Xaprb

The call for papers for the MySQL conference’s Ignite sessions is open. These are a lot of fun: 5 minutes, 20 slides, period. Last year I spoke way too fast — if I do it again this year, I’ll try not to cram so much into so little time. Either that, or I’ll deliberately talk like Busta Rhymes.

I often need to watch a server that’s very minimally configured, e.g. has no Perl DBI libraries installed, and I shouldn’t install anything. The following snippet is a quick way to do that:

watch 'mysqladmin proc | grep -v Sleep | cut -b0-130'

Replace 130 by the width of your terminal, naturally.

(Of course, innotop is much more featureful than mytop, but mytop is the essential functionality we’re going for here!)

I’m not sure how many of this blog’s readers are likely to be aware of VoltDB. It is one of the systems that I think could be poised to dispel the notion that SQL (or the relational model) is somehow inherently unscalable. Here’s a blog post explaining how VoltDB does transaction ordering and replication.