Category: My Projects
FastSessions Rails Plugin Released
6 Feb2008

How often do we think about our http sessions implementation? I mean, do you know, how your currently used sessions-related code will behave when sessions number in your database will grow up to millions (or, even, hundreds of millions) of records? This is one of the things we do not think about. But if you’ll think about it, you’ll notice, that 99% of your session-related operations are read-only and 99% of your sessions writes are not needed. Almost all your sessions table records have the same information: session_id and serialized empty session in the data field.

Looking at this sessions-related situation we have created really simple (and, at the same time, really useful for large Rails projects) plugin, which replaces ActiveRecord-based session store and makes sessions much more effective. Below you can find some information about implementation details and decisions we’ve made in this plugin, but if you just want to try it, then check out our project site.

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Data Recovery Toolkit for InnoDB Released
26 Nov2007

I’m returned from my 1-week vacation today and want to say – I’ve never been so productive as I was there 😉 Blue ocean, hot sun and white sand really helped me to finish my work on the first release of one really awesome project.

Today I’m proud to announce our first public release of the Data Recovery Toolkit for InnoDB – set of tools for checking InnoDB tablespaces and recovering data from damaged tablespaces or from dropped/truncated InnoDB tables.

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MySQL Master-Master Replication Manager 1.0 Released
29 Oct2007

It’s been a long time since we’ve started this project and it is time to make a checkpoint. So, I’ve decided to release final 1.0 version and make 1.X branch stable while all serious development with deep architectural changes will be done 2.X branch (trunk at this moment).

Changes from previous release:

  • Perl semaphores implementation caused huge memory leaks (mmmd_mod).
  • Now we do not send any commands to hard offline hosts with dead TCP/IP stack to prevent mointoring problems for other hosts.
  • Removed legacy StartSlave method from agent code which caused problems on some Perl versions
  • Added a few fixes to prevent non-exclusive roles from moving. This caused internal status structures to be corrupted.
  • Made all mysql checks properly report errors occurring (previously they were resulting in an OK response). Thanks to Phillip Pearson.
  • Some memory leaks found in mysql checkers and as a quick fix we’ve added an idea of “Maximum Checks Before Restart” to all checkers. If you want some checker to restart after N checks, simply add “restart after N” to your checker declaration.
  • Added some more docs to the project site.

New version can be obtained here or from the project’s SVN repository.


Linux User in Solaris 10 Survival Guide
28 Sep2007

This week aside from tons of different tasks I was working on one of MMM users complaint regarding some issues with MMM on Solaris 10. I knew that this OS has not so user (admin) friendly environment (especially for people with strong GNU-related background), but had no other options and decided to install Solaris 10 in VMWare Fusion on my desktop.

Installation was a bit strange comparing to Debian/RHEL/Ubuntu and FreeBSD where I have a strong experience, but I’ve managed to install it successfully. The major problem after my first boot was a lack of knowledge about how things could be done in Solaris… Below I’ll describe what generic Linux admin could do with Solaris to make it easier to use and more friendly for GNU-addicted mind 😉

Notice: If you’re Solaris administrator, please, don’t read further because I’m pretty sure that all these suggestions would look dumb for you (I knew some old solaris admins before and they hated GNU environments).

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1000 Great Technical Videos in BestTechVideos Library!
11 Aug2007

Yes! We did it! Just before I went to bed at 3:40AM (heh 🙂 ), I noticed, that someone submitted new video to BTV. I’ve approved it instantly and then noticed a following information in the top part of the site: “We have 1000 videos / 569+ hours of high-quality content!” So, we broke trough 1k videos barrier! And we’ll try to do 2k videos before the end of this year, we have some new features in closed beta testing which would greatly increase number of submitted videos each day.

Thanks to all our users for their contributions and support! Stay with us and we’ll try to give you more features really soon.