Xaprb

Stay curious!

Some people who know I’ve used Gentoo asked me my thoughts on using it for MySQL servers. Here are my opinions and experiences using Gentoo, both for desktop systems and for servers.

I recently attended the MySQL Camp 2006 un-conference at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. This article is a high-level overview of the event. If you didn’t go, you really missed something good. Go to the next one!

I recently tested installing innotop on Microsoft Windows. There was one slight glitch, but I changed a couple lines of code, and now it runs out of the box under ActivePerl. Version 0.1.156 contains those changes for Windows compatibility.

I recently got a message letting me know FreeBSD users will soon be able to install the innotop MySQL and InnoDB monitor through ports. Gentoo GNU/Linux users can find innotop in Portage.

Have you ever wanted to apply an input mask to an HTML form field? Input masks are common in traditional GUI applications, but HTML has no such feature. This article introduces a library that adds input masks to form fields with unobtrusive JavaScript.

Several years ago I wrote a pure PHP library for manipulating XML documents with the Document Object Model (DOM) in PHP 4, without external libraries such as libxml. This is often useful on shared hosting providers, where you can’t get C extensions installed. The library uses PHP4’s built-in SAX functions, which are enabled by default. Today I’m re-releasing this library under the LGPL.

You’ve probably heard of unobtrusive JavaScript. It’s a simple technique that lets you create richer documents without cluttered markup or accessibility problems. I often see link decoration and drop-shadow effects done with unobtrusive JavaScript. How about unobtrusive image captions? Instead of writing a caption into the page, let JavaScript do it. In this article I’ll show you how simple this can be.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about Perl, MySQL and so forth, and neglecting another topic that interests me: the Web. I’m going to finish and publish some of the drafts I have on the Web before I continue with another massive database marathon. This one is about someone who read my mind and built exactly the Firefox extension I was about to build myself: an easy way to block all cookies and allow them on a case-by-case basis without nagging.

I recently published an article on O’Reilly about monitoring tools for MySQL. Of course I believe innotop is the best in its class, so I mentioned it. But I also recently added some features to innotop, and made a stability fix too.

This is the fourth in a series of articles on profiling MySQL. My past three articles have explained how to measure the work a query causes MySQL to do. In this article I introduce a tool I’ve written to do the work for you and produce a compact, readable report of that work, with all the math already done, and the measurements labelled and grouped for ease of comprehension. With this tool you can understand query performance at a glance.

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