There was a point a few years ago where Sun could have had the next generation UNIX filesystem. It was in Solaris (and people were excited), there was a port to MacOS X (that was quite exciting for people) and there was a couple of ways to run it on linux (and people were excited). So… instead of the fractured landscape of ext3, HFS+ and (the various variations of) UFS we could have had one file system that was common between all of the commonly used UNIX-like variants. Think of being able to use a file system on a removable drive that isn’t FAT and being able to take it from machine to machine (well… Windows would be a problem, but it always is).

There was some really great work done in OpenSolaris with integration between the file manager and ZFS snapshots (a slider bar to browse the history of a directory, an idea I’ve championed for over a decade now, although the Sun implementation was likely completely independently developed). …

The gist of it is, if you’ve installed Mac OS X and you use Homebrew, you’ll be pleased to note that you’re just a brew install away for getting a working MariaDB. Yes, that’s right, simply do: brew install mariadb and that’s it — you’ll have MariaDB (currently 5.2.6) installed in no time. For further documentation and a step-by-step guide, visit the Knowledgebase article: Building MariaDB on Mac OS X using Homebrew.

Sometimes people ask why do I use MacOSX as my main work platform (isn’t that something to do with beliefs?). My answer is “good foundation with great user interface”. Though that can be treated as “he must like unix kernel and look&feel!”, it is not exactly that.

What I like is that I can have good graphical stable environment with some mandatory tools (yes, I used OS-supplied browser, mail, etc), but beside that maintain the bleeding edge open-source space (provided by MacPorts).

Also what I like, is OS-supplied development and performance tools. DTrace included is awesome, yes, but Apple did put some special touch on it too. This is visualization environment for dtrace probes and other profiling/debugging tools:

Even the web browser (well, I upgraded to Safari4.0 ;-) provides some impressive debugging …

The next release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will have ZFS enabled by default. There’s a good article for the masses, at ZDNet on ZFS on Snow Leopard - do read it.

We all know running any form of server using HFS+ tends to be a bit of a joke. So, Snow Leopard Server will be where ZFS makes its debut. It won’t be long before regular users will want it in their Mac Pro’s and so on…

OS X as a deployment platform for production MySQL servers? This is not far off, I’m sure.

Compiling and installing a User Defined Function for MySQL on Mac OS X seems tricky. There are installation notes, but they seem to be sparse on OS X (the comments are clues, though).

I was looking through the tutorial materials for Roland’s talk, and came up with what I think is the most full-proof way to ensure your UDFs get compiled…

gcc -Wall -dynamiclib -o udf_lightspeed.dylib -lstdc++ udf_lightspeed.c

The above will compile just fine, but MySQL will give you an interesting error saying “no suitable image found”. Its the infamous Error 1126.

Upon further poking, it seemed like the following should work:
gcc -Wall -dynamiclib -o udf_lightspeed.dylib -lstdc++ -lc -I`/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config –cflags` udf_lightspeed.c

And it …

A few months ago, I wrote about the issues you will face with installing MySQL on OS X 10.5, Leopard. I am pleased to inform everyone, that this problem has been fixed!

The bug in question, mysql#28854, clearly stated that the problem was with the PrefPane. On Valentine’s Day 2008, Alfredo Kojima (of Workbench fame) fixed the problem, and uploaded a new PrefPane, to ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/gui-tools/MySQL.prefPane-leopardfix.zip.

This fixes an incompatibility with the default shipped PrefPane. The new PrefPane also detects if the MySQL data directory (/usr/local/mysql/data) has the incorrect permissions (and if so, one should …

I’ve just tried to run PHP with MySQL on my Leopard and the first problem: “Can’t connect to local MySQL server through socket ‘/var/mysql/mysql.sock’”

I’ve just changed php.ini to:
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
The same situation with mysqli settings - be default it is not set so you should update it to the real path.
And it works!

MySQL Workbench has a beta out! No idea why its version 5.0.9, but its highly exciting. This software existed before, but this is quite unlike its predecessor. One snag for me is that it is Windows-only at the moment, with Linux and OS X versions to follow suit.

However, due to excitement, I decided to try running it on Linux, anyway.

Seeing that it is a .NET application, I thought I’d pass it through MoMA (the migration analyser). Everything passed, so I got excited. Running mono MySQLWorkbench.exe however, led me to a failure:
** ERROR **: Method ‘<Module>:<CrtImplementationDetails>.DoDllLanguageSupportValidation ()’ in assembly ‘/home/byte/Downloads/MySQL Workbench 5.0.9 OSS …

Use MySQL? On Leopard/OS X 10.5? Yes, the current available packages from dev.mysql.com don’t work very well. I track “mysql” on Twitter, and boy, are there heaps of complaints.

So its nice to see, Dan Benjamin, a member of the MySQL community, stepping up, and creating the amazing Installing MySQL on Mac OS X article. The Preference Pane will obviously still not be there, and I don’t know why he thinks Mantorg (?) will build it, but I believe this is something MySQL needs to fix for the next release.

Tracking mysql#28854 will be useful.

Mark Pilgrim decided that it would be cool to poke fun at OS X, because it “just works” on Ubuntu. While what he …

Today I missed a bunch of good talks that I was hoping to attend, because I was figuring out a problem at the Guru Bar. Offending criminal: MySQL Connector/ODBC 3.51. Offending OS: Mac OS X/PowerPC.

OS X comes with an ODBC Administrator. Once you unpack the MySQL package, and the .pkg installs itself, you’ll find that all your files are installed in /usr/lib. You need to fire up ODBC Administrator, click on Drivers, and Add the driver. Give it an appropriate Description (MySQL), provide the location of the driver file (/usr/lib/libmyodbc3.dylib), and define it as available within the System (this enables you to enable at the System DSN as well as the User DSN, in the next step).

Later, etiher add as …