Welcome googleCL

I am writing this blog post with Vim, my favorite editor, instead of using the online editor offered by blogger. And I am uploading this post to my Blogger account using Google CL a tool that lets you use Google services from the command line. I am a command line geek, and as soon as I saw the announcement, I installed it in my laptop. The mere fact that you are reading this blog post shows that it works.

GoogleCL is an apparently simple application. If you install it on Mac using macports you realize how many dependencies it has and how much complexity it gives under the hood.
Using an easy to understand syntax, it allows you to access your blog, pictures, calendar, contacts, videos, and online documents at your fingertips.
For example, let's query my blog for partitioning:

$  google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --title=partitioning list "title,url"

Hmm. No results. The manual doesn't help much, but something happened during this query. The first thing ist that I was asked to authorize the script to access my blog, and that was done by activating a key that I got in the command line. So far, so good. The second thing was a message informing me that a default configuration file was created in my home directory. Looking at that file, I saw an option saying "regex = True". Aha! So the title supports regular expressions. Let's try:

$  google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --title=".*partitioning" list "title"
Holiday gift - A deep look at MySQL 5.5 partitioning enhancements
The partition helper - Improving usability with MySQL 5.1 partitioning
A quick usability hack with partitioning
MySQL 5.1  Improving ARCHIVE performance with partitioning

OK. This gives me everything with the word "partitioning" in the title. But I know that some titles are missing. Comparing with the results that I get online, I see that the titles where "partitioning" is capitalized are not reported. So the search is case sensitive. What I need to do is to tell the regular expression that I want a case insensitive search. Fortunately, I know how to speak regular expressions. Let's try again.

$  google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --title="(?i).*partitioning.*" list "title"
Holiday gift - A deep look at MySQL 5.5 partitioning enhancements
Partitioning with non integer values using triggers
Tutorial on Partitioning at the MySQL Users Conference 2009
The partition helper - Improving usability with MySQL 5.1 partitioning
A quick usability hack with partitioning
MySQL 5.1  Improving ARCHIVE performance with partitioning

Now I feel confident enough to do some changes to my online contents.
To create this blog post, I used some of googlecl capabilities. After I created an image, I uploaded it to my Picasa album using this command:

$google picasa post -n "Blogger Pictures" -t googlecl ~/Desktop/google_cl.png 

Then I asked Picasa to give me the URL of the image:

$ google picasa list -n "Blogger Pictures" --query googlecl title,url_direct 
google_cl.png,http://lh6.ggpht.com/_gVfZHGgf5LA/TBzjaKiJJvI/AAAAAAAAA74/dthDDhybsmc/google_cl.jpg

And then I inserted that URL in this blog post. Finally, I uploaded the blog post with this command:

google blogger --blog="The Data Charmer" --draft --title "Welcome googleCL" --tags="google,mysql,partitioning,command line,blogging" post ~/blog/welcome_googlecl.html

(Now writing online) And after I checked that the post was looking as I wanted it, I hit the "PUBLISH POST" button.
Welcome, GoogleCL!

The Open Source Events Calendar

Kudos to Lenz, who, acting on an idea launched by Ronald Bradford some time ago, has put together a comprehensive calendar of open source events. Most of them are somehow related to the MySQL ecosystem, but there is no limitation to what the calendar contains. Here is the announcement, with the instructions to use and contribute to the calendar.

In addition to informing you about the events, this calendar does also tell you when a deadline is approaching. Using this tool, you won't miss a call for participation anymore.
You can simply subscribe to the iCal feed (it's a Google calendar) or see it online.
And of course, we want to improve the calendar. Feel free to submit new events using the event submission form.

We're looking into ways of improving the service. It would be nice to have a widget to show on your blog. Using Google APIs, it's easy to create such a widget, but the events are shown in insertion order, rather than chronological order. If anyone knows how to fix this issue, please contact me or Lenz.

A quick look at Google Fusion Tables

I was curious about Google Fusion Tables, and gave it a try.
I uploaded the employees table from the employees test database, 16 MB of data, about 300,000 rows. Since the maximum limit per table is 100 MB, I expected interesting results.
However, one of my first tests, with aggregation was quite disappointing.
A simple group by gender was executed in about 30 seconds.

InnoDB on my laptop did a much better job:

select gender , count(*) from employees group by gender;
+--------+----------+
| gender | count(*) |
+--------+----------+
| M      |   179973 | 
| F      |   120051 | 
+--------+----------+
2 rows in set (0.32 sec)

Here's the link to my test table, if you want to give it a try. You need to have a Google account to see it.

Easy server testing with MySQL Sandbox

MySQL Sandbox 2.0.18 introduces a new feature, changing port. You can now change the listening port for a sandboxed server, either as a standalone operation, or while moving it, using the sbtool. There is a feature in the Sandbox, introduced in 2.0.13, that makes really easy to test servers in special conditions. If you need to start or restart a server using an option that you know you will need only for the next test, you can add the option to the command line invocation of the start or restart scripts.

$ ./start --key-buffer=2G
$ ./use -e "show variables like 'key_buffer_size'"
+-----------------+------------+
| Variable_name   | Value      |
+-----------------+------------+
| key_buffer_size | 2147483648 | 
+-----------------+------------+
./use -e "show variables like 'innodb_buffer_pool_size'"
+-------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name           | Value   |
+-------------------------+---------+
| innodb_buffer_pool_size | 8388608 | 
+-------------------------+---------+

$ ./restart --innodb-buffer-pool_size=2G
./use -e "show variables like 'innodb_buffer_pool_size'"
+-------------------------+------------+
| Variable_name           | Value      |
+-------------------------+------------+
| innodb_buffer_pool_size | 2147483648 | 
+-------------------------+------------+

Some more news. There is a mailing list to discuss the Sandbox development, and new members are welcome. The Sandbox is also awaiting volunteer students for Google Summer of Code.

Mentoring a Summer of Code project

It's official.
I am now appointed mentor of a Google Summer of Code project.
Congratulations to Charlie Cahoon, who has submitted an intriguing proposal for improving our code coverage and testing tools. The abstract doesn't do justice to the project. The juicy part is in the details. More about it later.
More information on Kaj's announcement.

Thanks, Charlie, for proposing this project!

Thanks, Google, for promoting this great infrastructure!