Duel: gdb vs. linked lists, trees, and hash tables

My first encounter with the gdb command duel was on some old IRIX about 15 years ago. I immediately loved how convenient it was for displaying various data structures during MySQL debugging, and I wished Linux had something similar. Later I found out that Duel was not something IRIX specific, but a public domain patch for gdb 4.6 written in ’93 by Michael Golan. Unfortunately, it never got into gdb (for licensing reasons, so I’ve heard). Now the gdb 8 is out, and the patch, obviously doesn’t apply. Instead of fixing the patch, I’ve re-implemented Duel in Python, using gdb Python API and the Arpeggio parser. …

Making life prettier with gdb PrettyPrinting API

Anyone who has peeked inside a gdb manual knows that gdb has some kind of Python API. And anyone who has skimmed through has seen something called “Pretty Printing” that supposedly tells gdb how to print complex data structures in a nice and readable way. Well, at least I have seen that, but I’ve never given it much thought. Still, one day, when I was typing:
(gdb) p/t table->read_set->bitmap[0] @ (table->read_set->n_bits+7)/8
for the umpteenth time I asked myself, “why the heck not?”, and so it begun…
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Developer meeting & community meetup summary

MariaDB 10.1 shipped a few days ago, so it’s now a good time to focus on another important event. Last week we had a three day MariaDB developers meeting. It took place in Amsterdam (Oct 13-15). Meetings like this tend to have a great impact on the roadmap of the product. Booking.com was very kind to offer their facilities for the developer meeting.

Thank you Booking.com!

The day before the developer meeting there was a MySQL meetup arranged at eBay’s office in Amsterdam since, naturally, a lot of MariaDB developers were already in town for the developers meeting.

MariaDB 10.1.1: triggers for RBR

Sometimes users ask for something that doesn’t really make sense. On the first glance. But then you start asking and realize that the user was right, you were wrong, and it is, actually, a perfectly logical and valid use case.

I’ve had one of these moments when I’ve heard about a request of making triggers to work on the slave in the row-based replication. Like, really? In RBR all changes made by triggers are replicated from the master to slaves as row events. If triggers would be fired on the slave they would do their changes twice. And anyway, assuming that one only has triggers one the slave (why?) in statement-based replication triggers would run on the slave normally, wouldn’t they? …

MariaDB 10.1.1: engine_condition_pushdown flag deprecated

Let me start with a little story. You sit in your house near the fireplace in the living room and need a book from the library… Eh, no, sorry, wrong century. You’re building a robotic arm that will open your beer or brew your coffee or supply you with whatever other drinks of your choice… while you’ll be building the next robotic arm. So, you — soldering iron in one hand and Arduino in another — ask your little brother to bring a box with specific resistors (that you unexpectedly run out of) from the cellar. The problem — your brother is small and cannot tell a resistor from a respirator. …

MariaDB 10.1.1: system variables and their metadata

I don’t think it’ll surprise anybody if I say that MariaDB or MySQL server knows a lot more about server system variables, then just their values. Indeed, every variable can be session or global only, read-only or writable, it has an associated help text (that is printed on mysqld –help –verbose), certain variables only accept values from a given set of strings (this set of allowed values is also printed in mysqld –help –verbose since MariaDB 10.1.0), numeric variables have lower and upper range boundaries of valid values (that are never printed anywhere), and so on. I always thought it’s kind of a waste that there is no way to query this information. …

MariaDB 10.1.1: Defragmenting unused space on InnoDB tablespace

Introduction

When you e.g. delete rows, these rows are just marked as deleted not really physically deleted from indexes and free space introduced is not returned to operating system for later reuse. Purge thread will physically delete index keys and rows, but still free space introduced is not returned to operating system and this operation can lead holes on page. If you have variable length rows, this could lead to situation where this free space can’t be used for new rows (if these rows are larger than old ones). User may use OPTIMIZE TABLE or ALTER TABLE <table> …

MariaDB 10.1.1: FLUSH and SHOW for plugins

One of the most popular plugin types both in MariaDB and MySQL is INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugin type. INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins add new tables to the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. There are lots of INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugins, because they can be used to show just anything to the user and are very easy to write.

MariaDB 10.1.1 comes with nine INFORMATION_SCHEMA plugin:

  • Feedback — shows the anonymised server usage information and can optionally send it to the configured url.
  • Locales — lists compiled-in server locales, implemented by Roberto Spadim
  • METADATA_LOCK_INFO — Lists metadata locks in the server.