Pythian Group

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ cat my_feeds | \
    perl -MXML::Feed \
         -ne'say( (XML::Feed->parse($_)->entries)[0]->summary ) if rand() > 0.5 '

Curtis Jewell followed up on an old post by Adam Kennedy and checked out if shuffling things around really improve compression. From the results, there seems to be very little blood to be squeezed out of that stone.

jjore came up with a very clever hack to stop the debugger when a test fails. Not only it is extremely useful, but the hack itself provides a lot of insight and food for thought for anyone attracted to the dark arts of under-the-Perl-interpreter-hood meddling.

Jerome Quelin invites helpful-minded polyglots to provide translations for prisk, a Perl clone of the classic game Risk.

chromatic had a short piece that demonstrates with a telling example how tricky it can be to design a language so that it behaves with the least amount of surprise.

Daisuke Maki reported that Perl 5.12.1 is out! Right behind, Curtis Jewell preemptively announced that its Strawberry port is not far behind. The beta should be available at the beginning of June, and the real McCoy by early July.

Gabor Szabo wrote a blow-for-blow narration of the hunt and subsequent squishing of a bug in Padre. Quite interesting if you are wondering how other hackers tackle their debugging sessions.

cjfields pointed out that BioPerl has moved to Github.

Jay Hannah has nothing but love for QA done with Catalyst and WWW::Mechanize. He’s also mentioning that he uses Hudson as his integration server. I’ll have to look into that. Not only we need one at $work, but the possibility to join forces with the cyborg brother of our own dreaded head sysadmin is just too good to pass.

Remember when the Microsoft spiders DOSed the CPANTS site a few months back? Well, they are at it again. It is reported that Microsoft subsequently got in touch with the CPANTS folks and apologised. Again. I know, we shouldn’t attribute to malevolence what can be explained by incompetence, but come on! This is getting silly. In all cases, web crawlers of around the world, please remember: obeying the rules of robots.txt, it’s not just a good idea — it’s good manners.

Ovid wrote about sharding your database. Very good introduction if, like me, you never heard that expression before, and suspect it involves a wood chipper. He also wrote a nice little entry on how to properly deal with startup and shutdown methods in Test::Class.

And speaking of testing, Pablo Marin-Garcias has an awesome roundup of web testing modules.

Leo Lapworth coughed politely and brought attention to the fact that there’s now over 20,000 distributions on CPAN. With that kind of selection, is it really a surprise that some people claim they program in CPAN, and Perl is only the mean to tap into it?

Garu, cheekily notes that Matt S. Trout’s blog hasn’t been updated for a few weeks. Which wouldn’t be very interesting news if MST wouldn’t have sworn, when he launched the Perl Ironman contest, that “If [he] loses, [he's] gonna let you guys pick a colour and a theme, and I’ll do a talk about that theme with my hair dyed that colour“. Ooops. It goes without saying, there’s already a thread forming in the comments about which hue would suit our favorite curmudgeon. My favorite so far is the Bright as [censored] yellow, by Special Effects.

Want to see some of the yumminess that can be generated with Mojolicious? vti provides links to a few nifty Mojolicious WebSocket examples.

You’re more inclined toward PSGI? Then Zbigniew Lukasiak mused a wee bit about PSGI and Object Oriented programming.

And, finally, Alberto Simões wrote a report on the status of the diverse running TPG grants.

[yanick@enkidu shuck]$ perl -E'sleep 2 * 7 * 24 * 60 * 60 # see ya in 2 weeks!'

The MySQL track at Kaleidoscope in Washington, DC during June 28-July 1st is set! Here is the schedule, Lincoln VI is the MySQL track room.

Ronald has done a super job and spent a ton of hours in the past several weeks coordinating this effort. Work has kept me much busier than normal, but I have lent some time to the coordination as well. It is a credit mostly to Ronald that we have been able to plan an entire 19-session conference track, complete with confirming speakers, in less than a month. (You may notice the schedule does not have all 19 sessions full, we are just waiting for some more speakers to confirm details.)

Whether or not you made it to last month’s O’Reilly MySQL User Conference & Expo, and whether you are an expert or casual user, the sessions at Kaleidoscope will teach you new and exciting things. This is a credit to the planning we did (and again, Ronald spent the lion’s share of time on this) — we did not just want to re-do the same content from the April conference, and we wanted something that would be accessible to developers and DBAs who know what they’re doing when it comes to writing SQL queries, but may or may not know how MySQL itself works.

I will definitely be giving away copies of my book, The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, and Ronald will be giving away copies of his new book, Expert PHP and MySQL, so the conference is definitely not-to-be-missed!

It’s not too late to register for Kaleidoscope – be sure to use the discount code MYSQL to save $300 off your registration (assuming you are not a member of ODTUG).

Good afternoon and welcome to issue 27. The number 27 according to numerology is “the symbol of the divine light” so I’ll try to do that ideal justice. We’re off to a good start, what with me actually getting this out on schedule and such, so let’s get to it while the day is still quiet.

Operating Systems

It’s been two weeks since Ubuntu 10.04 was released. I’m still loving it. If you are on the fence or just curious, Ryan Paul at Ars has an intensive 9 page review of the release. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Welcome to Log Buffer, a weekly review of the database industry. This week’s issue Log Buffer #189 is generously published by Iggy Fernandez, editor of the quarterly journal of the Northern California Oracle User Group (NoCOUG).

