MySQL Response to Bugs

I’ve read at times people complaining about the response to bugs, and people bag the support of MySQL on the forums at times.

Well today I logged a bug, not the first and I’m sure it’s not the last. See LAST_INSERT_ID() does not return results for a problem in the latest Connector/J 5.0.3 that was released just recently.

Now it took me about 2 hours to log the bug, and probably at least 2 hours of frustration prior to that. The initial frustration 2 hours was unsuccessful debugging of what I was sure was valid code (and it was near midnight last night). The second 2 hours today was testing the problem between two environments, different database versions and different Connector/J versions, and providing a simple reproducable case of said problem.

So the timeline of the Bug in the MySQL Bug Tracking System.

  • [1 Aug 5:40] – Logged Bug
  • [1 Aug 5:58] – Initial feedback, something for me to confirm, bug “in Progress”
  • [1 Aug 6:04] – Confirmation that problem is new JDBC-compliant features, and the issue was a backwards-compatible option
  • [1 Aug 7:14] – Patch submitted to correct the issue
  • [1 Aug 7:28] – My response to initial feedback, as I hadn’t checked my mail for at least an hour, and then I had to go find the JSTL source code and check

So let me summarise that.

For aS3 (Non-critical) Bug, it took 18 mins from logging for MySQL AB to acknowledge and review the problem, 24 mins from logging to get confirmation of compatibility issue, and 94 mins from logging to have a patch submitted that addressed this and probably some more compatibility issues across 7 source files.

Good Job Mark Matthews. Where do I send the comments for the “MySQL AB employee of the month” award.

Determining Linux Video Driver Refresh Rates

I found this cool command called glxgears that you can run under X.

$ glxgears
10524 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2104.650 FPS
10003 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2000.501 FPS
8417 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1683.340 FPS    * Moved the window from left to right
10538 frames in 5.0 seconds = 2107.443 FPS
5639 frames in 5.0 seconds = 1120.850 FPS   * Moved the window around constantly
X connection to :0.0 broken (explicit kill or server shutdown).
$ glxgears --help
Warrning: unknown parameter: --help

Note the spelling error in “Warrning”.

Unexplained replication authentication behaviour

I’m playing with the latest 5.1.11 beta in a master/slave replication situation. Given a lack of H/W lying around I’m configuring a mixed H/W setup to leverage an existing office’s after hours CPUs running Windows XP for my slaves. So here is my test setup.

Server

Linux – 192.168.100.170

The following are the relevent my.cnf settings

[mysqld]
port=3307
server-id = 1
log-bin=mysql-bin

Confirming the server. I did some test commands prior to confirm the position.

$ mysql -uroot -p mysql
Your MySQL connection id is 47 to server version: 5.1.11-beta-log
mysql> show master status;
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| File             | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
| mysql-bin.000001 |     1759 |              |                  |
+------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+

Slave

Windows XP – 192.168.100.171

The following are the relevent my.cnf settings

server-id	= 11
master-host     = 192.168.100.170
master-user     = rep
master-password = dolphin
master-port     = 3307

Test

I’ve taken a few steps back for the documentation, to clearly identify any setup problems for those that are also reviewing this to setup replication.

Starting the Slave, I get the following error.

060720 16:36:22 [ERROR] Slave I/O thread: error connecting to master '[email protected]:3307':
  Error: 'Host '192.168.100.171' is not allowed to connect to this MySQL server'
  errno: 1130  retry-time: 60  retries: 86400

Makes sense, you need to give access to the slave to access the master. So to the uninitiated you may miss that a slave requires different access then a default ‘all’ for example.

On the master.

$ mysql -uroot -p mysql
mysql>  grant replication slave on *.* to rep@'192.168.100.%' identified by 'dolphin';

Just a side note, when defining the master replication you can specifically state databases to include or ignore, but to set up the appropiate grant on a particular database fails. For example:

mysql> grant replication slave on test.* to rep@'192.168.100.%' identified by 'dolphin';
ERROR 1221 (HY000): Incorrect usage of DB GRANT and GLOBAL PRIVILEGES

But the problem was not indeed here, looking closer at the error message, the host and the port matched the my.cnf file, but the user didn’t. It was ‘root’ when it should have been ‘rep’.

So, some advice later from the Planet MySQL #IRC (thanks Sheeri) you find if you RTFM at MySQL 5.1 Manual – Replication Startup Options.

If the master.info file exists when the slave server starts, the server uses its contents and ignores any options that correspond to the values listed in the file. Thus, if you start the slave server with different values of the startup options that correspond to values in the master.info file, the different values have no effect, because the server continues to use the master.info file. To use different values, you must either restart after removing the master.info file or (preferably) use the CHANGE MASTER TO statement to reset the values while the slave is running.

So investigating the master.info file located in the slave data directory I get:

14
mysql-bin.000001
1839
192.168.100.170
root
dolphin
3307
60
0

There is a mismatch between the master.info file and the my.cnf file. I don’t recall the exact series of events when I setup the Windows XP installation, I know I first tested it as a master, and it’s most likely I then configured the slave settings, but used a master-user of ‘root’ initially and started the server. Then thinking this was insecure before I’d created the permissions, I changed the my.cnf file to use the user ‘rep’.

So the lessons today are:

  1. Correctly configure your slave settings before starting the mysql server for the first time.
  2. MySQL records slave replication authentication information in two files, the my.cnf and the master.info.
  3. Making changes to my.cnf are not reflected in an existing master.info. In this situtation use the CHANGE MASTER TO command in addition.
  4. Read the Manual. MySQL does have good documentation, and when it’s not quite right, like I found yesterday with Bug #21134, report it to help everybody in the future.

Now I fully agree this is a Replication 101 error. My excuse is the last replication I setup was in 2003 under 3.23, and it worked perfectly well in a production system for 2 years with a number of 3.23 and 4.0 slaves. Hence while I’m just refreshing my replication skills now.

