Gource is a tool which can take a source code tree and create beautiful visualisations out of it. I’ve used it a few times before for various projects. This weekend I spent a little bit of time playing with it and applying it to MairaDB Server to see what it would produce.
The end result can be seen on YouTube.
My go-to Linux distribution when I’m setting up my workstations is Fedora. I have been using it since Fedora Core 1 and RedHat 9 before that. I can’t even remember what RedHat version I started with now. I often try other distributions out and sometimes use them for a few months but I always end up jumping back to Fedora.
Fedora defaults to the Gnome desktop environment so I have used Gnome as my primary desktop environment for many years. Again I’ve tried others such as Cinnamon and XFCE but I always end up back in Gnome. In recent months I’ve heard a lot of good things about KDE Plasma so I thought I would give it a shot for a week. This is a report of my findings.
All software has bugs. Even if you could possibly write the perfect bug free software all the layers down have bugs. Even CPUs as can be seen with the recent Meltdown and Spectre bugs. This means unfortunately sometimes software will crash. When this happens it is useful to capture as much information as possible to try and stop it happening again.
One of the first things I did when coming back to work from the holiday break is code a new crash dump handler to be used in MariaDB ColumnStore. This will spit out a stack trace for the current thread into a file upon a crash. It is very useful for daemons to try and find the root cause of a problem without running through a debugger. Continue reading Coding and decoding crash dump handlers
With MariaDB ColumnStore 1.1 Beta now released I quickly checked Twitter today to see what the response so far has been. I noticed that someone had posted up a benchmark comparison of MariaDB ColumnStore against a couple of other databases with data that doesn’t quite add up.
Unlike most storage engines, MariaDB ColumnStore does not store its data files in the datadir. Instead these are stored in the Performance Modules in what appears to be a strange numbering system. In this post I will walk you through deciphering the number system.
If you are still using InfiniDB with MySQL, the system is exactly the same as outlined in this post, but the default path that the data is stored in will be a little different.
I have a friend who was hit by a workforce reduction at a company I used to work at (as was his entire department). He is a brilliant engineer who has worked on some massive projects. But is struggling to find somewhere new in-part due to the insane way the recruitment process works in our industry.
Sometimes network protocols don’t entirely behave as documented. Other times there is no documentation at all beyond code. Either way you can sometimes find a need to sniff the traffic of a connection to find out what is really going on.
