The latest from the MySQL community

As you probably know, I recently finished writing a book with a few co-authors. I kept notes along the way and wanted to describe the process for those who are thinking about writing a book, too.

Update: see the followup post for more of the story, including my editor’s responses.

I think it’s important to be objective; my purpose here is to help prospective authors get a feeling of what it’s like, and it’s not all good (but I’d encourage people to do it anyway). Hopefully I won’t come off as sounding peeved at anyone or like I’m trying to put people down. I’ll have a lot to say about what went right and wrong, and how it helped and hindered the process.

Please excuse the rambling nature of this post. I’d love to …

I have in front of me a contract which I've signed and am sending out today. It's a contract to write a book for Wiley/Wrox titled "Developing Web Applications with Perl, Memcached, MySQL and Apache". I have never written a book before, so I'm wondering what this experience will be like. It seems like a huge task but one that I think I can handle both in terms of my experience and ability. This book is slated to be around 500 pages covering what the title suggests, of course in detail. Originally, Memcached wasn't included, but I thought that it's become an ever-increasingly used tool that is part of the LAMP stack (LAMMP?).

My goal is to create a book that helps web developers be able to build web applications using Perl as the language, MySQL as the database, Memcached as a read-through or write-through cache, Apache as the web server platform. With this book I hope create more interest in Perl web development. There are so many …

This weekend our networking guys decided to change ips for all of our servers. They also changed our subversion server’s ip. This caused some issues in the subversion world with developers who had checkouts pointing to ips instead of hostname, using command similar to:

svn co svn+ssh://192.168.1.10/svn/myrepos/ /home/mycheckout/

Now when they do “svn update” inside the their /home/mycheckout/ directory, they get an error:

We needed to point the checkout to the new ip. Easiest way to do this is to delete your checkout and re-checkout. Unfortunately, some of the developers had a lot of modified files which wasn’t checked in yet. I fixed it by issuing:

find /home/mycheckout -name "entries"|xargs /usr/bin/perl -w -i -p -e "s/192.168.1.10/10.1.1.10/g"

Find command helps us in finding all the files with name “entries” and xargs takes the filename and passes it to …

I have been using Maatkit in a different way since I joined Percona as a consultant. When I’m working on a system now, it’s a new, unfamiliar system — not one where I have already installed my favorite programs. And that means I want to grab my favorite productivity tools fast.

I intentionally wrote the Maatkit tools so they don’t need to be “installed.” You just run them, that’s all. But I never made them easy to download.

I fixed that. Now, at the command line, you can just run this:

wget http://www.maatkit.org/get/mk-table-sync

Now it’s ready to run. Behind the scenes are some Apache mod_rewrite rules, a Perl script or two, and Subversion. When you do this, you’re getting the latest code from Subversion’s trunk.[1][2] (I like to run on the bleeding edge. Releases are for people who want …

Update: Karanbir says “Just one thing to keep in mind is that we dont want too many people using it from the Testing repository - we only need enough feedback to move it from testing to stable ( and to be honest, there are already 8 people who have said yes it works - so move to stable should happen within the next 24 - 48 hrs ). Once the package is in stable, users on CentOS4 and 5 wont need to do anything more than just ‘yum install maatkit’ and it will install for them.”

At least one person (Karanbir Singh) is working to get Maatkit into the CentOS repositories, and I believe there might be movement towards RHEL also. From an email to the Maatkit discussion list a little while ago,

I am in the process of getting maatkit into the CentOS-Extras …

I'm pleased to announce the release of DBD::mysql 4.007. This release contains the changes:

* Took out mysql_server_init call where not needed
* Complete re-write of test suit to use Test::More - tons of cleanups!
* Makefile.PL changes to use current user in 'make test' if not defined

The biggest change in this release is a completely re-written test suite now using Test::More. This was something I wanted to do for at least two years. Using Test::More for the test suite makes it so much easier to add, manage and understand the various tests that come with the driver.

The file is:

file: $CPAN/authors/id/C/CA/CAPTTOFU/DBD-mysql-4.007.tar.gz
size: 123516 bytes
md5: 67a4d921acda942aeb0e65a0023f2098

URL:
http://search.cpan.org/~capttofu/DBD-mysql-4.007

…

It’s been a while since I had chance to work on Informeer as my itch was one of multi-user web based password management (AuthStor). Oh and moving house.

Now that things are settling down again (Servers back up and running) I decided to take a break from AuthStor and focus on something new – Informeer.

The concept is simple, Centralised Notification.

I am forever configuring notifications from several sources, be it backup alerts, host monitoring notification and even simple applications that send mail via SMTP. When living in a world of change, both software and business, having to visit every application to change an e-mail address or add a new user to a notification schedule can be quite time consuming. Add to that the effort of having to modify firewalls, SMTP servers and XMPP …

Download MySQL Cacti templates

As promised, I’ve created some improved software for monitoring MySQL via Cacti. I began using the de facto MySQL Cacti templates a while ago, but found some things I needed to improve about them. As time passed, I rewrote everything from scratch. The resulting templates are much improved.

You can grab the templates by browsing the source repository on the project’s homepage.

In no particular order, here are some things I improved:

• Standard polling interval and graph size by default.
• Full captions on every graph; you don’t have to guess at how big the values are. Each graph has current, max, and average values printed at the bottom for every value on …

I am happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.8. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

Below is the list of changes since version 0.6. You may wonder what happened to version 0.7 - it had a rather short life cycle as I was informed about a bug that I fixed quickly before I made a wider release announcement of 0.7.

• Fixed a bug in the InnoDB recovery function: the second mysqld process …

Download Maatkit

Maatkit contains essential command-line utilities for MySQL, such as a table checksum tool and query profiler. It provides missing features such as checking slaves for data consistency, with emphasis on quality and scriptability.

This release contains major bug fixes and new features. Some of the changes are not backwards-compatible. It also contains new tools to help you discover replication slaves and move them around the replication hierarchy.

Changelog for mk-archiver:

2008-03-16: version 1.0.8

   * Added --setvars option (bug #1904689, bug #1911371).
   * Added --charset option (bug #1877548).
   * Changed short form of --analyze to -Z to avoid conflict with --charset.

Changelog for mk-deadlock-logger:

2008-03-16: version 1.0.9

   * Added --setvars option (bug #1904689, bug #1911371).
   * Added 'A' part to DSNs (bug #1877548).

Changelog for …