It’s no secret that I love linux.conf.au. My first was linux.conf.au 2003, in Perth and I’ve been to every one since (there are at least two people who’ve been to every single one, including CALU as it was called in 1999). I’ve been on the board of Linux Australia for some in...

It’s fortunate that I’m watching Veronica Mars again with a mate; a more-than-you-think amount of detective work is required to understand the relationship (and format) of the TABLE_SHARE, the FRM file and HA_CREATE_INFO. Oh, also you’ll need drizzled/base.h and drizzled/structs.h ...

The frustration builds. I have come to despise MySQL's sql_mode. It is a hack of the most gargantuan proportions. Basically, the optimizer just ignores the sql_mode whenever it is convenient for it to do so. More importantly, the optimizer silently ignores bad datetime input in various places. The r...

#define MAX_FIELDS 4096 /* Limit in the .frm file */ I should be able to remove this limitation soon. Although if you come anywhere near it, you probably have already lost (and written your own engine)....

/* Function to free dboptions hash element */ extern “C” void free_dbopt(void *dbopt); void free_dbopt(void *dbopt) { free((unsigned char*) dbopt); }...

Like I mentioned in my previous article, I've been working on refactoring the temporal data handling in Drizzle. The major problem I've been dealing with is poorly or non-documented code. The lack of documentation has led me to rely on the MySQL Manual in some cases, and then additional research and...

A number of commenters on my previous entry thought I was basically saying "Screw Windows". Lukas Smith and Bill Karwin, both of whom I respect enormously, noted that Windows is a dominant development platform for MySQL users, and that one of the reasons for MySQL's popularity was that it runs smoot...

Since I got fed up with Solaris the other day, the T1000 is running Debian. This means that “I’ll care about Drizzle on Linux Sparc”. OMG were things broken in the most “trivial” ways. A good quick intro to the issues is Memory alignment on SPARC, or a 300x speedup! It ...

Here is my advice to MySQL. Take it or leave it. Time will tell whether I'm full of shit. MySQL 5.1 is out the door. Awesome. Great job to all the folks who fixed the thousands of bugs over the last 3 years. MySQL 5.1 should be faster and more stable than 5.0 because of those bug fixes, and features...

After what many hours trying to netboot the T1000 to install Solaris Express, I wondered “how hard is it for debian?”. Easy. get the sparc64 boot.img, put it on TFTP server, add “filename “boot.img”;” or similar to dhcp, boot the T1000 from the service console som...