Eric Bergen

For those of you that don’t live in the culturally diverse bay area, pho is a Vietnamese soup consisting of rice noodles in a clear broth and various meats. Around here it’s typically eaten with over sized plastic chopsticks. The problem is that wet noodles are very difficult to pick up with plastic chopsticks. The Pho Hoa in Mountain View recently switched from plastic to wooden chopsticks. Hooray! Chopstick challenged patrons like myself can now safely eat pho without risk of a large blob of slippery noodles sliding off the sticks into the bowl blasting them with scalding hot broth.

Next they need to get rid of their $10 minimum Visa charge.

In Issue 3 of MySQL Magazine Peter Zaitsev writes, ” I would set [innodb_log_file_size] to 256 megabytes for small sized boxes up to 5% of the total memory on the big boxes.” I tend to set my log file size to around 128M. Depending on your system setting the log file size around a few hundred megs should be the right balance between preventing checkpointing and still having fast recovery times.

The manual states, “Sensible values range from 1MB to 1/N-th of the size of the buffer pool, where N is the number of log files in the group.” The sample my.cnf files that come with MySQL state to set the innodb_log_file_size to 25% of the innodb buffer pool size. I think this mistakenly advises people to set their log files much larger than they need to be causing unnecessarily long recovery times.

Crash recovery time is an important feature of InnoDB. In the event of a server crash large log files could mean waiting hours for InnoDB to recover data while your site is down. A log file size of a few hundred megs will enable InnoDB to perform recovery in a few minutes on reasonable hardware.

When I received and email almost two years ago about a announcement that MySQL was going to release and enterprise product I was very excited. I was looking forward to a redhat style model of vetting releases in the community then offering a proven stable version to paying customers. I saw it as a great way to for MySQL to generate revenue as well as eliminate the need for people to stay a few releases back from the head and guess when to upgrade.

The release shocked me. What was originally emailed to me and the final plan were two very different things. It was a plan to hand paying customers bleeding edge code that had been tested only by MySQL’s QA team. It seems MySQL has forgotten the years of testing by millions of community members that has given MySQL the stability we have grown to trust. I predicted the instability of MySQL enterprise back in October ‘06 by saying that releasing patches in enterprise that hadn’t been tested by the community would result in instable releases being delivered to paying customers. These should always be tested by the community first.

MySQL 5.0.48 enterprise is rock solid proof that the release cycle MySQL chose to implement is completely broken. It was released then pulled due to some very basic sorting functionality being broken. I hope they’re working to change the release cycle to more of a redhat model both to put trust back in the community for testing and to give enterprise customers the stable version they’re paying for.

In perfect timing with my unable to assess risk series a family wants to have plastic pen tops banned because their teenage son died choking on one. Banned. Really? You want to ban something because out of the millions of plastic pen tops your child was the one unlucky one that choked on one? Insane. I understand you’re upset and you want to get revenge for your sons death. First you can’t take revenge on an inanimate object. It won’t make you feel any better. Second there are millions if not billions of these caps floating around and one person has died. They may get plastic pen tops banned but I bet the will still drive while talking on a cellphone.

We have some wonderful people fueling the fire too. His school has banned the pen tops. I’m sure a few hundred people get these caught in their mouth every year. Now one _one_ kid has died and they should be banned? Before we get pen tops banned let’s focus on cellphones, swimming pools, and bad parents.

I’m not the only one to drop my iphone. However, I am one of the few to drop my iphone and have it impact pavement on the edge of the glass and shatter half way across the screen. Apple is nice enough to ‘repair’ accidental damage for $250. By repair I mean replace the phone on site. While it seems steep for a repair fee remember that most other companies make you buy a new one.

With my newly repaired iphone I also picked up a black incase for it. The case feels like it’s protecting the iphone well but it makes it more difficult to put in your pocket and the dock is now useless. The case makes the phone too wide to slide into the case. All other functionality is available with the case on. The case also covers the edge of the glass where my old phone impacted pavement.

Referring to a shell command that uses awk in a creative way. As in, “That shell command was awksome!”.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about. Wikipedia can fill you in on the power of awk.

During my life I have seen the level of fear in our society rise almost out of control. We have really lost the ability to assess risk. I’m going to attempt to realign the fears in our society back on a logical course. One of the many things that I think we should be afraid of that we currently aren’t is cellphones.

Sure people are worried about cellphones causing cancer. For the most part this doesn’t cause much stir because it’s out of sight out of mind (except the cancer in your brain). I’m not worried about my cellphone or the cancer it may be causing. I’m not worried about my cellphone at all. I’m worried about other people’s cellphones and when they use them.

I’ve been commuting in the bay area for a little over 2 years now. Part of that time my commute was about 5 miles of highway and the rest was about 20 miles of highway. It wasn’t a long commute but it was long enough for me to gather enough data to prove a point.

Most people cannot drive and talk on the phone at the same time. Every time I say this someone pipes up and says “I drive just fine while on my phone!”. Fine then, you aren’t in the ‘most’. Even though I bet at least half of the people that say they drive just fine really don’t they just think they do because they’re paying too much attention to their phone to realize they’re running people off the road.

These days parents are paranoid about their kids safety when riding bikes. Kids ride around these days wearing more padding and armor than our soldiers in WWII. Yet parents are perfectly ok with inattentive driving caused by talking on a cellphone. They happily yak away while driving putting their kids lives at risk. What’s worse parents, your kid hitting a fire hydrant at 4mph with no pads or you slamming into a semi at 80 because you couldn’t hang up the phone?

