Pythian Group

I just installed a copy of the titular distro last night and have been playing with it a bit. So far it’s been less trouble than I would have expected from a first beta, and runs well. Get Kubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala beta 1 here. A word to the wise, this is beta software and not yet ready for prime time.

I installed it on my laptop, I use it for a lot of things but the data is always expendable. I had installed it in a VM a few days previously but that was not as satisfying as trying it in the real world as opposed to the idealized world of the VM.

Test Specs

• Compaq EVO n610c
• Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 – M CPU 2.40GHz
• TEAC DW-224E-A 24x/24x writer cd/rw
• Fujitsu MHT2040A 5400RPM drive
• 512MB DDR
• D-Link DWL-G630 802.11g Atheros AR2413
• ATI Radeon Mobility M7 LW [Radeon Mobility 7500]

The Install

From the get-go there was trouble. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Building High-Performance Drivers for Oracle Database 11g: OCI Tips and Tricks (PDF). I had the opportunity to have an early look at this white paper by Luxi Chidamdaram.

The paper goes over what needs to be done to use OCI effectively, especially in a web environment. The step-by-step approach taken in this document is very readable and the well explained code snippets make it a very good reference — great for comparing your code to the “proper” way to do it.

The novice OCI programmer will find the initial sections of great benefit, as it takes a lot of mystery out of OCI programming. For the more advanced OCI-head, the document is full of good examples of how to manage connections, sessions, and pooling–with an examination of what type of pooling is needed in a given situation.

One highlight for me was the section on database events, which are covered very effectively with some practical examples.

In short, this white paper is a must-read for both the OCI master and the novice, with some great pointers on how to use what is already in OCI and what is new in 11.

I was contacted by the folks at MONyog and asked if I would review MONyog. Since using MONyog is something I have been wanting to do for a while, I jumped at the chance. Of course, “jumped” is relative; Rohit asked me at the MySQL User Conference back in April, and here it is two months later, in June. My apologies to folks for being slow.

This review is an overall review of MONyog as well as specifically reviewing the newest features released in the recent beta (Version 2.5 Beta 2). Feature requests are easily delineated with (feature request). This review is quite long, feel free to bookmark it and read it at your leisure. If you have comments please add them, even if it takes a while for you to read this entire article.

While the webyog website gives some information about what MONyog can do, it is a bit vague about what MONyog is, although there is a link to a PDF whitepaper on What is MONyog? which does answer much of these questions.

The screenshots available from the website are accurate, so I will not reproduce them here. I will note that I have not shared this feedback with the webyog team yet, so I may be upset that a feature is lacking, and the feature may be implemented but I missed it. I will post a follow-up in that case, even though they will likely comment here too.

My reference points — I have used other monitoring and graphing tools such as Nagios, Cacti, and Intermapper as well as MySQL’s Enterprise Monitor.

Overall

As an overall review — MONyog is the best out-of-the-box GUI monitoring tool for MySQL that I have seen. It “just works.” As promised, getting up and running quickly is easy, and having a centralized location for monitoring is very useful. The graphs are beautiful and the statistics that are graphed are useful time-savers.
Read the rest of this entry . . .