http://www.xaprb.com/blog Stay curious! Wed, 03 Sep 2008 14:52:59 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Sometimes there are funny communication styles between people who are geographically distributed and working together all the time. Recently one of our team members echoed back to me some answers I gave over a chat session: Q: Is it OK for me to buy quad-core servers? A: The old man walks ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/09/03/life-as-a-consultant-my-crooked-arm-for-a-pillow/ I've been digitizing my LP collection recently and thought I'd share a quick howto, since I haven't seen a good complete tutorial on the whole process online. Hopefully this will show up on Google and people can find it. It takes time Before I begin, I want to make a few ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/30/how-to-digitize-records-with-ubuntu-a-usb-turntable-and-audacity/ Along with some others, I have arranged a conference for open-source database users and developers. Key facts: It is of, by and for the community (you). At this event, all open-source databases are created equal. We'll learn together and grow together. It's a combination conference and hackathon. It's free. It is Friday night Nov 14, ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/26/announcing-opensql-camp-2008/ After last week's post on agents versus agentless monitoring systems, I got a lot of email. One, from a customer whose name I am not permitted to mention, sent me the following action shot (posted with permission): Over half a gigabyte; more than twice what MySQL itself is using. ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/26/how-much-memory-does-mysql-enterprise-monitors-agent-use/ I've been following the Drizzle project with some interest. There's a lot to like about it. But you know what I like most about the project? No dual licensing. Just plain GPL, version 2. I personally think this is the foundation for why people are empowered, why there is ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/21/drizzle-stops-the-rain/ Rob Young has posted a few blog entries lately on the MySQL Enterprise monitoring software. His latest post claims that agent-based monitoring is equivalent to extensibility (MySQL Enterprise Monitor: Agent = Extensibility). I think this is conflating two completely distinct properties of a monitoring solution. Cacti is extremely extensible, ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/21/is-agent-based-or-agentless-monitoring-best/ I got some interesting comments on my previous article about unit testing Maatkit, including echoes of my own conversion to the unit-testing religion. One of the objections I've heard a lot about unit-testing is how it's impossible to test code that talks to a database. "It's too hard," ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/19/how-to-unit-test-code-that-interacts-with-a-database/ It has all played itself out according to Microsoft's wishes. They have railroaded through a so-called standard for document representation, gotten it rubber-stamped by so-called standards bodies, and fought their way past all the objections of sensible people and companies. In the process, lots of developing nations have ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/19/microsoft-gets-their-way-with-so-called-xml-standard/ Over in Maatkit-land, Daniel Nichter and I practice test-first programming, AKA test-driven development. That is, we write tests for each new feature or to catch regressions on each bug we fix. And -- this is crucial -- we write the tests before we write the code.* The ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/18/how-maatkit-benefits-from-test-driven-development/ Want to know the type of an arbitrary expression in MySQL? Someday in the far far future in version 7.1, you might be able to with the TYPEOF() function. For now you can try this: CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE typeof AS SELECT [expression] AS col; For example, let's see what the type of ... http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/08/13/how-to-emulate-the-typeof-function-in-mysql/