MySQL and MariaDB innodb_file_per_table

For those of you pushing your MySQL instances to higher levels, you'll have realized at some point that all InnoDB tables share their indexing space into a single file (ibdata1, usually). This has several very bad outcomes:
  • the ibdata1 file becomes huge after some time (we've seen it pass the 8GB bar)
  • starting the MySQL server takes longer
  • deleting an InnoDB table *doesn't* reduce the space used by ibdata1
  • you have to shutdown your server, remove ibdata1 completely, then restart the server in order to reinitialize the ibdata1 file to a 0-size file (but th

gem install mysql2 on Debian Wheezy with MariaDB 10

Just in case you would be in this situation (and given the fact I couldn't find online information about it), if you are ever installing the mysql2 gem on a Debian Wheezy system with MariaDB 10 (I would guess a rather rare situation), you might get this error:
# gem install mysql2 -v=0.3.11
Building native extensions. This could take a while...
ERROR: Error installing mysql2:
 ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

 /usr/bin/ruby1.9.1 extconf.rb
checking for rb_thread_blocking_region()... yes
checking for rb_wait_for_single_fd()...

Important meetings

Sometimes I like to treat this blog as a personal one and write down things that might affect in fundamental ways our future... or at least my own future, potentially. Anyway, I'm currently living in Peru and had a series of meeting over the last two months with the new Electronical Government Office (ONGEI).