Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category

Using vim as a man page viewer

I love color on my terminal. Black and white editors and and man pages are boring and more difficult to read than simple syntax highlighting. Vim supports syntax highlighting for man pages. Using it is as simple as setting an environment variable.
MANPAGER=”col -b | vim -c ’set ft=man nomod nolist’ -”
You can add this line [...]

June 4, 2009 • Posted in: Geek • No Comments

Why Oracle can’t kill MySQL.

When Oracle agreed to acquire Sun there was some speculation that Oracle might try to kill MySQL. First this wouldn’t be a very prudent effort on Oracle’s part and second it’s not even possible. I think Monty has the best explanation from his comment on his blog:
The simple fact is one can’t own an [...]

May 19, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 2 Comments

Update of Google’s Sysbench patch to 0.4.12

[Update: I found the magic javascript links that show old releases of sysbench.]
Sysbench is an application that can be used to benchmark different system parameters and also includes support for testing MySQL directly. Google has released a patch for sysbench that adds a lot of new OLTP tests. It’s great for testing MySQL and for [...]

May 18, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • No Comments

Percona Performance Conference EMT Presentation Slides

I sat down about 20 minutes ago to write a blog post that included a link to the slides of my EMT presentation. It turned into a long post about the presentation, how I feel EMT was received and my feelings on presentations in general. Here is the short post and the link to the [...]

April 22, 2009 • Posted in: EMT, Geek, MySQL • No Comments

MySQL Brings the Heat

This week throngs of MySQL developers, users, and enthusiasts descended on silicon valley. Apparently the valley’s cooling system can’t keep up because as they arrived the outside temperature went up into the 90s (32s for those of you who choose to use a sane temperature measurement system). I’m not attending the conference this year but [...]

April 20, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 3 Comments

Longest beta ever, myisamchk –parallel-recover

I was reading through the manual and noticed that myisamchk parallel recover option is still listed as beta code. The feature was added in 4.0.2 which was released in july 2002. This means it’s been in beta longer than gmail

April 11, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 2 Comments

Where did 5.0.79 enterprise come from?

While updating the mirror last week I was surprised to see that the newest MRU MySQL release is numbered 5.0.79. Previously enterprise releases had even numbers and community releases had odd numbers. I posted the question in #mysql-dev and HarrisonF was kind enough to explain it all.
MySQL 5.0 is running out of version numbers. There [...]

April 10, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 8 Comments

WTF is EMT?

EMT provides an easy way to gather common system performance metrics, as well as providing a simple plugin-based interface to collect custom application-specific metrics. This data can be viewed on the servers that are collecting it or, through the output handler interface, be sent to centralized servers.
I started building EMT because it was very [...]

April 8, 2009 • Posted in: EMT, Geek • No Comments

Google Summer of Code and #mysql-dev, who is supposed to answer the questions?

The #mysql-dev irc channel on freenode was created with the idea of getting the community people more involved in active discussion about mysql internals and development. When the channel was first created this happened for a few weeks and I was pretty happy to be able to observe and participate in the discussion. Now it’s [...]

March 30, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, MySQL • 7 Comments

MacBook Pro Hinges

About a year ago I upgraded from a MacBook to a MacBook Pro 17″ to get the additional screen space. I used to work a lot from my couch before the upgrade. It gets tiring work from a desk after about 8hrs. The upgrade caused some problems though. I opened up my shiny new MBP, [...]

March 2, 2009 • Posted in: Geek, QFTPWE • 2 Comments