Archive for the ‘Geek’ Category
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. [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
Select distinct fail
A few months ago I got a strange email from one of my clients that contained two very simple looking select queries. The only difference between the two queries is that one included the distinct keyword and the other didn’t. The strange part is that the query that used distinct returned zero rows. I spent [...]
How to force Mail.app to show messages in plain text
If you read a lot of emails from exchange users this is a must have. It fixes the super small fonts that exchange seems to like to send by default. Simply run this in a terminal: defaults write com.apple.mail PreferPlainText -bool TRUE I’m not sure why apple made fixed width fonts a preference pane option [...]
Gmail Themes
I’ve been using gmail since the name gold rush days. The interface is intuitive and the conversation threading makes reading mailing lists much easier. One thing has always bothered me and that’s the bright white color. It makes reading email painful in low light. Gmail recently added themes that changed most of that. The message [...]
On MySQL 5.1 going GA
When MySQL 5.1 first went GA I had the same knee jerk reaction as most of the community, “It’s not ready! There are still bugs!”. After thinking about it for a week or so I don’t think this matters. It’s true that MySQL isn’t really ready for GA but it doesn’t matter since most MySQL [...]
Ptrace on threads and linux signal handling issues
At Proven Scaling it’s not always all about scaling databases. Sometimes we get to solve other problems not related to scaling at all. We have a client that has been using jmap (unsupported) to grab memory statistics from java. They found that after they ran jmap they were unable to shutdown the jvm without it [...]
Splitting flush logs command
Last week I was working with a client that rediscovered a bug where setting expire_logs_days and issuing a flush logs causes the server to crash. It’s MySQL Bug #17733 if you want to have a look. Seeing MySQL crash was enough inspiration to fix something that I and others have wanted to fix in MySQL [...]