Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0 on June 1st, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.5.24, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.5.24-26.0 is now the current stable release in the 5.5 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.5.24-26.0 milestone at Launchpad.

New Features:

• …

Where to host a dynamic website that stores all its content on Amazon S3? Anywhere you choose to.

OblakSoft is pleased to announce availability of an OVF Virtual Appliance with ready-to-run WordPress on S3: Yapixx.  Now WordPress on S3 can run anywhere, not just in Amazon EC2.

Any web server

The virtual appliance is distributed in the Open Virtualization Format that is supported by most major hypervisor software vendors (such as VMware, VirtualBox, Oracle VM, etc.).  The virtual appliance (one-file OVA package) contains the same software components as the corresponding Yapixx Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

The Yapixx VM has the …

MySQL Innovation Day is just a few short days way and it has a great agenda this year. Be sure to take advantage of this free event, you can register to attend the event in-person or register to attend the event on-line. 

The agenda will include some great content regardless of how you attend.

Opening Keynote: What’s New and Cool in MySQL 

Lightning Talks:

Better Availability with InnoDB Online Operations

• Calvin …

Martin Farach-Colton and I ran a Tutorial on Algorithms for Memory Sensitive Computing on May 18th at the 44th ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) at NYU. Here is the program for the tutorial.

Erik Demaine (MIT) spoke on the History of I/O Models. Throughout the years, a remarkable variety of computational models have been proposed to explain the effects of caching, data locality, prefetching, and single-and multi-level memory hierarchies. Erik traced the intellectual history and connections between these models. Most approaches now sit on shelves. (For example, lower bounds on the cache and I/O …

Taxonomy upgrade extras: mysqltalkconferencefroscon

Also this year we will have a special track for MySQL, Galera, Percona und MariaDB at the FrOSCon in St. Augustin in Germany. The conference is scheduled for August 25 and 26 2012.

Together with the PostgreSQL people we are organizing a sub-conference for Open Source RDBMS there. Now we are looking for interesting talks about MySQL and related techniques like Galera, Percona, MariaDB. The only restriction for the talks is: They must be about an Open Source topic.

We encourage you to …

MySQL Cluster running on Raspberry Pi

I start a long weekend tonight and it’s the kids’ last day of school before their school holidays and so last night felt like the right time to play a bit. This week I received my Raspberry Pi – if you haven’t heard of it then you should take a look at the Raspberry Pi FAQ - basically it’s a ridiculously cheap ($25 or $35 if you want the top of the range model) ARM based PC that’s the size of a credit card.

A knew I had to have one to play with but what to do with it? Why not start by porting MySQL Cluster onto it? We always claim that Cluster runs on commodity hardware – surely this would be the ultimate test of that claim.

I chose the customised version of Debian – you have to …

I have spent some free time developing this tool that loads JSON data into MySQL. And yes, I know there are some other means of doing this, but in my case, yes, this was done with a particular purpose in mind, I needed something different. Something that could load a lot of JSON data real fast.


The program is a C program, it uses the Jansson library for JSON parsing (I really like this library by the way. It's available here: http://www.digip.org/jansson/) and it is multi threaded (configurable number of loading threads) and uses MySQL INSERT arrays.

You want to try it? It's available on sourceforge download. The program comes with some basic documentation, which is also available as a separate download, and uses the usual configure / make process to build it. …

I had to install Percona XtraDB Cluster, I think for the first time since it was announced stable. I remembered many problems I faced with beta releases, which was understandable given they were only for a preview, but this time I hoped for significant improvements.

I have to say I am generally quite sensitive about simple problems that could/should be easily discovered and corrected. Well, it didn’t take five minutes to see a few of such problems. These minutes I spent installing the database binaries from Percona Yum repository. It turned out that was enough to see a lot of errors for no reason. Not a good thing.

[..]
  Installing : 1:Percona-XtraDB-Cluster-server-5.5.23-23.5.333.rhel6.x86_64         5/5
ls: cannot access /var/lib/mysql/*.err: No such file or directory
ls: cannot access /var/lib/mysql/*.err: No such file or directory
[Note] Flashcache bypass: disabled

Why does it matter that ls: cannot access …

In this blog we discuss invalid dates in MySQL, how to retrieve them using Connector/Python and we raise the question: Should Connector/Python raise an error or just keep returning None on invalid dates?

If you run MySQL without proper SQL Modes, you will be able to update and
read invalid dates such as ’2012-06-00′. If you’ve payed attention the past decade, you’ll know that you can prevent this configuring your MySQL server setting SQL Mode to ‘TRADITIONAL’.

Now, the problem if this is allowed, how do we get invalid dates using MySQL Connector/Python?

Lets look at an example inserting an invalid date and trying to read it again using MySQL Connector/Python:

>>> cur = …

Often application needs to know where a user is physically located. The easiest way to figure that out is by looking up their IP address in a special database. It can all be implemented in MySQL, but I often see it done inefficiently. In my post I will show how to implement a complete solution that offers great performance.

Importing Geo IP data

First you will require a database mapping network addresses to real locations. There are various resources available, but I chose the one nginx web server uses with its geoip module. GeoLite City comes in CSV format and is available for download with no charge from MaxMind.

The archive contains two files. GeoLiteCity-Blocks.csv lists all IP ranges and maps each one to the corresponding location identifier, while …