TERRIBLE results, tut!

Well done, you did your dad proud! speed was not the name of the game. clever clogs. (you should have used the go-cart)
love Miriam x

Sniff…well done Graham xxx

You didn'’t drag me - it was an honour to come along with my hero! Well done my love, your dad would have been so proud of you - Lucy and I certainly are.

Scary stuff! Rather you than me! Hope all’’s well with you and yours and that recent events haven'’t affected you too much, J

You were wearing leathers, dark glasses, cute hat and a girl young enough to be your daughter(!)cuddling you and you wonder why everyong thought you were a Rock Star! I would have asked you for an authograph if I had been there you lovely hunk. I hope your Manager Suzie gets a good percentage of all the takings. Stick with it bud.

Hi, you'’re totally spoilt! Glad you had a good day, we had fun here too
J

Question of quantity versus quality?

Aah last one was probably just a blip, hope this goes better.

Thanks - i try not to be too boring
but this was very pleasing for me quite affirming in a a way
maybe i stress myself by doing too many 6-8 milers
an i should do just one 10 miler every month … maybe not it does hurt
i hate being MORTAL.

Looking back at 2008:

This has really been a crazy year. Probably the first year I truly felt I couldn’t keep up with everything that was happening around me (in a good sense). Not because of the depression in the market but rather because many different aspects of our business, community and eco-system have accelerated. Amidst these changes I have also taken on additional roles at Zend to help drive the next phases of our multi-year strategy.

For Zend this has been an important year in delivering on our long term strategy and plan. The PHP Collaboration project which we announced at the end of 2005 has really come to fruition and delivered on its promise including:

- Zend Framework: This year we have had three major releases of Zend Framework, 10 million downloads since inception, two new partners w/ Adobe Systems and Dojo (SitePen) joining as contributors, and many more contributors joining the project. We are very proud that significant content in each release of ZF was not driven by Zend but rather the community. Zend Framework also has driven more opportunity to Zend with both small and large customers unfortunately it is not easy to get the largest ones to agree to being named in public; suffice to say that Enterprise adoption has significantly accelerated. Also we are seeing the next-generation of PHP applications emerging built on Zend Framework including Magento, PHPProjekt and others; some already public and some not, but both driving value to our users and opportunity for Zend and our partners.

- PDT: The 2^nd open-source project we launched with the PHP Collaboration Project is the PHP Development Tools (PDT) open-source project at the Eclipse Foundation. This project also has been a great success for us. It has been consistently ranked in the top 2 most popular projects at the Eclipse Foundation which is not only impressive by itself but especially so as Eclipse has traditionally been more focused at the Java community.

On the commercial product side it has also been exciting. We launched Zend Studio for Eclipse 6.0 in January 2008 which builds on top of PDT and delivers a fully fledged IDE for professional developers on the Eclipse framework. We followed with 6.1 in September adding better support for ZF, Ajax and SQL.

On the application server side we released Zend Platform 3.6 w/ enhanced support for page caching esp. URL-based schemes which is critical for framework based applications, enhanced our support for monitoring and root cause, and delivered a variety of additional enhancements. Our reliable PHP offering, Zend Core, which delivers a fully-supported PHP offering including hot fixes to keep PHP up-to-date with the latest critical issues, also saw several releases including version 2.5. And all this not only in the standard packages on Linux and other OSes but also on the IBM i (AS/400) where we drove additional innovation including a 5250 bridge which enables IBM i shops to modernize and move to the Web extremely quickly while retaining the flexibility of working with a language like PHP.

What’s coming up in 2009?

The economic reality drives opportunity for companies like Zend as our solution and eco-system deliver a low-cost and high-quality alternative to Java and other more expensive solutions. While spending has tightened our experience during the dot-com bust was that ultimately it increased the opportunity for Zend. The world back then shifted from an almost de-facto standard stack of Sun, Weblogic and Oracle to embracing Linux, PHP and MySQL. With the large Java vendors already struggling to resurrect their relevance in the Web application space I believe the current economic climate can only accelerate the market opportunity for us.

2008 was an important year for us. Not only did we finish delivering on the first part of our long-term strategy but spent a good part of the year driving a strong roadmap for 2009. The foundation for this roadmap is to leverage what we have achieved so far and deliver a fully integrated and mature solution for professional PHP shops. Some key goals include:

- Continue contributing to the open-source projects which we use as a basis for our solution including PHP, Zend Framework and PDT and help drive ubiquity in the Web market.

- An increasing emphasis on service and quality. This means more frequent releases, more frequent hot fixes, more opportunity for our users to contribute to the process and a preference to reduce the support matrix to enable more focus on the most common setups.

