MySQL - Sun Party

I attended the MySQL-Sun cocktail party yesterday (March 25, 2008) at the Jillian's @ The Metreon (101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA).

Live JasperSoft Seminar

I was lucky enough to attend the JasperSoft Seminar held at their headquarters in San Francisco yesterday (March 19, 2008). There were basically 3 sessions and I personally did not get much from the seminar.

What I found interesting was that I was able to talk to Guilio Toffoli who created the iReport which is basically the GUI software to create JasperReport xml files. We talked about performance limits of the software, problems that I had with designing the queries using SQLeonardo, and other stuff.

What's the Point?

The point is part of the line.
The line is part of the circle.
The circle is the wheel of the car.
The point is that we will never know what the point is.

10 traits to look for when you’re hiring a programmer

I found this interesting article that talks about things to look for in a programmer which I think is also suitable for a DBA.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=319

JapserServer Evaluation - Part 2

It's been almost a month now since I have been evaluating JasperServer. And it has been quite hard to evaluate the software without a proper documentation. Fortunately, I was able to convince my boss to buy the books Definite Guide to iReport, Definite Guide to JasperReport and JasperServer Ultimate Guide.

What I found interesting in all this experience is that just like any open software, it is connected to a lot of different applications. I had to study Tomcat and Ant in a thorough manner to get through JasperServer. In the end, I'm actually quite happy that I had to go through this experience.

Anyway, I am now quite comfortable with JasperServer. I am now able to create reports on the fly and I'm able to understand what it is now doing in a more in-depth manner. In fact, I will be giving a demo to our boss sometime soon and who knows we might use JasperServer in our company.

MySQL Documentation

Sometimes I don't like MySQL for the way it documents its software. And I don't like people who would try to define something and get the definition from the MySQL documentation. Let me give an example, MySQL defines Handler_read_key server status variable as the number of requests to read a row based on a fixed position. This value is high if you are doing a lot of queries that require sorting of the result. You probably have a lot of queries that require MySQL to scan entire tables or you have joins that don't use keys properly.

If you search around the web, people will also use this definition. But what does this actually? No one would try to go deeper because they actually don't know. Don't get me wrong, I also don't know what this actually means.

Let me dissect the way this definition is written, what does number of requests means? Is it the number of queries? What does a "fixed position" mean? And how is this related to being high when a lot of sorting is done? And finally how is this related to table scan?

MySQL Re-packaged RPM

Sometimes it would be handy if you know how to re-package a MySQL rpm. You might wonder how this will benefit your system. Well, for starters, consider if you have custom-built scripts that needs to be in all the database servers. Also, consider if you have a standard way of organizing your database structure such as separating your logs with your data files.

A re-packaged MySQL rpm would come very handy in these situation. I've used this a lot in my companies and if you don't have a Red Hat OS, then consider writing a script to handle your automated MySQL installation.