Nine out of ten times when I see someone swerving or looking like they are having difficulty driving and I pass them it’s because they’re on the phone. We have been paranoid about drunk driving and click-it or ticket for years. Let’s get some legislation out there for cell phones. It should work like this. The first time you get pulled over for inattentive driving from being on a cellphone the cop takes away your phone. You get it mailed back to you a few days later. The second time you get caught you get your phone taken away until you get a special device installed in your car. That device would require that you plug your phone into it in order to operate your car and your phone won’t be operable while in the device.

We managed to function as a society for years without the need for phones while driving. Most people that have phones can wait 20 minutes to return a call instead of answering it while driving. If you can’t then you should really take a look at your life. Your phone owns you.

[Update: 10/15/07 I forgot to add that when commuting to work a few months ago a guy in front of me ran into a construction road cone which flipped it up into the air causing me and the car behind me to swerve. The guy was swerving really bad so I passed him as soon as I could. What was he doing? Looking down at a cellphone texting people. Yes, texting in a construction zone. That guy should have his phone taken away]

MySQL Bug Tracker

I realize that MySQL is in a transitional phase making it’s development more transparent to the community so this entry isn’t really a rant but something that will hopefully ease the transition. The public MySQL bug tracker doesn’t seem to have any way to view the history of status changes to a bug. Things like changing a bug from open to inactive. I assume there will always be things that should be hidden from bugs like links to sites internal to MySQL AB but things like simple status changes should be visible to the public.

For example on this Bug #20358 Heikki posted a comment that he was moving the bug from open to unable to repeat. Did he actually make the change? I have no idea because I can’t access the status log. Was it ever changed from unable to repeat back to open or verified? Again I have no idea…

Another “feature” of the bug system that I find questionable is the bug bot. The script trolls the bug database looking for bugs that need an automatic state change. In my opinion it should never find anything. I’ve noticed that it changes state on bugs that haven’t been commented on for a month to an inactive status. I have one example of a Bug #26489 that I think is fairly critical being marked in an inactive state not because the bug wasn’t still occurring, but because we had no new useful information to post at the time. Just because no new information has been found doesn’t necessarily mean that a bug should be taken off of people’s radar. If humans want to mark them as inactive it’s fine but a script making that decision worries me.

I do appreciate the things MySQL has done recently to make the development process more accessible for those of us without MySQL AB on our name tag. #mysql-dev on freenode is well populated with very intelligent minds. It’s nice to have them readily accessible to bounce ideas off of.

Keep the momentum on this transition going and please don’t mark my blog post as inactive

Are you afraid of nagios because of the config files? Don’t worry you’re not alone. GroundWork to the resuce! GroundWork is a set of packages that takes the pain out of configuration for nagios. It’s a web based GUI that supports importing existing nagios configs, audo discovery of servers and much more. I hate for this to sound like an advertisement for GroundWork but it does solve most of my major complaints about nagios. The most important of which is that it’s a pain to setup and configure. GroundWork with basic checks can be setup on a friday afternoon.

I do have a few complaints. First the configuration EZ and configuration sub menus aren’t logical. Configuration doesn’t have commit. In order for any changes to take effect you have to go back to the Configuration EZ menu. This should really be changed to have configuration basic and advanced, both with commit capability. Easy is essentially worthless.

Another issue is the use of RRD for performance historical data. This paragraph deserves it’s own post and I’ll write it some day. For now I’ll just cover the main issue I have not with RRD itself but the way RRD is used most of the time. RRD is purely for round robin data. Historical performance data is not round robin. Hell it has “history” right in the name. This data should be kept as long as possible. It’s useful for planning capacity for future events based on previous events. Aggregating away history data into month or year graphs means it’s impossible to go back and see what traffic looked like on dec 25th 2005 or any other random date(s) because RRD has either purged it or aggregated it away into a yearly view. I know it’s possible to disable the aggregation on rrd but the preallocation of data files makes this impractical for long term data storage and constantly changing servers and services. Once again RRD is a fine tool for what’s it meant to be used for it’s just not meant for historical data.

Anyway if you like nagios but are afraid of the configs give GroundWork a try. Beware! If you install it on a server with and existing apache package GroundWork will overwrite /etc/init.d/httpd

When I first moved to down town Mountain View the person at the leasing office spent about 15 minutes trying to convince me that DSL/Cable availability wasn’t an issue because Google was going to provide free internet to all of Mountain View. I tried to explain that WiFi wasn’t good enough because I routinely ssh into servers across the country thus ping time is critical. My initial assumptions about Google WiFi have been proven right over the past two years. Unless you’re aligned with Google just right it doesn’t work. I’ve tried from in buildings, in parkings lots all around town my conclusion is that it’s a compete and total failure.

I’m willing to give them a few more months to get it working in downtown mountain view. What I can’t forgive is the fact that they can’t get it working from their own campus. I’m at Google HQ building 43 right now for the MySQL Meetup and I can see an SSID for Google WiFi from my laptop but I can’t connect to it long enough to even authenticate through wifi.google.com. To me a good way to promote your free wifi service is to have it readily available on your campus.

I’ll continue the hunt for a google wifi “hotspot” in down town mountain view but don’t hold your breath.