Happy Holidays!

Black Friday is back. We are happy to offer a 50% flat discount on all Webyog products. Yes, you read it right, fifty percent flat discount. Hurry up, this offer is valid only till 1st Dec 09, 23:59 PST.

Still using SQLyog Community Edition? Held off buying SQLyog Enterprise Edition? This offer is literally too good to pass up. Its time to own your copy of SQLyog Enterprise with all the PowerTools. Check out what Enterprise Edition has to offer.

Worried about your MySQL server’s health? Monitor it like a PRO. Get MONyog – MySQL Monitor & Advisor. Your MySQL DBA in a box! Check what it has to offer.

Want to extend your maintenance period? Don’t think twice, head right away to

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I read the article SQL is dead, Long live SQL and I have to say I really liked it. It spoke about the NoSQL movement and how relational database appeal to analysts.

This struck a cord with me. I always believed that what the regular applications play a small part (perhaps a very small part) of what happens to the data through out its lifetime.
After the data is inputted for the first time, it is analyzed, dissected, made sense of and placed in several reports and KPIs that are called for several times a day/week/month.

The business that paid for the application to be developed needs that data. It is not trivial to them at all. In fact, they may possibly make long term strategic decisions based on that data (in an ideal world). Hopefully, they use that data to improve how they




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In the article ‘Versioning MySQL data‘, I showed the basics of implementing a revisioning system using trigger. As Jens Schauder already pointed out, often the data of a record is spread across multiple tables, like an invoice with multiple invoice lines. Having each invoice line versioned individually isn’t really useful. Instead we want a new revision of the whole invoice on each change.

The perfect solution
Ideally a change of one or more parts of the invoice would be changed, a new revision would be created. There are several issues in actually creating this those. Detecting the change of multiple parts of the invoice at once, generating a single revision, would mean we need to know if the actions are done within the same transaction. Unfortunately there

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Another video from the recent OpenSQLCamp in Portland, Oregon….Earlier today I uploaded the Lightning Talk Videos. Due to the holiday I am unsure when the rest of the videos will be ready. When they are, I will do one blog post featuring them all.

However, I have had several requests for this specific video, so here is Brian Aker speaking about Drizzle.

The slides are up at http://www.slideshare.net/brianaker/drizzle-opensql-camp, and here’s the video:

(Note, I will not do a post for each video…..but since this one is up and ready, I figured I’d do it before I leave for the holiday).

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! Not many folks have blogged about what they learned there….if you missed it, all is not lost. We did take videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded).

All the videos have been processed, and I am working on uploading them to YouTube and filling in details for the video descriptions. Not all the videos are up right now….right now all the lightning talks are up.

• All the lightning talks belowin one continuous video (just over 54 minutes total)
  
• The Graph Engine (Antony Curtis)


• Cluster/J, a new set of Java APIs to

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If you have more then a single MySQL database for your production environment, e.g. a development and test environment, or a MySQL replication topology, ensuring your schema’s are in sync can be task that requires some time if not managed correctly.

There is a tool I do use for MySQL environments called Schema Sync – a MySQL Schema Versioning and Migration Utility. There are many reasons why schema’s get out of sync. Developers may not ensure their changes are reflected in any software to be deployed, and when not tested you could end up with broken functionality. A DBA might try some different index strategies on a slave, but not the master, and never implement or revert.

While some people want the quick and hidden just sync version akin to Rails, I really like this product as it produces proper patch

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It just works. In absence of any MySQL monitoring for your site, I have found no solution that gets you operational as quickly and easily. MONyog can be deployed in 60 seconds, and configured in another 60 seconds. Within 5 minutes you can have visual monitoring of your MySQL environment.

MONyog is an agentless process, which is an advantage for easy install, but does not provide for monitoring redundancy in the capture of information due to agentless nature. It’s a static standalone executable which is great if you need something to work out of the box. You can easily configure multiple servers in a replication topology, or different servers in your environment. You get the ability to monitor all the usual information, with a dashboard and detailed graphs. While MONyog does provide customizations of rules for the graphs and

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Last week I spent some time speaking with Kevin Weil, head of analytics at Twitter. Twitter, from a technology perspective, has had a bit of a hard time due to their stability issues in their early days.  Kevin was keen to point out that he feels this was due to the incomparable growth Twitter was experiencing at the time and their constant struggle to keep up.  Kevin was also keen to show that Twitter prides themselves on striving for engineering excellence, the creation & contribution to new technologies and generally assisting in pushing the boundaries forward.  Our conversation naturally centered on analytics at Twitter.

Twitter, like many web 2.0 apps, started life as a

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I really like ZRM for MySQL Community Edition for backups. I find
it very simple to install and configure and it gets the job done. It's default settings suits most installations. The challenges arise once you need to adapt it to more complex organizations. Please note that all the issues described on this article refer to Linux installations.

What If DBAs Have No sudo?

This was the 1st challenge that I ever faced. ZRM requires full root access at least during installation and in some cases, it requires some sudo permissions to be able to manage its files as well. Some organizations don't grant these permissions to the DBAs complicating the installation. When I looked into the scripts, I didn't see any reason why they wouldn't run in the user space, other

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Ok, this is inspired by another post on the same subject. I would have just commented, but there was a required signup. Ew.


While the method there with juggling grants works fine, I'd like to highlight another way that I think is much simpler: use grep & sed to create a file which contains only the table you want to restore.

mysql> show tables;
+------------------+
| Tables_in_gtowey |
+------------------+
| t1               |
| t2               |
| t3               |
+------------------+
3 rows in set (0.00 sec)

# mysqldump gtowey > dump.sql

Given 3 tables in a mysqldump file, lets restore just t2

# grep -n

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I’ve teamed up with O’Reilly once again to do another webcast this coming January.  In it, I’ll provide a step-by-step live tutorial of setting up DRBD with MySQL on a couple of virtual servers.  After the live demo there will be time for Q&A as well, so hope you all can tune in.

Register here:  DRBD and MySQL – An HA Match Made In Heaven

NorthScale's own Patrick Galbraith has, for many years now, authored and maintained the MySQL, and now Drizzle, UDFs for memcached.  Last week, Patrick took this one step further with the latest release, version 1.1, which now includes support for "check and set" (a.k.a. CAS) operations.  

User Defined Functions are available for a number of different databases.  This allows some kind of stored procedure language or other triggers to execute other code imported into the DB.  In the case of the memcached UDF, this means giving stored procedures the ability to call memcached operations.

The general idea here is pretty simple.  Most applications start with a database, though it's always possible to use web services or flat files.  Regardless of where the data is

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