First Experiences in Portland

My wife and I recently moved to Portland from Chicago. We are in an apartment complex in South West Portland. We are as close as you can get to Beaverton while still being technically in Portland. We are absolutely in love with the area! Everything is so lush and green. Trees are everywhere. This is exactly the kind of place that my wife and I want to live. It has been a while since I last blogged and I normally blog about technology or software related topics. This time I really wanted to reflect on my experiences from our first three days in Portland.

We are both still battling a violent virus that we acquired right before the move. As a result we haven’t been able to start making our routine visits to the local breweries in the area. We did discover a lot of other cool stuff though.

The Tao of Tea
http://www.taooftea.com/

My wife and I have been consumers of high quality loose leaf teas for a very long time. In Portland we discovered this great find that already is one of our favorites.

Big Wins:

• Locally owned and operated
• Organic, whole leaf (not just loose leaf) teas

New Seasons Market
http://www.newseasonsmarket.com/

Reminds me of my old coop that I went to all of the time when I was studying at SIUC in Carbondale, IL. My wife and I immediately fell in love with it.

Big Wins:

• Locally owned/operated
• Carry “The Tao of Tea” teas in whole leaf
• Carry “The Tao of Tea” microbrewed in bottles
• Offer brewed and whole bean Stumptown Coffee
• Several wholesome, delicious, fresh meals

Down to Earth Cafe
http://www.downtoearthcafe.com/

I found this gem on Yelp. It had great reviews and they were dead on. We will definitely be going back soon.

Big Wins:

• Served Stumptown Coffee
• Delicious, real food
• Brought real cream and organic sugar by default for coffee

Why I Use Percona XtraDB

What is Percona and why do I use it?

MySQL community edition has a bad reputation for not performing well enough for enterprise level usage. This is why originally a lot of open source shops jumped ship for postgres. The Percona team has made a significant series of changes to the InnoDB storage engine which they package as a drop-in replacement called Percona XtraDB. You can find an itemized list list of changes on their website. Many of these are optimizations for performance. You can also see a recent performance comparison on their website here.

This collective boost of performance is what makes it so appealing to me. Percona’s devotion to open source is absolutely fantastic. All of their software is completely open source and they make all of their profit through training, support, and consulting. The company I work for has a Gold support contract with them. I have been using this support rather often lately and they have provided us with top notch responses. I have applied several of their suggestions, tips, and tricks to my daily efforts on various projects and it has had a noticeably positive impact on results.

They also have several added value pieces I use pretty much every day, including:

1. Percona XtraBackup
2. The Percona Toolkit (personal favorites below)
   1. pt-table-checksum – Verifies MySQL replication integrity
   2. pt-table-sync – Synchronizes MySQL table data more efficiently
   3. pt-query-digest – Analyzes query execution logs and generates a query report of problematic queries
   4. pt-online-schema-change – Allows ALTER tables without locking them
   5. pt-stalk – Gathers forensic data about MySQL that can be passed to Percona support
3. Percona XtraDB Cluster

Additional Resources

If you are interested in learning more about Percona and high performance MySQL you can find a sea of information at the following links.

• Official Percona Documentation
• Percona Screencasts
• Percona’s High Performance Blog

Achieving Readable Tabular Output in MySQL

I just changed employers a few weeks ago and went from a psql shop to a mysql shop. One of the things that I missed was the ability to set a pager in a .psqlrc file and get readable output from query results. After some digging and ignoring the posts about \G and vertical output which is nearly useless to me I finally found out the proper flags for less to achieve what I wanted.

On the fly:

mysql> \P less -S
PAGER set to 'less -S'

Permanent config:

$ vim ~/.my.cnf

Add the following…

[client]
pager = less -S

Interested in the difference?
Before:

After:

Kickstarter Spotlight: Star Wars Trivia Book

I recently started listening to the Sarlacc Pit Podcast over at Galactic Binder. I really enjoy listening and they talk about some very interesting stuff. They have created a Kickstarter project to fund a Star Wars trivia book that Chris is working on. I would really like to see it get funded so I can have a copy for my (future) kids. One of the excerpts that really captured my attention:

This book is for all ages, but was created for the first and second Star Wars generation, to pass along the love of the movies to our third generation and beyond. This book will help to excite the younglings who have only known the “Clone Wars”. Watching these movies, they will become more intrigued as they search for answers.

Please pledge $5 or more and help this project fund!

Dubstep Violin by Lindsey Stirling

Lindsey Stirling had a strange, but wonderful idea – to mix the violin with the wonderful genre of dubstep! Without further introduction, I present you with a song titled Crystallize which is her first song experimenting with this mix. I really like it and hope you do as well.

This track can be downloaded from her website in high quality for $0.99! Please check out her website and support her at http://lindseystirlingviolin.com/store/crystallize-single/

Music Spotlight: Cascade by Hyper

I know it is older, but I am really digging this. I am going to have to pick up this album. I just thought I’d share. It is just good, smooth techno.