Web Sites – Squarespace

WebSite: www.squarespace.com

What is Squarespace?
Squarespace is a great way to publish and manage a web site online. We let you snap together a web site in a flash that will allow you to manage all of your unique content right in one place. It can be as professional or personal as you want.
Who’s Squarespace for?
Bloggers. Independent professionals. Small businesses. Anyone who needs to maintain a web presence, but wants exacting control over their site, and powerful publishing features that cover everything from blogs to files. No technical skill is required

Web Sites – Digg

WebSite: www.digg.com

Digg is a user driven social content website. Ok, so what the heck does that mean? Well, everything on digg is submitted by the digg user community (that would be you). After you submit content, other digg users read your submission and digg what they like best. If your story rocks and receives enough diggs, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of digg visitors to see.

What can you do as a digg user? Lots. Every digg user can digg (help promote), bury (help remove spam), and comment on stories… you can even digg and bury comments you like or dislike. Digg also allows you to track your friends’ activity throughout the site — want to share a video or news story with a friend? Digg it!

Web Sites – Zimbra

WebSite: www.zimbra.com

Zimbra is an open source server and client technology for next-generation messaging and collaboration. Zimbra delivers innovation for both the administrator and the end-user as well as compatibility with existing infrastructure and applications (both open source and proprietary).

Web Sites – Cacti

WebSite: www.cacti.net

Cacti is a complete network graphing solution designed to harness the power of RRDTool’s data storage and graphing functionality. Cacti provides a fast poller, advanced graph templating, multiple data acquisition methods, and user management features out of the box. All of this is wrapped in an intuitive, easy to use interface that makes sense for LAN-sized installations up to complex networks with hundreds of devices.

Cacti is a complete frontend to RRDTool, it stores all of the necessary information to create graphs and populate them with data in a MySQL database. The frontend is completely PHP driven. Along with being able to maintain Graphs, Data Sources, and Round Robin Archives in a database, cacti handles the data gathering. There is also SNMP support for those used to creating traffic graphs with MRTG.

Web Sites – eyeOS

WebSite: www.eyeos.org

eyeOS is an Open Source Web Desktop Environment, commonly known as Web Operating System or Web Office. With eyeOS you can be organized, work and have fun anywhere, using your own personalized Web Desktop. For using eyeOS, you only have to go to your eyeOS server (or use the official eyeOS public server) and log in with your username and password. If you don’t have a username and password, you can create an account from there too.

Web Sites – RRDtool

WebSite: oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

The industry standard data logging and graphing application. Use it to write your custom monitoring shell scripts or create whole applications using its Perl, Python or PHP bindings.

RRD is the acronym for Round Robin Database. It is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average).

Web Sites – Nagios

WebSite: www.nagios.org

Nagios is a host and service monitor designed to inform you of network problems before your clients, end-users or managers do. It has been designed to run under the Linux operating system, but works fine under most *NIX variants as well. The monitoring daemon runs intermittent checks on hosts and services you specify using external “plugins” which return status information to Nagios. When problems are encountered, the daemon can send notifications out to administrative contacts in a variety of different ways (email, instant message, SMS, etc.). Current status information, historical logs, and reports can all be accessed via a web browser.

Web Sites – Thumbshots

WebSite: www.thumbshots.org

This site enables you to embed a thumbnail image of a website. Rather cool, except there must be some level of caching for new website requests. This page at the time of saving doesn’t show the thumbshot of the official site.

Below is an example output from website that I got the idea from:

Eclipse CVS Tutorial 1

Repository Management


  • Start Eclipse
  • Window | Open Perspective | CVS Repository Exploring
    • This will add an icon to the quick dock option. See Point 1
    • This should open the CVS Repositories View. See Point 2. If not, you can do Window | Show View | CVS Repositories
  • In the CVS Repositories View, Right Click | New | Repository Location
  • Enter the following details on the Add CVS Repository window
    • Host: cvs.arabx.com.au
    • Repository Path: /home/repository/cvs
    • User: [username]
    • Password: [password]
    • Connection Type: pserver
    • Finish




Project Management

  • Within the CVS Repositories View, you can see the appropiate CVS repositories
  • Expand the repository, and then HEAD (Point 1) to get a list of projects within the CVS Repository (Point 2).
  • The simpliest way to get a CVS project into Eclipse, is to Right Click on the CVS Project, and select Checkout
  • In larger projects, you would always do Right Click, Checkout Out As, this gives you a dialog.
    • At the Check Out At dialog, normally you would select the appropiate project name (Point 1), normally the project plus some indicator of tag version or branch. Click Next (Point 2)
    • Next
    • Now is when you normally select an appropiate branch or version. In this case, you could expand Branches or Versions (Point 1). I’ve simply created some dummy versions (BUILD_100, BUILD_101) (Point 2). Choice One, Click Finish (Point 3)
  • Now you should be in the Navigator View, if not, Select Window | Show View | Navigator.
    • Expanding out the project, will notice the following.
    • The Project has a decorator of the Repository (Point 1), and generally the branch details if applicable
    • Individual files all have a Revision Decorator (Point 2)
    • New Files when created have a > indicator (Point 3), and this propogrates to each parent directory and project

NOTE: These CVS repositories are just test areas, they are not used for any production systems.

What is a BLOB?

If your answer was Binary Large Object, then you would be wrong. Check out Mike’s comments on History of Database Blobs from the man that created the BLOB, Mr Jim Starkey.

I had the chance to meet Jim a few months ago, and I spent quite some time talking on various database topics. He is one cool guy.

Mercurial Version Control Software

I got asked (being a Java developer) about what was involved in creating an Eclipse Plugin for Mercurial. Well in true Google style, why invent when somebody probably already has. A quick check finds Mercurial Eclipse by VecTrace.

Now until last week, I’d never heard of Mercurial, so this is really an introduction to somebody that has no idea.

What is Mercurial?

Mercurial is a fast, lightweight Source Control Management system designed for efficient handling of very large distributed projects.

Ok, so big deal, I use CVS. I also use Subversion (SVN) for my Apache contributions, and also for MySQL GUI products. Why do we need another Version Control Product? Mercurial is a Distributed Software Configuration Management Tool. The following is from the Mercurial Wiki

A distributed SCM tool is designed to support a model in which each Repository is loosely coupled to many others. Each Repository contains a complete set of metadata describing one or more projects. These repositories may be located almost anywhere. Individual developers only need access to their own repositories, not to a central one, in order to Commit changes.

Distributed SCMs provide mechanisms for propagating changes between repositories.