- Simplicity: We want it to be easy to get up and running with Zend, both on the development and the production side. We are putting a big emphasis on making the whole adoption of our solution easier and more straightforward.

On the application server side we have an exciting roadmap which again leverages the investments we have made thus far. We will be focusing at simplicity, streamlining deployment, performance management and delivering a supported and up-to-date PHP. We have spent the past year working on integrating some of our key goals on the application server side and are looking forward to delivering it to market in 2009. As we will roll out a lot of this work we also continue to have a strong feature roadmap for the year on delivering additional value with at least one very cool innovation cooking in the garage. We are also on the look-out for PHP 5.3 and have already made preparations to pick-up and support this major new version when it goes GA.

On the development tools side we have a strong roadmap for Zend Studio for Eclipse. We will be building this roadmap on PDT 2.0 which the team released two days ago (congrats!). PDT 2.0 brings a new source editing experience to PHP developers with a new robust platform and with many new features. It also has more than 500 issues fixed. We believe the time we are investing in PDT will serve us well when we continue to drive innovation around Zend Studio for Eclipse. We have also announced that we will be joining the Galileo simultaneous release (http://wiki.eclipse.org/Galileo) which will provide better synchronization between the various projects in Eclipse and the PDT project and ultimately will deliver more value to our Zend Studio for Eclipse customers. This also puts PHP in the list of leading top languages that provide “Eclipse Aligned” packages (currently these are Java, Java EE and C++).

Not only does our roadmap hold a lot of opportunity for our partners but we’ve been working throughout the 2^nd half of 2008 to continue driving various partner initiatives. We are fortunate to have strong partnerships from small ISVs and SIs to larger corporations like Adobe, IBM, Microsoft and Oracle. We continue to drive joint community contributions, product integrations, customer successes and other initiatives with our partners which will continue to strengthen and roll-out throughout 2009.

If you’ve made it this far I’d like to close by thanking all of our community, customers, partners, and employees for not only making 2008 an enjoyable year but for also supporting us towards rolling out a successful 2009.

Happy New Year!

select td1.c1, td2.c2, td1.c1/td2.c2, -99 / 0.03    
  from testdata td1,         
       testdata td2   
 where td1.c1 = -99 
   and td2.c2 = 0.03 
 limit 1;

+------+------+---------------+------------+
| c1   | c2   | td1.c1/td2.c2 | -99 / 0.03 |
+------+------+---------------+------------+
|  -99 | 0.03 |    -3300.0000 | -3300.0000 |
+------+------+---------------+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Here DISTINCT is added to the query.  The result is incorrect:

select distinct td1.c1, td2.c2, td1.c1/td2.c2, -99 / 0.03    
  from testdata td1,         
       testdata td2   
 where td1.c1 = -99 
   and td2.c2 = 0.03 
 limit 1;

+------+------+---------------+------------+
| c1   | c2   | td1.c1/td2.c2 | -99 / 0.03 |
+------+------+---------------+------------+
|  -99 | 0.03 |     -999.9999 | -3300.0000 |
+------+------+---------------+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

select distinct td1.c1, td2.c2, td1.c1/td2.c2, -99 / 0.03 
  from testdata2 td1, 
       testdata2 td2 
 where td1.c1 = -99 
   and td2.c2 between 0.02 and 0.04;
+------+------+-------------------+------------+
| c1   | c2   | td1.c1/td2.c2     | -99 / 0.03 |
+------+------+-------------------+------------+
|  -99 | 0.03 | -3300.00007376075 | -3300.0000 |
+------+------+-------------------+------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The gearmand job server written in Perl (current production server from Danga):

mysql> SELECT length(gman_do("reverse", repeat('x',10000000))) AS test;
+----------+
| test     |
+----------+
| 10000000 |
+----------+
1 row in set (49.08 sec)

The new gearmand job server written in C:

mysql> SELECT length(gman_do("reverse", repeat('x',10000000))) AS test;
+----------+
| test     |
+----------+
| 10000000 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.30 sec)

Mmm, efficiency. Oh, and are those some new MySQL UDFs? Much more coming soon…

Hi all,

This is my last blog entry for the year 2008. I've blogged 227 times this year, about a variety of topics (mostly NetBeans). I enjoy blogging. It puts me in touch with the community, making me much more approachable by community members.

