Interesting Programmer Links

• Peeping into memcached.

Really interesting read about how to examine what’s stored in memcached.

Peep uses ptrace to freeze a running memcached server, dump the internal key metadata, and return the server to a running state. If you have a good host ejection mechanism in your client, such as in the Twitter libmemcached builds, you won’t even have to change the production server pool. The instance is not restarted, and no data is lost.

• Quick look at MySQL 5.4

Highlights include scalability improvements, subquery optimizations and join improvements, improved stored procedure management, out parameters in prepared statements, and new information schema additions.

• EasyVMX

EasyVMX lets you create empty VMWare images. Very useful when coupled with the VMWare player.

• For the next 5 days you can get Jira 5 user license for $5.

I used Jira about 3 years ago at Infosearch Media, which I don’t think exists any more. Anyway, it trounced bugzilla then and still does.

• A cool rundown on what you can do with the information schema in MySQL.

I like this post, it makes a few really cool points. It explains how to get a list of all tables and their engine and how to get a list of foreign keys in your schema. Very cool.

• Q4M, a Queue storage engine

Q4M looks like a pretty cool storage engine that aims to address twitter-like features. I’ll be trying this out for myself in the near future.

Q4M (Queue for MySQL) is a message queue licensed under GPL that works as a pluggable storage engine of MySQL 5.1, designed to be robust, fast, flexible. It is already in production quality, and is used by several web services (see Users of Q4M).