Distributed SCMs are in contrast to CentralisedSCMs.

So, clearly a distributed model would well in a large distributed organisation where external factors limit continous access to a single central repository. Low Bandwidth, Poor Internet Connectivity, being on a plane, and travelling are all things that would make a distributed model a more ideal solution. I know I’ve taken my laptop away, and being an “Agile Methodology” developer, I commit often. When you have several days of uncommitted work it goes against the normal operation.

You can get more information at the official website at http://www.selenic.com/mercurial. A few quick links are: Quick Start Guide, Tutorial, Glossary.

Installing Mercurial

su -
cd /src
wget http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/release/mercurial-0.9.tar.gz
tar xvfz mercurial-0.9.tar.gz
cd mercurial-0.9
# NOTE: Requires python 2.3 or better.
python -V
python setup.py install --force

A quick check of the syntax.

$ hg
Mercurial Distributed SCM

basic commands (use "hg help" for the full list or option "-v" for details):

 add        add the specified files on the next commit
 annotate   show changeset information per file line
 clone      make a copy of an existing repository
 commit     commit the specified files or all outstanding changes
 diff       diff repository (or selected files)
 export     dump the header and diffs for one or more changesets
 init       create a new repository in the given directory
 log        show revision history of entire repository or files
 parents    show the parents of the working dir or revision
 pull       pull changes from the specified source
 push       push changes to the specified destination
 remove     remove the specified files on the next commit
 revert     revert files or dirs to their states as of some revision
 serve      export the repository via HTTP
 status     show changed files in the working directory
 update     update or merge working directory

A more detailed list:

$ hg help
Mercurial Distributed SCM

list of commands (use "hg help -v" to show aliases and global options):

 add        add the specified files on the next commit
 annotate   show changeset information per file line
 archive    create unversioned archive of a repository revision
 backout    reverse effect of earlier changeset
 bundle     create a changegroup file
 cat        output the latest or given revisions of files
 clone      make a copy of an existing repository
 commit     commit the specified files or all outstanding changes
 copy       mark files as copied for the next commit
 diff       diff repository (or selected files)
 export     dump the header and diffs for one or more changesets
 grep       search for a pattern in specified files and revisions
 heads      show current repository heads
 help       show help for a given command or all commands
 identify   print information about the working copy
 import     import an ordered set of patches
 incoming   show new changesets found in source
 init       create a new repository in the given directory
 locate     locate files matching specific patterns
 log        show revision history of entire repository or files
 manifest   output the latest or given revision of the project manifest
 merge      Merge working directory with another revision
 outgoing   show changesets not found in destination
 parents    show the parents of the working dir or revision
 paths      show definition of symbolic path names
 pull       pull changes from the specified source
 push       push changes to the specified destination
 recover    roll back an interrupted transaction
 remove     remove the specified files on the next commit
 rename     rename files; equivalent of copy + remove
 revert     revert files or dirs to their states as of some revision
 rollback   roll back the last transaction in this repository
 root       print the root (top) of the current working dir
 serve      export the repository via HTTP
 status     show changed files in the working directory
 tag        add a tag for the current tip or a given revision
 tags       list repository tags
 tip        show the tip revision
 unbundle   apply a changegroup file
 update     update or merge working directory
 verify     verify the integrity of the repository
 version    output version and copyright information

Mercurial Eclipse Plugin

The plugin is still in it’s early days, but the “FREEDOM” of open source enables me to easily review. After a quick install and review of docs, I shot off an email to the developer, stating why I was looking, and while I have other projects on the go, I asked what I could do to help. It’s only be 2 days and we have already communicated via email several times on various topics. That’s one reason why I really love the Open Source Community. Generally people are very receptive to feedback, comments and especially help.

Within Eclipse

  • Help ->Software Updates-> Find and install…
  • Select “Search for new features to install”, click Next
  • Click “New Remote site…”
  • Enter following details and click Ok
    • Name: MercurialEclipse Beta site
    • URL: http://zingo.homeip.net:8000/eclipse-betaupdate/
  • Follow the prompts to accept the license and download.

So now with Eclipse, on a project you can simply go Right Click -> Team -> Share Project -> Select Mercurial

A Quick Mercurial Tutorial

Of course the quickest way to learn about using Mercurial is to look at an existing product. So taking this plugin project for a spin.

$ cd /tmp
$ hg clone http://zingo.homeip.net:8000/hg/mercurialeclipse com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse
$ hg clone com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse example
$ cd example
# Create some new dummy files
$ touch test.txt
$ touch html/test.html
# View files against respository status
$ hg status
? html/test.html
? test.txt
# Add the new files
$ hg add
adding html/test.html
adding test.txt
# Commit changes
$ hg commit -m "Testing Mercurial"

So other then the second clone command (which enabled me to not mess up the original repository and to test distributed handling next), this is just the same as CVS (checkout, diff, add, commit)

# The Distributed nature involves first Pulling from the "upstream" respository
$ hg pull ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse
pulling from ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse
searching for changes
no changes found
# Confirm our new file is not in "upstream" respository
$ ls ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse/test.txt
ls: ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse/test.txt: No such file or directory
# Push local respository changes to "upstream" respository
$ hg push ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse
pushing to ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse
searching for changes
adding changesets
adding manifests
adding file changes
added 1 changesets with 2 changes to 2 files
$ ls ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse/test.txt
ls: ../com.vectrace.MercurialEclipse/test.txt: No such file or directory

Hmmm, missed something here. The Quick Start Guide docs seems to want to work back into the original respository, pulling in changes from the “downstream” repository, then executing a merge and commit command. I don’t want to do this just in case I start messing up the original repository. Time for me to create a new standalone repository so I don’t screw anything up. Stay tuned for an updated tutorial.

Of course this is very basic, I need to look into commands used in CVS like login, tagging (versioning), branching, diffing revisions and merging but this is a start.

I do have a concern with the number of distributed respositories, when and how do you know you are in sync with the “master”, indeed what is the “master”. It does merit some investigation to see what management is in place, like identifying all respositories, and comparing for example.