2008 was a great year. Here is a sample of what I was able to witness or take part in (I've tried to put them in chronological order):

• Sun's acquisition of MySQL
• NetBeans switching from CVS to Mercurial
• Sun presentations in Second Life
• 100th NetBeans Community Docs contribution
• The release of NetBeans 6.0.1
• The creation of a NetBeans Community Docs blog
• New Woodstock components in the NB Palette
• My visit to St. Petersburg, Russia
• Big Database changes in NetBeans IDE (ongoing)
• The release of NetBeans 6.1
• A new Contribution Coordinator for NetBeans Community Docs: Varun Nischal
• A new bundle: NetBeans 6.1, GlassFish, and MySQL
• PHP support in NetBeans
• JavaScript support in NetBeans
• Zembly is a big hit on Facebook
• JamesBranam's Blog's 300th blog entry
• Sakila sample database available as a plugin
• NetBeans Community Docs gets two evangelists: Kristian Rink and Aristides Villarreal
• NetBeans IDE 10th birthday celbration
• Three years at Sun Microsystems
• The release of NetBeans 6.5
• New Python support in NetBeans IDE
• More database changes underway (ongoing)
• 275th NetBeans Community Docs contribution
• ICEfaces Migration Guide made available for developers wishing to switch from Woodstock

As you can see, 2008 was a very successful year for NetBeans (and this technical writer). 2009 could prove to be a challenging year, with the financial crisis in full swing. I hope that I'll have the opportunity to continue blogging for Sun for a very long time.

Happy New Year, everyone!

See you in 2009.

Cheers!

-James

I want you to tell me the story of how you got started with the Net.

Tell me how your passion was sparked and why it keeps coming to full flame.

Tell me why the Net matters to you, even after all of the long days, short nights and wrecked weekends.

I've been writing my story because I need to understand why I care deeply for what the Net is and what it means.

I want to read your story for the same reason.

Don't hold out on me now. I can see your data trails in my server logs: a few hundred of you trudging in from RSS subscriptions, the PHP, Mozilla and MySQL planets, Boris' twitter post, and other places sundry and diverse.

Most of you are Net veterans – people who've been helping build and nurture parts of this massive meta-machine for a decade or more – and many of you care very, very deeply for what the Net allows and what it represents.

I 'd love to know. Leave comments, send trackbacks, email me, let me buy you a pint, sent postcards - even implement RFC1149.

p.s. Feel free to substitute Electronic Frontier or Free Software or Open Source or Free Culture for the Net. As near as I can tell, its all part of the same ball of wax.

Entry posted by EvgenyS | One comment

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« Post 2 | This is the 3rd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series.

"As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it." — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I like beginnings. This is a constant. In primary school, I tried to re-invent arithmetic. My D&D characters were be obsessively re-rolled and scrapped. On various computers, I'd start my games of Civilization over and over. I'd hope that if I could just get the beginning right that the rest wouldn't be so hard or boring.

There were three other constants in my life during my teen years: a loving family, a long-running D&D group and near-complete loathing of school. Before I hit twenty, these three constants had dwindled down to one. While my family remained (and remains) wonderful, but my D&D group evaporated - a dozen or so friends each fumbling their separate ways into life - and I had managed to drop out of school not once, but twice.

It wasn't much change but it wasn't much of a life and I still found myself adrift. I wandered from job to job, holding six different positions in the space of two years. Each time I'd quit in frustration and go looking for a new beginning to try and get right.

In early '94, financial pressures mounting, I landed a job at a dental lab and clung to it for dear life. I liked the work. I made friends. I even survived my first evaluation. Thankfully, I had a kind boss who turned me into a project. It was a good job. Some years later, I even met my lovely wife there. So, by late '94, I was pretty sure that I would be a dental technician. Full stop. For the foreseeable future, I would spend my nights playing D&D and my days crafting false teeth while wearing a turquoise smock. Life would be good.

Then the province of Alberta drastically cut funding for senior's dental care and, with it, much of the profit involved in running a dental lab. Waves of layoff swept the industry and, as lifelong staffers at the lab were let go, I was sure that I would be next.

One night in January, while I moped over my coming unemployment, my mother saw a segment on the local news about the Information Superhighway.^* Around this time, my mother was taking a business course and one of the other participants told her about something called the Information Superhighway. The idea of the Net set a fire in her which quickly spread to the rest of the family.

I hardly remember the six months that followed — they are still a blur of days at the dental lab (I never did get laid off) and of nights exploring the Net with my family. As best I can recall, it went like this:

Dream. Dream a lot. Get quotes on web page development. Beat a hasty retreat from $10,000/page. Scrape some cash together. Buy a second-hand 286. Buy a modem. Find cheap Web access via a local BBS. Spend three days figuring out how to actually get to a website. Surf the awesomeness of the textual web with Lynx. Fail to understand the HTML spec. Buy a second-hand 386. Get Netscape Navigator. Freak out at the total awesomeness of the graphical Web. Discover View Source. Lose mind. Build hideously malformed web pages stitched together from the HTML sources of Netscape's site, razorfish.com and hotwired. Work ourselves into a bleary-eyed, sore-fingered, sweaty, sleep-deprived lather. Repeat several times. Finally, in June of 1995, publish an online travel magazine with 20-something articles and, somewhat oddly, a satirical paperdoll of Canadian politician Preston Manning.

