Colin Charles Agenda

Yes, MySQL 5.1’s new Partitioning feature definitely is a hot topic. Last week’s iPod Nano winner won thanks to interesting partitioning happenings, and this week’s one wins for the same reason.

With that, here comes a hearty congratulation to Jeremy Cole, who’s won himself an iPod Nano!

Jeremy’s been a long-time MySQL user, a one-time employee, and a great help on the mailing lists. In trying out new features in MySQL 5.1, he stumbled upon several bugs, one of which has been fixed. Again, the idea of repeatable bug reports is tantamount to how quickly a developer can fix a problem. (mysql#17541) Don’t forget to read his engaging blog, jcole’s weblog, which is already fed to Planet MySQL.

Want an iPod Nano next week? Its simple. File a useful, reproducible, non-duplicated bug report. Blog about it. That second step, is seemingly important. And I’ll notice it when I do my weekly bug hunt ;-)

In other news, if you want to meet Jeremy Cole, he’s presenting quite a bit at the MySQL Users Conference 2006:

• Tutorial on Replication for Scaling and High Availability
• MySQL GIS: Overview and Tools – fairly hot topic GIS is, there’s also talk about getting it going with PHP
• A HackFest on Creating UDFs along with and a panel titled Scale Out

Conference time! While I understand Frank’s feelings, there’s always hope that there will be some great “blog reports”, amazing IRC, and if at all, some form of podcasts.

However, if I was going to the MySQL Users Conference 2006, I’d probably attend things in this order:

• Monday – Arjen’s Optimizing MySQL Applications Using the Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture because this is important stuff all folk should learn about. Performance being the name of the game these days, it’d be silly to miss MySQL Performance Optimization that our very own performance guru, Peter Zaitsev will be giving.
• Tuesday – Mono is hot, right? Might as well listen to Creating .NET applications with Linux and MySQL. In the VoIP and telco industry, it would seem that The Case for Carried Grade Linux in Telecom would rock. Go for Jay’s Performance Tuning Best Practices (his last webminar rocked!). Come 4.30pm I get torn between Embedding MySQL, MySQL Partitioning, or the Sakila Sample DB. Again, back to performance, Peter runs the 5.0 vs. 4.1 review – these results will be really interesting.
• Wednesday – How do you choose between Speeding-up Queries or a talk on Backups? Or an Asterisk talk versus Security by Example? Heck, even at the tail end of the day there’s competition – Tuning Stored Procedures or a more “in this world” talk by Alcatel on Building scalabale Telecoms databases on MySQL. This is a talk I’d love to see in a Webminar so everyone else can watch.
• Thursday – I haven’t mentioned any of the keynotes per se, but I suggest all wake up and attend Mark Shuttleworth’s talk on Ubuntu (and MySQL). I’d then hit Plugging Your Applications into the MySQL Storage Engine Layer by Brian Aker (even though there’s a .NET session that looks interesting). Technical talks like Optimizing MySQL on Source Code Level will definitely be worth your time, as will the Django talk. Heard of ipTel? Their real-life large scale VoIP deployments should be interesting.

Well, that pretty much sums it up. The MySQL Users Conference looks like a little week of lots of learning. If you can go, be there.

I’m going to be at my first MySQL Meetup tomorrow. Its at the Mercat Cross, 456 Queen St at 7pm. This is quite near Melbourne Central, and definitely has a good view of the Vic Market night market. I hear (from AdamF) that there’s lots of beer on tap, if that catches your fancy.

We can talk about all things MySQL, and get more users into MySQL 5.1. Hello event scheduling! Hello partitioning! Hello tables in information_schema!

Congratulations to Giuseppe Maxia, who’s won himself an iPod Nano!

Giuseppe has been actively submitting bug reports for MySQL 5.1, plus he’s got an interesting blog (syndicated at Planet MySQL), mentioning new features that are available in MySQL 5.1. Of interest, is your performance related post on Partitioning. To add to that, your bug reports are reproducible, and simply facilitate “cut-n-paste” verification! (mysql#17894)

Giuseppe, thanks for your help and helping make MySQL 5.1 rock!