Conclusion

Ok, so now I’ve got a grasp on Mercurial, time to review the Java Code and see what works and what doesn’t in the Eclipse environment. Of course I don’t use Mercurial so what I may consider as functionality required, may be lower priority to those users out there. Any feedback I’m sure will be most appreciated by the original developer.

What is software quality?

Greg Lehey wrote today Is MySQL getting buggier?. The underlying question of his comments is a more fundamental and passionate topic, and especially for me. That is “Software Quality”.

The quintessential question is this. “How do you determine the ‘software quality’ of a product?” And then quickly followed by, “How do you benchmark this with other software products?”

The short answer to second question is simple. You can’t. The reasons why become apparent in addressing the first question. (There’s a mathematical term for this two question situation, another one of the million things to research and remember one day).

15 years ago as part of my masters research I worked on “Improving Software Quality and Software Productivity”. At the time when I started, I found that these were generally considered mutually exclusive. Quite simply, to improve software quality was to decrease productivity, and when you had to improve productivity, quality declined. Unless you had a clear end goal (which you can’t in software, features, cost, satisfaction etc.), it was impossible to measure the total “cost”. It was also impossible to clearly determine impact on key factors, as with software you never have a “control group” working in isolation of other groups trying different things, and being able to do imperial comparison analysis.

In summary, I found that to improve software quality and software productivity you had to reconsider the approach at several different levels.

  1. You had to strive to work towards a simpler business solution, rather then a more complex solution.
  2. You had to leverage converting business knowledge that was held in lengthy and often dated paper documents, into electronically managable content. Some of the benefits included concurrency, consistency and comparative analysis of the knowledge. The early days of CASE repositories were built on this principle, again before they became to complex.
  3. You also had to look at better ways of writing code, and the area I focussed on was code generation. That is “Code writing Code”. (I have a very successful story of 400,000-500,000 Lines of C code. The ODT was a specialised intelligent peer-to-peer selective replication, between a central repository and 32 distributed sites, allowing for independent heterogeneous operations. It provided levels of complexity within replication including two-way master of partial database data, selective row replication between nodes depending on business needs, and collision management. And I did this is1992. A story for another day).

I also found in the business and industry sectors of research, it was near impossible to get a commonality of some components, a higher level of re-use, a higher value of cost savings. There were many factors for this, another topic for another time.

Now that was a long time ago, and a number of things have changed greatly, including my views. These are far more prevalent regarding Open Source.

Some historical general principles in measurement don’t apply today in Open Source. I remember reading recently in the browser wars, that FireFox was “too honest”. Being more open to acknowledge problems/bugs and correcting them, then the Microsoft perspective. How do you compare quality in this situation. (Side Note: I wish there was a search engine that would search all pages that you had viewed, bookmarked etc., rather then searching the WWW for everything. Would make life much easier in finding references like this.)

Open Source does something commercial software can’t do. If you find a bug, and you can’t wait, then fix it yourself, or at worse pay somebody to fix it for you. The scope, functionality and rules are constantly changing, the resourcing and priorities as well. How do you adequately measure something so fluid.

I am a proponent of “Agile Development Methodologies”, having use for many years eXtreme Programming (XP) either rather seriously, or taking small attributes and applying to existing infrastructures. Terms include Test Driven Development (TDD), Feature Driven Development (FDD), Code Coverage, Unit Tests.

Speaking just on Unit Tests. You write a Unit Test before you write your code. It helps to understand what you are trying to achieve before you try to achieve it. It also provides coverage for when the rules change, you write new or changed tests, which allows you to have analysis performed by your code to address problems. I’ve found that writing extensive tests become a self documentation system of the functionality, it highlights what can and can’t occur. Simply ‘grep’ing can offer a clear summarised description of code, even if you have now knowledge of it. In Java you write long method names (some abstract examples would be ‘testFunctionDoesThisAndNotThis”, “testFunctionAcceptsTwoOfThese”, “testFunctionFailsWithValuesOfThis” etc.) I need to provide a more concrete example to better explain.

An Agile approach, also tends to better encapsulate the Web 2.0 principle of considering software as a service, and not a product. This entirely changes the general thought of software development, of the large cost of software development, followed by a maintenance period and cost of the product, followed by a review of potential new products as circumstances change, followed by … (you get the picture)

If you consider an acceptable ongoing cost for providing a service, perhaps pegged against other business revenue/expenses, and then your product was managed by what available resources you had (time, money, people), rather then by functionality requirements you entire perspective changes. You include a high level of user ownership, the release often principle, and the capacity to review and adapt to changing and improving technology and requirements, all these factors change the outcome on how software is development, managed and perceived.

The other thing about all this is, It’s common sense. It’s a simpler approach, and if everybody considered “How can I make this simpler?” first, it would change they way software is developed and perceived.

So getting back onto the topic of Software Quality. I found that in the right circumstances (and there are wrong circumstances), imploring a change in principle towards Agile concepts can have a significant effect on Software Quality. But, Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. Software Quality is also much the same. What may be acceptable for somebody is unacceptable for somebody else. How then do you measure this?

So after all this, we are left with the question. “How do you determine the ‘software quality’ of a product?” Well, we can only consider a single product in isolation, and we are talking the MySQL server. I should note that you can’t consider all MySQL products in one analysis, different factors including the relative age of the product, the technologies etc. all affect the measurement. You need to consider each product individually.

So why is the number of bugs, or number of open bugs a measure of software quality. What about how big is the product (e.g. lines of code), how complex is the product, how mature is the product, how tested is the product. What we considered the lifespan of critical bugs as a measurement? So what if there were a larger number of critical bugs, but they were fixed immediately is that a good or poor reflection on software quality. If software is in the Web 2.0 “Perpetual Beta”, then are bugs really incomplete functionality.

In software and for organisations, I think an approach could be similar as mentioned by a prospective employer recently. “We know things aren’t the best they could be, but they are better then they were. If our goal could be to improve just 1% each day, then we would be easily 100% better in 6 months.” So with whatever metrics were in place (and you have to have some form of measurement), if there is always a continual improvement, then software quality is always improving.