The first few weeks after publishing, we'd refresh our log files every few minutes to see who had visited, cheering as people worked their way from article to article. Good times.

I hold much fondness for this year. It still feels like we just wandered up to the side of the information superhighway and stuck out our thumbs, waiting in the bright sunshine for the future to pull up in a fast car. And when she pulled up, we were so naïve that we weren't even surprised — with a nod of our heads we just got in.

(I'll finish this story up on Jan. 2)

« Post 2 | This is the 3rd post in my MoFo Futures 2009 blog series.

Sometimes one has weird ideas, or am I the only one? - This specific one is at least a year old, now, during the Christmas days, waiting for New Year's Eve I had the time and mood to finally try it out: MySQL 5.1 has a plugin interface to easily add storage engines. PHP can easily embedded into other applications.  So why not combine these two things? - Writing a MySQL Storage Engine which reads data by calling a PHP script.

Let's start with a simple example first:

This is the bare minimum storage engine my plugin supports. create_table() is called for creating the table, open_table() to access it, the later one then returns an iterator which is used for a full table scan. This example uses an ArrayIterator, which implements the SeekableIterator and the Countable interfaces, the first one provides a seek() method, which is called to read specific rows after sorting for instance, the later provides a method count() which gives the optimizer a hint.

Let's use this table:

mysql> CREATE TABLE php_test (id int, val CHAR(3)) ENGINE=PHP;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.04 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM php_test;
+------+------+
| id   | val  |
+------+------+
|    1 | foo  | 
|    2 | bar  | 
+------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Ok, of course that's nice and shiny but well, it's read only. To solve that you can implement a few interfaces provided by the plugin to handle writes:

Again, we can test it:

mysql> UPDATE php_test SET val = 'baz' WHERE id = 1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.02 sec)
Rows matched: 1  Changed: 1  Warnings: 0

mysql> DELETE FROM php_test WHERE id = 2;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> INSERT INTO php_test VALUES(3, 'bar');
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> SELECT * FROM php_write;
+------+------+
| id   | val  |
+------+------+
|    1 | baz  | 
|    3 | bar  | 
+------+------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

As a reminder: This is calling PHP for all these operations.

So what might real life use cases be, once the major issues in the code are fixed? I have a few ideas like

• A live-logfile query tool, not sure that's really need, see the primitive Apache httpd access_log parser which is provided with the code as an example
• Combine it with the embedded MySQL server and use this storage engine for your unit tests, "mock tables" ...

Any other ideas? - Leave a comment

Oh, and like most MySQL stuff nowadays: There's a launchpad project for this plugin.

Ok this isn't very timely reporting, but about two weeks ago Batched Key Access feature has been pushed into MySQL 6.0. You can get it from the bazaar repo now (bzr branch lp:mysql-server/6.0), or wait several more weeks till MySQL 6.0.9 is released and get it from there.

Batched Key Access in a nutshell

BKA is about accessing tables in batches when running nested loop joins. The benefits of batching table accesses are that

• "Remote" engines save on number of roundtrips
• Disk-based engines do reads in disk order instead of randomly probing the table, which allows to be easier on disk cache and take advantage of prefetching

Batched Key Access only works if the used storage engine supports it. At the moment there is support for MyISAM, InnoDB, Maria, Falcon (these are disk-based) and NDB (this one is remote) engines.

Documentation

At the moment there's no manual chapter yet. There is a short introduction at Batched_Key_Access page on the forge and there are MySQL Conference 2008 session slides. The slides cover some benchmarking and give an idea about what kind of queries and dataset you need to get speedups with MyISAM/InnoDB. We've seen great speedup with NDB also but didn't publish anything so far.

Observation

With Batched Key Access and condition pushdown, it is now feasible to create a remote table engine with decent performance. We have a remote engine, ha_federated and it doesn't support BKA or condition pushdown and is a death by latency if you have queries that do not match the

SELECT * FROM table WHERE primary_key=const

This is now a rather low-hanging fruit, any takers?

One of our customers gave me a chance to run some benchmarks on 24-core (intel cpu based) server, and I could not miss it and ran few CPU-bound tasks there.

The goal of benchmarks was investigation of InnoDB-plugin and XtraDB sca