High Performance MySQL

Databases have recently become interesting to me. Previously, they've always seemed like these massive beasts that provide such simple and basic functionality, I didn't understand how companies such as Oracle could make billions selling databases. Yes, it was a dirty word in my vocabularly. And yes, I'm now a reborn DBA in training.

Recently I've been working on a small PHP project reporting statistics on some data from our network. The small project has been collecting for some time now, and has begun to attract some attention. It's also started to slow down considerably. I read a few MySQL performance articles and blog entries, which had quite a few tips and tricks, but in reality I was adding indicies and making config changes without really knowing how to measure the performance differences, or how the change was really affecting my web app. It was blind performance tuning.

And then I picked up "High Performance MySQL". This book is changing my life one page at a time. I've noticed that most of the articles and blogs around MySQL on the web (at least, the ones I could find) were centered around the basic stuff: installation, basic configuration, and cookbook recipes. This book goes to the next level and answers many questions that I've previously had, but didn't have an aggregated place to find.

The key to that last statement is aggregated. I'm sure there are articles out there that explain the differences between InnoDB, and MyISAM, various ways to benchmark your queries to measure performance differences, or methods to cache your queries to improve performance, but having them all aggregated in one place provides context that has proved valuable.

If you're looking for the next level of intelligence on using MySQL in real-world environments, this book is highly recommended.

Testing Old Versions of IE in Linux

As much as I wish people would move off their old versions of IE and Firefox as fast as possible, it's rather hard to induce this. Microsoft has tried hard to move people to IE7 by making it a Windows Update. However, the simple truth is that when developing web sites, you must support many different browsers, including those old, terrible versions that you wished had never been released.

There is a small problem with this: finding these older versions of IE is rather difficult. Oh they are out there somewhere, but it's not easy and obvious. I usually resort to downloading some version of IE 5.5 off of a sketchy website, and then proceed to do multiple AV scans of the file I've downloaded.

And what should come to the rescue...Linux, naturally! I recently found a project called IEs4Linux that installs IE 5, 5.5, and 6 off of Wine. It's meant to be used for web designers to test site compatibility in older IE versions. Personally, it will be useful for my own web testing -- and now I don't have to use Windows to test IE anymore.

Apple Rising

Paul Graham, that most prolific of writers for any tech geek, recently posted an interesting article titled "Microsoft is Dead". I think the title was for dramatic effect, as what he means is that Microsoft is dead in the same way IBM is dead, i.e., not innovative or interesting anymore. I believe he's right, for the most part.

One of the reasons he touted as a sure sign of Microsoft's death piqued my interest:

"Nearly all the people we fund at Y Combinator use Apple laptops. It was the same in the audience at startup school. All the computer people use Macs now. Windows is for grandmas, like Macs used to be in the 90s."

Without a doubt, Apple is rising. It's something I've discussed with friends, and spent time trying to decipher. At any tech conference I go to, there are tons of people with Macs. Whenever I visit the Google campus, there are macs all over the place.

What does this mean? Why are people moving to Apple, rather than installing Linux on their laptops with cheaper commodity hardware? There are a myriad of small reasons that I can come up with, but there is no denying the trend. Or fad. I'm not sure which it is.

A good quote to be reminded of

A recently came across a Peter Drucker quote that struck me as very true.

"Growth that increases productivity is healthy, growth without an increase in productivity is fat, and growth that decreases productivity is cancer...."

I think it's often easy to forget that, in software at least, output is king. If what you're doing doesn't contribute to output or productivity, you may want to rethink what you're doing.

AppVerifier

I've been introduced to a pretty interesting test tool that was released by Microsoft: AppVerifier. From the intro page of the tool:

"AppVerifier encompasses areas that are specifically designed to test for commonly encountered application compatibility issues, and some very subtle kernel issues."

Pretty nice. AppVerifier works by attaching to the program you want to test, and performing configurable tests whenever the program is accessed. There are five main areas you can configure for testing:

1. Memory: This ensures that virtual memory API's are used correctly
2. Thread Local Storage: This just ensures that the TLS API's are used correctly.
3. Low Resource Simulation: This simulates a low resource environment
4. Limited User Account Predictor: This lets you know whether a non-Admin user can properly use the program
5. Misc: Dirty stacks and dangerous API's, according to the website

I'd say it's worth a look if you're testing a program on Windows XP.