Generating an internal SSL Certificate (for tomcat)

How to Generate an internal SSL certificate

Create the self-signed keystore

$ su -
$ URL="your.url.here";export URL
$ cd /opt/tomcat/conf
$ keytool -genkey -alias ${URL} -keyalg RSA -keystore ${URL}.keystore
Enter keystore password:  changeit
What is your first and last name?
  [Unknown]:  your.url.here
What is the name of your organizational unit?
  [Unknown]:  IT
What is the name of your organization?
  [Unknown]:  your.url.here
What is the name of your City or Locality?
  [Unknown]:  Brisbane
What is the name of your State or Province?
  [Unknown]:  QLD
What is the two-letter country code for this unit?
  [Unknown]:  AU
Is CN=your.url.here, OU=IT, O=your.url.here, L=Brisbane, ST=QLD, C=AU correct?
  [no]:  yes

Enter key password for <your.url.here>
        (RETURN if same as keystore password):

Turn the keystore into a X.509 certificate

$ keytool -export -alias ${URL} -keystore ${URL}.keystore -rfc -file ${URL}.cert
Enter keystore password:  changeit
Certificate stored in file <your.url.here.cert>

Delete existing trusted certificate

$ keytool -delete -alias ${URL} -file ${URL}.cert  -keystore /opt/java/jre/lib/security/cacerts  -storepass changeit

Import the certificate into cacerts – JRE trusted certificates

$ keytool -import -alias ${URL} -file ${URL}.cert  -keystore /opt/java/jre/lib/security/cacerts  -storepass changeit
Owner: CN=your.url.here, OU=IT, O=your.url.here, L=Brisbane, ST=QLD, C=AU
Issuer: CN=your.url.here, OU=IT, O=your.url.here, L=Brisbane, ST=QLD, C=AU
Serial number: 44ab628c
Valid from: Wed Jul 05 01:56:12 CDT 2006 until: Tue Oct 03 01:56:12 CDT 2006
Certificate fingerprints:
         MD5:  EC:76:01:04:7F:FC:21:CC:A8:41:AD:86:C8:B2:D5:6D
         SHA1: 2D:FD:7C:56:65:70:36:1B:1D:71:09:41:84:98:E6:8E:89:18:BC:18
Trust this certificate? [no]:  yes
Certificate was added to keystore


If you replaced an existing certificate you will need to restart Tomcat.

Differences in syntax between mysql and mysqltest

As I wrote earlier in Using the MySQL Test Suite I found an issue with using the current MySQL Sakila Sample Database as a test with mysqltest.

I was running an older version of 5.1.7 beta so I figured the best course of action was to upgrade to 5.1.11 beta.

Well the problem still exists, and I found that the cause was due to the syntax of the DELIMITER command. Assuming the creation of the schema tables, here is an example of what I found.

Running in an interactive mysql session the following works

DROP TRIGGER ins_film;
DELIMITER ;;
CREATE TRIGGER `ins_film` AFTER INSERT ON `film` FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
    INSERT INTO film_text (film_id, title, description)
        VALUES (new.film_id, new.title, new.description);
  END;;
DELIMITER ;

On a side note, why does DROP TRIGGER not contain the IF EXISTS syntax like DROP DATABASE and DROP TABLE. It’s a shame, it’s a nice SQL extension that MySQL provides.

Now running the same SQL in a mysqltest test (with appropiate create tables) produces the following error

TEST                            RESULT
-------------------------------------------------------
sakila-trigger                 [ fail ]

Errors are (from /opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/log/mysqltest-time) :
mysqltest: At line 53: Extra delimiter "" found
(the last lines may be the most important ones)

It seems, that the DELIMITER command within mysql accepts a line terminator as a statement terminator, while in mysqltest, this is not so.
The solution is to be more strict in the mysqltest, using the following syntax, note the first and list DELIMITER lines are terminated by the appropiate delimiter in use.

DELIMITER //;

CREATE TRIGGER `ins_film` AFTER INSERT ON `film` FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
  INSERT INTO film_text (film_id, title, description)
  VALUES (new.film_id, new.title, new.description);
END//

DELIMITER ;//

Surprisingly, this syntax does then not work in mysql? Is this a bug? I’m note sure, perhaps somebody could let me know.

Using PBXT 0.9.5

Paul has released Version 0.95 of his PBXT MySQL Transactional Storage Engine.

Here is what I did to get it operational under CentOS 4.3.

su -
useradd pbxt
su - pbxt
wget http://www.primebase.com/xt/download/mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5.tar.gz
tar xvfz mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5.tar.gz
cd mysql-4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5
./configure --with-debug=full --with-pbxt-storage-engine --without-query-cache --with-mysqld-user=pbxt  --prefix=/home/pbxt/mysql
make
make install
scripts/mysql_install_db
cd /home/pbxt/mysql
./bin/mysqld_safe --user=pbxt --basedir=/home/pbxt/mysql &

Now, lets test and confirm PBXT is operational.

bin/mysql -uroot mysql
Reading table information for completion of table and column names
You can turn off this feature to get a quicker startup with -A

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1 to server version: 4.1.16-pbxt-0.9.5-debug

Type 'help;' or 'h' for help. Type 'c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> show engines;
+------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| Engine     | Support | Comment                                                    |
+------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------+
| MyISAM     | DEFAULT | Default engine as of MySQL 3.23 with great performance     |
| HEAP       | YES     | Alias for MEMORY                                           |
| MEMORY     | YES     | Hash based, stored in memory, useful for temporary tables  |
| MERGE      | YES     | Collection of identical MyISAM tables                      |
| MRG_MYISAM | YES     | Alias for MERGE                                            |
| ISAM       | NO      | Obsolete storage engine, now replaced by MyISAM            |
| MRG_ISAM   | NO      | Obsolete storage engine, now replaced by MERGE             |
| InnoDB     | YES     | Supports transactions, row-level locking, and foreign keys |
| INNOBASE   | YES     | Alias for INNODB                                           |
| BDB        | NO      | Supports transactions and page-level locking               |
| BERKELEYDB | NO      | Alias for BDB                                              |
| NDBCLUSTER | NO      | Clustered, fault-tolerant, memory-based tables             |
| NDB        | NO      | Alias for NDBCLUSTER                                       |
| EXAMPLE    | NO      | Example storage engine                                     |
| ARCHIVE    | NO      | Archive storage engine                                     |
| CSV        | NO      | CSV storage engine                                         |
| BLACKHOLE  | NO      | Storage engine designed to act as null storage             |
| PBXT       | YES     | Super fast transactional, row-level locking engine         |
+------------+---------+------------------------------------------------------------+
18 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Now to take if for a spin with the MySQL Sakila Sample Database. At this time I need a modified version of the schema, as the sample database is designed for Version 5.