As always, if you’d like to host your own issue of Log Buffer, simply reach out to the Log Buffer coordinator.

Please enjoy Iggy’s issue of Log Buffer #189.

I have been talking with a group of folks who have been making a product that has lots of free functionality, including the ability to centrally manage many MySQL instances. The administration functions include starting and stopping MySQL, seeing status and system variables, seeing and managing the MySQL config file (/etc/my.cnf), seeing and managing accounts, a small dashboard of overall health graphs, and more.

With this free tool you can look at and manage local and remote databases. It supports ssh tunneling, including ssh using password-protected ssh keys. It’s pretty neat, and I have been working with the product manager to add features. I think this took will become the de facto standard for centralized GUI administration of MySQL.

The tool is Read the rest of this entry . . .

A MySQL user group member saw that I use Poderosa as my ssh-on-Windows tool, and asked why I did not use PuTTY. My response was that I like having tabbed windows and hate having to keep opening another PuTTY program every time I want to open another connection. With Poderosa I can open a new connection with Alt-N, and I can even connect directly to Cygwin with an icon.

But Poderosa is not the tool I wanted to mention…. Read the rest of this entry . . .

In How to tune MySQL’s sort_buffer_size, Baron gives a condescending viewpoint on how to tune the sort_buffer_size variable in MySQL. In a much-nicer-nutshell, his advice is “do not change sort_buffer_size from the default.”

Baron did not explain the logic behind his reasoning, he handwaves that “people utterly ruin their server performance and stability with it,” but does not explain how changing the sort_buffer_size kills performance and stability. Regardless of how respected and knowledgeable the source, NEVER take any advice that tells you what to do or how to do it without understanding WHY.

This article will explain the “why” of Baron’s point, and it will also talk more about understanding why, an integral part against the “Battle against any guess.” Baron’s recommendation to leave sort_buffer_size as the default is just as bad as all the advice given to change the sort_buffer_size, because all that advice (including Baron’s) does not explain the underlying causes.

First, I explain the sort_buffer_size issue. Read the rest of this entry . . .

In The Doom of Multiple Storage Engines, Peter talks about how the storage engine concept of MySQL is usually spoken of in positive terms, but there are many negatives.

I have a hard time trying to figure out the deeper meaning behind Peter’s post, given that Percona writes a storage engine for MySQL, XtraDB. Does this mean that Percona will stop developing XtraDB? Does this mean that the Percona Server will diverge farther and farther away from MySQL so that they’re not compatible any more and migrating from MySQL to Percona Server is very difficult?

Or maybe it’s just that Peter is saying one thing and doing the opposite; which just seems wrong because that would be blatant hypocrisy on Percona’s part.

(This idea was a comment on the blog post but seems to be trapped in the spam filter, so I’m posting it; apologies if the comment comes through eventually….)

My own opinion of the issue: Peter is factually correct with what he says. However, it’s nice to have the framework and be allowed to use more than one storage engine, or use exclusively one storage engine that’s not MyISAM.

I’ve never attended the North California Oracle User Group Conferences even though they are organized every quarter. However, I’ve been always jealous of the great agenda they put together. A couple months ago, Chen Shapira reminded me once again that the next NoCOUG conference was coming up and asked whether I would be able to come to present. What a chance, I thought, easy to plan as I have no other conferences in May.

So, at NoCOUG Spring Conference 2010 in just 10 days, I’ll be doing my two hour long presentation — Demystifying Oracle RAC Workload Management. If it’s your local conference, I hope you can attend and say hello. You might also want to download the whitepaper that I put together few years ago for Hotsos Symposium — Oracle RAC Workload Management.

The conference is free to members of NoCOUG and only $50 to non-members but it would make more sense to just join the user group as its annual fees are unbelievably low — I couldn’t say it better than Iggy Fernandez did:

How much does a NoCOUG membership cost? It doesn’t cost $400, as you might expect to pay for so much educational value. It doesn’t cost $300 and it doesn’t cost $200. It doesn’t even cost $100. Yes, a calendar-year NoCOUG membership only costs $95! Won’t you join today?

Read the rest of this entry . . .

Hi there and welcome to Blogrotate in which I, your humble host and blogger, bring to you interesting stories and events from the past week in the SysAdmin world. It’s been yet another busy week, which is why this is coming out on a Sunday again, so I am going to have to short list this edition but there’s still plenty of tasty nuggets to be found. Read on.

Operating Systems

It’s been discovered that Microsoft released three patches last month without including them in the release notes. Two of the patches were to fix security holes in MS Exchange servers. While this is nothing new it completely removes the ability for a sysadmin to evaluate the impact of the patches on critical corporate systems, which is necessary before rolling out the updates. Not to mention it makes it really difficult to diagnose a change in behaviour if you have no idea there was a change made. See more gory details in Security firm reveals Microsoft’s ’silent’ patches.

Sun/Oracle removed public firmware downloads is a strange piece by someone called techbert describing how he logged into the sunsolve to download some firmware for his systems only to find that they were no longer publicly available. Read the rest of this entry . . .