P/S: Thanks for the help on the Sakila sample database as well.

So, earlier today I was playing around with compiling MySQL on a 64-bit platform, as there was a bug reported that there were problems allocating a large amount of memory to it. I compiled it, and tried running a few tests beyond the usual make test to see if I could make it run into problems.

I couldn’t. From a chat earlier in the morning, Stefan told me to try a really large table, with a stored procedure that repeatedly queried it. I tried that, but never got my out of memory errors. And my test box had 1GB of RAM.

So my question to readers are:

1. Have you had grief with MySQL 5 (or later, see 5.1 just hit beta) on a 32-bit or 64-bit platform, where you had issues allocating a large amount of memory to the MySQL server?
2. Do you have useful test harnesses designed to stress test your greatest/latest/newest database installation? How do you, the community QA the next release of MySQL?

If you answered yes to any of the above, do drop me e-mail at colin@mysql.com, or comment here. Thanks.

In other interesting news, Jay, my colleague presented a webminar on Coding and Indexing Strategies for Optimal Performance. It was well received, I had a really good time attending it (even though it was at 5am!) and I suggest folk going to these webminars. Sure, it requires an icky Java client, but you do learn a lot following presentations and listening to the presentation. Its like a recorded lecture/podcast, except its all automated :)

Oh, and MySQL 5.1 just hit beta. Seeing my iPod 3G died, maybe its time to make MySQL rock and win an iPod Nano. File reproducible bug reports, talk about it, and get picked to win an iPod Nano. 1 given away every week!
(yes, yes, I know I can’t get to win an iPod Nano)

There was a request to take a gander at the $100 Laptop: One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), and reading Fedora People recently made me want to snap up the opportunity to give it a go. Here are my first impressions on the emulator, known as the OLPC SDK, by Daniel Berrange.

Installation, if instructions are followed on FC-4 work fine. There are spec files to rebuild for FC-5. During the bootup sequence, I noticed that LVM was starting up, and finding no volume groups – can’t this be disabled? There doesn’t seem to be a use for LVM on the OLPC.

Once you get past the fairly slow emulator startup (its qemu based), you’ll notice that at the heart of it, you’ve got FC-5 sitting there. Very sexy.

Looking for a terminal? While gnome-terminal isn’t supplied (and probably will never be), xterm is there for the moment. Alt+F2, xterm, and you’re on your way. The root user has no password, so su – shouldn’t be a problem.

What doesn’t work with the olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3 firmware image is networking. Try modprobing for ne2k-pci, and it’ll fail, mainly because 8390.ko is missing. This should be fixed with the next firmware image.

All’s not lost however. If you run file on the .ext3 firmware image, you’ll notice that it contains an x86 boot sector, code offset 0x48. A little fdisk, will show that there are 63 sectors/track, with each sector size being 512 bytes. Multiply that, get 32256, and that should be the offset to mounting the image.

sudo /sbin/losetup -o 32256 /dev/loop0 olpc-2006_02_06_16_08.ext3
sudo mount -t ext3 /dev/loop0/mnt
merrily going on making changes
sudo umount /mnt
sudo /sbin/losetup -d /dev/loop0

Its well worthwhile to not have QEMU running with the disk image – make sure it isn’t, otherwise corruption is likely. Once that happened, it was fairly trivial to get MySQL installed. So I did.

MySQL running on the OLPC

The question is… do we want 61MB of a package sitting there? It can probably be reduced in size tremendously. So can removal of /var/log and /etc/yum.repos.d/ and so on…

From reading the software task list, it doesn’t seem like there’s a focus on teaching IT to the owners of the OLPC. Does MySQL pass off as educational software, covering a database component? I don’t see OpenOffice.org being listed as something that will be on the OLPC, and the GNOME Office (Abiword and Gnumeric) don’t have a front-end for database connectivity.

I’d like to thank davidz and Daniel Berrange for assistance when needed! Oh and read his blog for little tips – the simulator debugging did come in handy.