Download sakila.mysql4 script.
Download sakila.pbxt.sql script.

bin/mysql -uroot mysql
mysql>  source sakila.mysql4
mysql> source  sakila.pbxt.sql
# NOTE: Alter table of film_text fails as expected due to FULLTEXT index
mysql> show create table actor;
mysql> exit;

A few warnings in my sakila.mysql4 script I’ll need to review, but it looks ok from an installation step. Now back to my tests that I’m writing to use the Sakila Sample Database which I was working on, so I can really test the ACID state and performance of PBXT.

Using the MySQL Test Suite

MySQL provides two different tools to test the MySQL Server with SQL statements. One is mysqltest and in 5.1 mysqlslap. Both of these tools have quite different purposes. This is a quick review of the usage of mysqltest.

Current Usage

Under Linux deploys, the README in the mysql-test directory gives you all the information you need to know to run.

To run the full test suite.

cd /opt/mysql/mysql-test
 ./mysql-test-run

Rather easy, it does take some time, and I was surprised to find a number of tests marked as ‘skipped’. The general purpose of having tests in a product is to provide coverage of software functionality, and tests should always be forward compatible, unless they are no longer applicable and should be removed. I wonder why the time wasn’t taken to ensure they work in each release.

Should you already have a mysqld running, you can also use this using the -extern syntax to run specific tests against the server. For Example.

./mysql-test-run --extern alias analyze

There are over 700 tests, so this approach is not practical for all tests. It is noted in the README that some tests can’t run in extern mode.
Looking a bit closer at both the server configuration and a running test sheds some light on the types of parameters that are used, and how mysqltest operates.

/opt/mysql/bin/mysqld --no-defaults --server-id=1 --basedir=/opt/mysql --port=9306 --port-open-timeout=380 --local-infile
--exit-info=256 --core --datadir=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/master-data --pid-file=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/run/master.pid
--socket=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/tmp/master.sock --log=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/log/master.log
 --character-sets-dir=/opt/mysql/share/mysql/charsets --default-character-set=latin1 --tmpdir=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/tmp
--language=/opt/mysql/share/mysql/english/ --innodb_data_file_path=ibdata1:128M:autoextend --open-files-limit=1024
--log-bin-trust-function-creators --loose-binlog-show-xid=0 --rpl-recovery-rank=1 --init-rpl-role=master --key_buffer_size=1M
--sort_buffer=256K --max_heap_table_size=1M --log-bin=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/log/master-bin --user=root

/opt/mysql/bin/mysqltest --no-defaults --socket=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/tmp/master.sock --database=test --user=root
--password= --silent -v --skip-safemalloc --tmpdir=/opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/tmp --port=9306 -R r/count_distinct3.result

Extending MySQL Test Suite

That’s all nice, but the power of this infrastructure is you can incoporate your own tests. This may be beneficial if you have complex statements and use bleeding edge versions of MySQL. Indeed, it’s another approach to being able to provide to MySQL reproducable test cases if you have a problem.

There are basically 2 steps to incoporating your own tests.

  1. Create a test script in the t subdirectory.
  2. Create a test results file in the r subdirectory.

Using the MySQL Sakila Sample Database as a test case, I created a test with the default sakila-schema.sql and sakila-data.sql files. I did need to replace the DROP and USE DATABASE commands and add a set of DROP TABLE statements.

cd /opt/mysql/mysql-test
vi t/sakila.test
./mysql-test-run --record sakila
more r/sakila.results

Example Results

./mysql-test-run sakila

Stopping master cluster
Installing Test Databases
Removing Stale Files
Installing Master Databases
running  ../bin/mysqld --no-defaults --bootstrap --skip-grant-tables     --basedir=.. --datadir=mysql-test/var/master-data --skip-innodb --skip-ndbcluster --skip-bdb
Installing Master Databases 1
running  ../bin/mysqld --no-defaults --bootstrap --skip-grant-tables     --basedir=.. --datadir=mysql-test/var/master-data1 --skip-innodb --skip-ndbcluster --skip-bdb
Installing Slave Databases
running  ../bin/mysqld --no-defaults --bootstrap --skip-grant-tables     --basedir=.. --datadir=mysql-test/var/slave-data --skip-innodb --skip-ndbcluster --skip-bdb
Manager disabled, skipping manager start.
Loading Standard Test Databases
Starting Tests

TEST                            RESULT
-------------------------------------------------------
sakila                         [ pass ]
-------------------------------------------------------

Ending Tests
Shutting-down MySQL daemon

Master shutdown finished
Slave shutdown finished
All 1 tests were successful.

Now, of surprise with my present version of 5.1.7 beta, a number of statements from the sakila-schema failed.
You can download my working version of the sakila.test from above here. The first failure was:

TEST                            RESULT
-------------------------------------------------------
sakila2                        [ fail ]

Errors are (from /opt/mysql/mysql-test/var/log/mysqltest-time) :
mysqltest: At line 220: query ';
CREATE TRIGGER `ins_film` AFTER INSERT ON `film` FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
INSERT INTO film_text (film_id, title, description)
VALUES (new.film_id, new.title, new.description);
END;;
CREATE TRIGGER `upd_film` AFTER UPDATE ON `film` FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
IF (old.title != new.title) or (old.description != new.description)
THEN
UPDATE film_text
SET title=new.title,
description=new.description,
film_id=new.film_id
WHERE film_id=old.film_id;
END IF;
END;;
CREATE TRIGGER `del_film` AFTER DELETE ON `film` FOR EACH ROW BEGIN
DELETE FROM film_text WHERE film_id = old.film_id;
END;;
DELIMITER ;
--' failed: 1065: Query was empty
(the last lines may be the most important ones)

Now is the time to upgrade to the latest 5.1.11 beta to confirm operations and isolate the errors into smaller tests, and hopefully all is well, if not, I’ve got something to contribute back.

