as it has been about seeing the wonderful things going on in MySQL.

Having joined Continuent last month after an ‘absence’ in NoSQL land of almost 2.5 years, joining the MySQL community again just felt like coming home after a long absence. And that’s no bad thing. On a very personal level it was great to see so many of my old friends, many of whom were not only pleased to see me, but pleased to see me working back in the MySQL fold. Evidently many people think this is where I belong.

What was great to see is that the MySQL community is alive and well. Percona may be the drivers behind the annual MySQL conference that we have come to know, but …

I am not at Percona Live this week because I opted to stay home after a crazy year of travel (41 talks in 11 different countries on 3 continents in the past year). However, I realized today that Percona Live has no Code of Conduct.

I will not be attending any Percona Live events until there is an acceptable Code of Conduct. MySQL is the world’s most popular open source database; the community deserves a Code of Conduct.

ETA: I have contacted Kortney, the conference organizer for Percona Live, and asked for a Code of Conduct to be put in place ASAP.

ETA: If you want to know why this is an issue, see http://adainitiative.org/what-we-do/conference-policies/

ETA: This is my personal statement, and not a statement of what any of my Mozilla colleagues may feel. Other colleagues, including employees under me, may choose to attend or …

This morning I watched Tomas Ulin’s Keynote at Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo, delivered yesterday. I missed this live as I am not at Percona Live (I am on a conference hiatus from March through September for personal reasons). As far as the technical content in it, there have been a few posts about the Hadoop Applier and MySQL 5.7, so there’s not much of a need to delve in there.

Message #1: Failure
I was impressed that Ulin spoke of failure. Around 7:27 in the video above, Ulin says, “We really failed with 5.0,” and “even 5.1 we weren’t fully and back on track when we released.” He spoke about the new way MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 were engineered, a hybrid agile/milestone development cycle. There are some hidden messages here:

Hidden Message #1: Oracle is a great steward for …

In the past… One of the typical problems you have when restarting mysqld is that the InnoDB buffer pool (buffer pool from now on) is empty and consequently access to the database requires reading directly from disk. Performance suffers dramatically as a consequence.

So the common solution is to artificially warm upthe server by doing queries which will fill the buffer pool. Typical solutions might be to do: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM some_table FORCE INDEX (PRIMARY) LIMIT ... on a number of tables to fill up the pool on startup. Fitting this into the standard mysql init start script is somewhat tricky as no hooks are provided for this sort of post-start action. (It would be nice to have this for other tasks too.)

Of course choosing the right parameters here can be tricky as workload changes over time, and as the ratio of the size of the database to the size of the buffer pool increases, you need to be more selective …

MySQL 5.6 is out now and that is good news. I have already been using pre-GA versions on some production servers with good success and now that the few wrinkles I have seen have been ironed out, I am sure a lot of people will find the new features in 5.6 well worth waiting for.

However, that does lead to the question of: “what next?”

I still have several things that I would like to see in MySQL in no specific order of preference such as:

• Session transaction state exposed as a variable to allow you to determine if you have started a transaction or not, and thus allowing you to use BEGIN WORK, ROLLBACK or COMMIT as needed.  This information is available via the C API I believe but not via SQL.  Something like @@in_transaction = 1.  Makes modular programming easier.
• Table space management. The default behaviour now in 5.6 is to move to innodb_file_per_table = 1, but really on a large …

I’ve just completed my first month here at Continuent, strangely back into the MySQL ecosystem which I have been working in for some time before I joined CouchOne, and then Couchbase, two and half years ago. Making the move back to MySQL is both an experience, and somehow, comfortable…

Continuent produce technology that makes for easier replication between MySQL servers and, more importantly, more flexible solutions when you need to scale out by providing connector and management functionality for your MySQL cluster. That means that you can easily backup, add slaves, and create complex replication scenarios such as multi-master, and even multiple-site, multiple-master topologies. This functionality is split over two products, Continuent Tungsten, which is the cluster management product, and the open source Tungsten Replicator, which provides the basic replication functionality.

Those who know me well will know that I am no fan …