Johannes Schlüter

Sun recently introduced their Amber Road storage systems which act like a storage appliance with a Web-Interface for configuration and analytics. Due to the power of DTrace combined with an AJAX web-inerface, you have the ability to really see what's going on. Brendan Gregg, the engineer who's famous for screaming at his storage systems, recently published a new blog posting giving some insights on the heat maps created by these systems. But Sun engineers won't be Sun engineers if they don't have weird ideas. So what about sending text messages to the analytics software? - Scroll to the bottom of Brendan's blog to see what I mean.

Some time ago Sun introduced it's Sun Modular Datacenter, also known by it's project name, Blackbox. As I, of course, have the need for some more computing power but have little space for a data center I had to get at least one of them. Now, after around one year of working for Sun two of them are here. Read More

Now that I run OpenSolaris I install quite general software from time to time, today: The GNU image manipulation program, aka. "GIMP" Now the question is: "What's the OpenSolaris package name?" And the answer is simple: "SUNWgnome-img-editor" ...

I recently wrote a few postings about great Sun stuff. The reason for that? - Well since joining Sun I get all the information about the things Sun does and there are tons of cool things, I enjoy OpenSolaris, especially DTrace and zfs (zfs snapshots!) - these are great pieces of technology. Ok, you can feel that OpenSolaris isn't finished yet, but it's a good step from a classic Unix to a quite usable system.

Now Sun is famous for another product family: Java. For me Java has always been a synonym for ugly and annoying applets and over-engineered "enterprise" applications which are close to being unusable. Being Sun I learned about a new technology for fighting the RIA wars against Microsoft's Silverlight and Adobe's Flex: JavaFX. After browsing a while over the different sites I found out that key part of JavaFX is a declarative scripting language for creating user-interfaces. That sounds quite cool - no annoying and over-verbose XML and no procedural coding for describing a GUI, but a syntax which looks quite sane for that. So I wanted to give it a shot. And that's where the trouble began ...

Read More

NetBeans 6.5 is soon to be released. After 10 years of NetBeans that's the first version of Sun's OpenSource IDE featuring PHP support. While 6.5 is waiting to be packaged the development didn't stop and the first features for the successor, NetBeans.next, are already being developed. David Van Couvering just showed a preview of a cool new feature: SQL completion in PHP strings, if it does what the screenshot promises that's a damn great addition in my opinion....

Angelo recently showed an easy way to dump SQL queries using DTrace, while reading the articles I felt that some important information is missing: The name of the user executing the query and the selected database. So I sat down a few minutes and tried to collect that data.

For the database name I found a quite simple solution: It is passed as parameter to the check_user() function to MySQL so we can easily add a thread-local variable to keep that name. Simple script for that:

#!/usr/sbin/dtrace -s

#pragma D option quiet

pid$1::*check_user*:entry
{
    self->db = arg4 ? copyinstr(arg4) : "(no schema)";
}

pid$1::*dispatch_command*:entry
{
    printf("%s: %s\n", self->db, copyinstr(arg2));
}

Getting the username is a bit harder, for the PID-provider we need a function where it is passed as parameter, best would be if it was passed as char*, but there's no such function reliably called. (For instance there are functions for checking max connections per user where all we need is passed in a proper way, but it's only called when a limit was set) The only way would be to take the user_connect property of the THD object which is passed to dispatch_command and then access the username (and hostname). But getting that working from within DTrace is quite some work. I prepared some scripts doing this with simple C structures for the second part of my DTrace article series, which is ready in my head and is waiting to be typed, so in theory it should be possible, anybody wants to try?

The best solution, of course, would be to add proper probes into the MySQL server code which provide all that information.

End October - time for the traditional meeting of the German and International "PHP family" - end of October? - Yes, the International PHP Conference is a bit earlier this year. Additonally the organizers moved the conference away from the industrial area of Mörfelden to the center of Mainz which sounds quite promising. Although I'll spend only around 24hrs at Mainz I'm looking really forward to the conference next week.

On Thursday morning I'll give a presentation about PHP 5.3, which will be quite interesting as one of the biggest features, namespaces, is still undergoing heavy discussions and the final syntax probably won't be clear when presenting - fortunately PHP 5.3 is much more than namespaces!

Sun will also be present at the conference, so if you're looking for an open source PHP IDE you might talk to Petr and Wen about the upcoming NetBeans 6.5 release which will feature PHP support, if you're running a startup company you might talk to Stefan Schneider who will represent the Startup Essential Program which has interesting discounts on Sun products.

Unfortunately I won't be able to attend Brian Aker's keynote about Drizzle or Ulf's session about new and hot stuff in mysqlnd, one of the new feature in PHP 5.3.

DTrace is a damn cool debugging tool, unfortunately only available for Solaris and different BSD flavors. If you want to learn about it watch the quite entertaining video (well, I guess you should be a true geek to be entertained, ...) from Bryan Cantrill's talk.

The reason for me writing this is that I had some problems with the PID provider and wanted to note the solution for myself:

$ dtrace -n 'pid1005:::entry { printf("Hello"); }'
probe description pid1005:::entry does not match any probes

The reason is that my user only had the dtrace_user, not the dtrace_proc right. Setting the attributes correctly solved the issue. Time for more DTrace'ing.

Two month have passed since the close of the Sun-MySQL-Deal, two months of uncertainty whether it's a good idea to join Sun or not but after consulting my ElePHPant, who read the 18 pages of the contract and related documents (including MySQL termination agreement, data privacy agreement, ...), I'm quite optimistic and look ahead to a sunny future. Therefore I'll be a true Sun employee as of tomorrow, May 1st.

Der xenjo bemitleidet mich - das finde ich nett. Er erinnert uns auch daran, dass Java für alles mögliche gedacht wurde, wer mehr will: James Gosling, mit dem ich ja im Januar zu Mittag war, hat das letztens auf Video kommentiert.

So genug der Werbung für den Arbeitgeber.

In January Sun announced to buy MySQL, today the deal was closed and MySQL is now part of probably the worlds biggest Open Source company. For a full coverage visit mysql.com, Kaj's Blog or Sun's new product site. I'll continue with my tasks now.

Currently I'm at MySQL's staff meeting at Orlando. As you most likely read: Our CEO Marten Mickos announced that SUN is going to buy MySQL AB. I joined MySQL just in October and it's the first time for me to go to a company meeting, so I'm still in some kind of orientation phase, meeting many people where I only knew the name and now the company becomes way bigger. But I'm not only having the chance to meet people from MySQL now, but SUN also sent a bunch of guys over to Orlando, so Ulf, Andrey and me from MySQL's PHP team had James Gosling joining our table at lunch - but I won't go and do Java now, I'll stay with PHP