QMail Admin

For some reason my vqadmin failed to create a new mail domain?? I know I had some /home permissions problems, but that was quite some time ago, perhaps I haven’t added a domain for mail in that time. Anyway, time to refresh my skills and software.

vqadmin

Home Page

cd /src
wget http://www.inter7.com/vqadmin/vqadmin-2.3.2.tar.gz
tar xvfz vqadmin-2.3.2.tar.gz
cd vqadmin-2.3.2
./configure --enable-cgibindir=/home/vqadmin/cgi-bin --enable-htmldir=/home/vqadmin/www
make && make install-strip
vi /opt/httpd/conf/httpd.include

        deny from all
        Options ExecCGI
        AllowOverride AuthConfig
        Order deny,allow

vi /home/vqadmin/cgi-bin/vqadmin/.htaccess
AuthType Basic
AuthUserFile /home/vqadmin/.passwd
AuthName vQadmin
require valid-user
satisfy any
chown nobody /home/vqadmin/cgi-bin/vqadmin/.htaccess
chmod 644 /home/vqadmin/cgi-bin/vqadmin/.htaccess
htpasswd -bc /home/vqadmin/.passwd admin admin_password
chmod 644 /home/vqadmin/.passwd
apachectl stop
apachectl start

All fixed. For a step by step guide to all Qmail software I recommend http://qmailrocks.org

Using Cascade in Foreign Keys

For those that are using a Referential Integrity based Storage Engine in MySQL, the use of Foreign Keys can provide an extra level of data integrity within your application. There are of course caveats to this statement, such as correct design, proper transactional use etc, but that’s a topic for another time. The use of CASCADE has an effect on this.

So, just a quick refresher, using the MySQL Sakila Sample Database (if you don’t have it, get it. This can be a valuable tool in many other areas). Let’s first check out the Schema Diagram. We will look at the first relationship in the top left corner of the diagram.

There is a defined relationship with the actor and film_actor tables. An actor record can belong to one or more film_actor records, and a film_actor record must have one corresponding actor record.

Schema Definition

CREATE TABLE actor (
  actor_id SMALLINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  first_name VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
  last_name VARCHAR(45) NOT NULL,
  last_update TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  PRIMARY KEY  (actor_id),
  KEY idx_actor_last_name (last_name)
)ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

CREATE TABLE film_actor (
  actor_id SMALLINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  film_id SMALLINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  last_update TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP ON UPDATE CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  PRIMARY KEY  (actor_id,film_id),
  KEY idx_fk_film_id (`film_id`),
  CONSTRAINT fk_film_actor_actor FOREIGN KEY (actor_id)
         REFERENCES actor (actor_id) ON DELETE RESTRICT ON UPDATE CASCADE,
  CONSTRAINT fk_film_actor_film FOREIGN KEY (film_id)
         REFERENCES film (film_id) ON DELETE RESTRICT ON UPDATE CASCADE
)ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

Explanation

The above shows the CREATE TABLE syntax as provided in Version 0.8 of the Sakila Sample Database. Looking specifically at the constraint we wish analyse.

  CONSTRAINT fk_film_actor_actor FOREIGN KEY (actor_id)
         REFERENCES actor (actor_id) ON DELETE RESTRICT ON UPDATE CASCADE,

The FOREIGN KEY for a specific column REFERENCES an appropiate table and column, and includes optional UPDATE and DELETE actions.

The ON DELETE RESTRICT is indeed optional as this is the default operation, but is a good practice for both readibility and future compatibility.
The ON UPDATE CASCADE in this case, is indeed unwarranted as the actor primary key is an AUTO_INCREMENT column and should never be updated. By good design definition, a PRIMARY KEY should never be updated in a table, and then should be set to RESTRICT. If however you ever wish to update a primary key value in RESTRICT mode, you can’t as to first UPDATE children before the parent is to set the value to an unknown value that values validation. The best approach here is always use AUTO_INCREMENT primary keys, and never update the values.

Use

So let’s take the current implementation for a spin to see how the default RESTRICTED implementation operates.

mysql> select count(*) from film_actor where actor_id=1;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|       19 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.05 sec)
mysql> start transaction;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> delete from actor where actor_id=1;
ERROR 1451 (23000): Cannot delete or update a parent row: a foreign key constraint fails
    (`sakila/film_actor`, CONSTRAINT `fk_film_actor_actor` FOREIGN KEY (`actor_id`) REFERENCES `actor` (`actor_id`)
   ON UPDATE CASCADE)
mysql> rollback;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)

As you can see, an attempt to delete an actor fails due to a foreign key constraint failure.

The correct implementation for this design is to delete child relationships first. For example.

mysql> start transaction;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> delete from film_actor where actor_id=1;
Query OK, 19 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> delete from actor where actor_id=1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> rollback;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.06 sec)

Let’s now try CASCADE.

mysql> alter table film_actor drop foreign key fk_film_actor_actor;
Query OK, 5462 rows affected (0.78 sec)
Records: 5462  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
mysql> alter table film_actor add CONSTRAINT `fk_film_actor_actor` FOREIGN KEY (`actor_id`) REFERENCES `actor` (`actor_id`) ON DELETE CASCADE;
Query OK, 5462 rows affected (0.69 sec)
Records: 5462  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0
mysql> start transaction;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from film_actor where actor_id=1;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|       19 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.01 sec)
mysql> delete from actor where actor_id=1;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
mysql> select count(*) from film_actor where actor_id=1;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
|        0 |
+----------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)
mysql> rollback;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

As you can see, by changing the definition to CASCADE, the requirement to delete all child rows is nullified.

Considerations

When designing I try to avoid the use of CASCADE. While it has it’s benefits, it is a “catch” by the database, and can hide poor design and coding techniques. In can however in more heavily loaded systems, provide a performance improvement, as additional commands for deleting don’t incur the network communications overhead. I’ll need to add this as a note to my performance testing guidelines to see what effect this has.

Another benefit on a more strict approach is MySQL for example currently does not fire triggers resulting on cascading constraint operations.

Try it yourself

As you can see it’s easy to use. To try it yourself.

  • Use an appropiate storage engine, e.g. InnoDB. You can use ALTER TABLE [table] ENGINE=InnoDB; on your tables.
  • Add an index to the target (foreign key) column, your source (primary key) will have an index by definition of being a primary key.
  • Ensure your source and target columns are the same data type
  • Create the appropiate constraint.

While the MySQL Manual refers to both the source (primary) and target (foreign) columns must have Indexes, I’ve found this not to be the case in 5.1. An ALTER TABLE will auto create the target (foreign) columns index if it doesn’t exist.

Just note, traps for young players. Both the source (primary) and target (foreign) columns must have the identical datatype definition. A common problem I’ve seen is that UNSIGNED is used for a Primary Key definition and not for a foreign key definition.

References
Wikipedia definition of “Referential Integrity”
MySQL Manual Page – FOREIGN KEY Constraints
MySQL Sakila Sample Database Forum
MySQL Forge Wiki on Sakila Sample Database

Guidelines for managing embedded external project dependencies

I’ve yet to find any Java project that doesn’t have dependancies on some other Open Source external libraries. I’ve yet to find a Java project that manages these external dependencies appropiately for support and integration at an enterprise level.

As with most projects, understanding an applying sound principles that scale will help you at a later date, and generally the cost of implementation is minimual at the start, but of course becomes more expensive when it’s really needed. The classic case is Version Control. For over 10 years, even on small single developer projects, I’ve used Version Control, it should be taught at university as an introduction to good programming design, it would greatly benefit software development and maintenance.

Back onto the topic of hand. Let’s use a moderate Java Web Based application, and for the purposes of this discussion the following Open Source external libraries are incoporated. Log4J, JUnit, Canoo WebTest, MySQL JDBC, Apache Commons (Collections, DHCP, Pool, HTTPClient, Taglibs Mailer). I could continue, but this will suffice for the demonstration.

It’s very easy for your project to include the appropiate jar’s such as (log4j.jar, junit.jar, commons-pool.jar etc), however this is where support and integration with other products fall down.

A Controlled Approach

You need to keep a seperate repository (under source code control of course) of your external libraries, and this becomes the source across all corporate projects. This is to include the following for each library:

  • The actual deployed jar
  • The matching source code of the deployed jar
  • Java Documentation of deployed jar

Versioning

Log4J is an example of an Open Source project that does version their jars, will many other open source projects do not. Why don’t they? Well one reason is to enable people to upgrade easily but simply overriding existing versions, and processes that have specific CLASSPATH’s are not affected. Generally today, implementations of software include all jar’s within a specified directory so I don’t see the problem.
Log4J gives in this example a log4j-1.2.12.jar for deployment purposes. When libraries do not include a version number, the are to be specifically added. This adds another small delemma of standards. The general practice is to use the hyphen ‘-‘. followed by the product version using the full-stop ‘.’, however there are projects that don’t follow this.

Version Recording

So now we have for each external library, an appropiately versioned jar, and matching source and documentation. This is the initial baseline. What’s needed is a simple HTML index that manages this information for use. The Index should include:

  • Product Name
  • Product URL
  • Repository Version
    • Version Number
    • Version Date
    • Download Date
  • Latest Version
    • Version number
    • Date
    • Comment

You may ask, why do you record the Latest Version, when the practice should be to always get the latest version. JUnit is a good example, the present version 4.x, requires a JDK 1.5.x deployment, and if your application is running only 1.4.x, then you can only use older 3.8.x versions.s mentioned earlier,

Management

Having an index of external libraries is one thing, correct use and management is the most important step. Let’s assume we have taken the time to download and document the required libraries from our example, and everything has been deployed into our first project.

Now, a 2/3 month task of checking for updated versions can be scheduled. Withing this process, newer versions can be downloaded and recorded appropiately. In our example, Log4J now has 1.2.13. Updating the external libraries repository is the simple part, the next step is to notify all coporate projects of the new version, and to encourage uptake. This may not always occur in a timely manner, but with at least this baseline in place and when there are issues, standardisation on the known coporate version is the first step.

Dependencies

Within each project libaries, a readme that details which versions of which external jars are included andwhen they were last updated from the repository should be done. Noting this information with the both the external libraries repository and the project repository provides a paper trail. In addition, should there be any exceptions, this is the place this information can be reported.

External Projects

Canoo WebTest is a good example of an external project that also includes other external libraries such as Log4J, JUnit, HtmlUnit, NekoHtml.
Problems arise when these products may use and implement older or unknown versions of libraries.

Internal Projects

Having internal projects that are dependent on other internal projects is nothing new in a large corporate enterprise. The problem arises when a spaghetti of undocumented dependancies causes a management nightmare. Let’s take this real life example.

Product A has included jars of Product B, Product C, Product D and Product E. The Product C actually has a different version of Product D embedded within in. Product D which now is included twice also includes Product E, so there are now three copies of this, all are different in size, and all a binary only with no version numbers, and no corresponding matching source code. Does this sound bad? Well it is. How it ever worked is still amazing.

This mess could have been managed first with Version Control (a basic 101 in software development), and an appropiate management of external libraries, and a similar approach to internal libraries.

An Example

This is a great example to highlight the cost in lack of appropiate management. I was supporting an existing large scale project (1000+ users) (let’s call this Product A), and the integration of a new project (let’s call this Product B) had been passed from the development team for implementation, testing and release. A threaded process, it would simply just hang after some initialisation, no notice, no errors, just nothing. Not withstanding that something should have been better reported for the errors. Due to 7 possible log files between the software application and the application server, nothing was reported, but that’s another topic.

The final result was Product B had introduced the use of org.apache.log4j.Logger.trace(), a new more granular logging then debug(). The appropiate Log4J jar had been included in the product, and this was Version 1.2.12. However, Product A, which was using Product B, was bundled with an earlier version of Log4J, Version 1.2.8, and this version didn’t support this new method.

While it took a few hours of debugging to find this problem, it was made easier because at least these jar’s were version, of the 20-30 jars across products only 3-4 were versioned. Similar problems with QName and XMLBeans unamed jars prior to this took days to resolve (indeed one had to be worked around as it couldn’t be resolved).

A further complication in this process was when Product B was introduced. This was developed and built under Linux, while Product A was still being maintained under Windows. From the experience of Integration is was found that the order of loading within the classloader of a commerical application server differed between operating systems.