If you host a Typo3 installation at a provider where you don’t have shell access, need a custom cron job for the Typo3 scheduler and the host’s configuration interface (Plesk, for instance) is somehow cumbersome (for instance, it may limit your cron job to a chrooted shell and PHP isn’t installed the chroot environment, so you can’t start PHP scripts from there), you can try to install a Typo3 Web shell extension. Then check for existing cron jobs:

crontab -l

If you see some environment variable definitions, remember them. There may be a SHELL= restricting you to a chroot shell – in this case you may choose to remove this environment variable in your custom crontab. Now write your custom crontab, put it into fileadmin and call

crontab …

This is the english translation of an article in my german blog. This article, like the german original, is licensed CC-BY-SA. The english translation has been kindly provided by Tobias Klausmann.

Recently, I had to explain this to several people, hence a writeup for the blog for easier reference. The question: I have content in my database that can be sucessfully read and written by my application, but if I do a mysqldump to transfer the data to a new system, all the non-ASCII characters like Umlauts are destroyed. This happens if you save data to a DB with the wrong text encoding label.

In MySQL, every string has a label that describes the character encoding the string was written in (and should be interpreted in). The string …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.61-13.2 on February 10th, 2012 (Downloads are available from Percona Server 5.1.61-13.2 downloads and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.61, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.61-13.2 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona ‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.61-13.2 milestone at Launchpad.

…

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.5 on 10 February, 2012 (Downloads are available here and from the Percona Software Repositories).

This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona XtraBackup.

There are some important bug fixes around incremental backups, parallel backups and backups on databases with the system tablespace being multiple files. The full release notes and details are available here: http://www.percona.com/doc/percona-xtrabackup/release-notes/1.6/1.6.5.html

After completing my recent ‘downloads‘ page (similar to my ‘changelogs‘, ‘documentation‘, and ‘server variables‘ pages), it occurred to me that I should add a ‘bugs‘ page as well.

So, I’ve added a bug page, which has links to the main bug listing/reporting pages for MySQL, MariaDB (Aria), Drizzle, Percona Server (XtraDB), Xtrabackup, Sphinx, MONyog, and SQLyog (thus far).

Bug Page:

http://www.chriscalender.com/?page_id=876

Hope this helps.

…

A couple of users of our very popular MySQL Configuration Wizard have submitted feedback such as “I’d love to input my existing server settings and get suggestions on how to improve it.”

This sounds like it would be great, doesn’t it? We’ve considered doing this, and even partially implemented it. But during our pre-release testing, we found a lot of potentially serious problems with the idea. It turns out to be very subtle — perhaps too subtle to be done with any computer program, no matter how smart, because there might be a lot of assumptions it’s forced to make, which could turn out to be dangerous. Every approach we considered carried a high risk of de-optimizing a server so it performs worse than before.

So in the end, although our tool is excellent for creating a starting my.cnf, my old blog post about the …

I just wanted to share my steps for building MariaDB 5.3 on Windows. (Note, this is not much different than the instructions Wlad posted here).

But, things are not always so smooth, and of course I ran into a couple small issues, so I wanted to share my outputs plus those issues and their solutions (once again many thanks go to Wlad!) for those out there who might encounter the same.

Here are the steps to build:

1. Download MariaDB 5.3 and extracted to C:\mariadb-5.3

2. cd C:\mariadb-5.3

3. mkdir bld

4. cd bld

5. cmake .. -G "Visual Studio 9 2008"

6.     cmake --build . --config relwithdebinfo --target package

* …

I have been attempting to be better about letting folks in the general MySQL world know when the videos from the Boston MySQL User Group are up. We have a great group, with anywhere from 20-50 attendees each month, and the speakers are always great, even when the group asks some tough questions.* Thanks to the generous donation of time that Richard Laskey puts in editing the videos, there are 2 videos I can share with you:

Ivan Zoratti of SkySQL presented MySQL HA Reloaded at the December MySQL Boston Users Group. Slides are online at http://www.slideshare.net/izoratti/ha-reloaded-11261643

Tim Callaghan of Tokutek presented Fractal Tree Indexes -- Theoretical Overview and Customer Use Cases at the …

Registration for Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo is open! The conference is from Tuesday, April 10th through Thursday, April 12th at the Santa Clara, CA convention center. Early bird pricing ends March 12th, 2012.
Use code PL-pod and save 10% off the early bird prices!. Check out the tutorial and session schedule!

SkySQL and MariaDB Solutions Day on Friday, April 13th, 2012 in Santa Clara, CA.

read more

Good books on databases are rare. So permit me to step out of my normal MySQL-centric role and review a new book that is very good and covers a lot of generic relational database territory while also teaching the basics of Oracle 11g. I would estimate that 10% of the book is 11g and the rest would be valuable to new DBAs of other database systems. Besides, seeing how other databases perform some tasks differently may spur you to improve your own.

OCA Oracle Database 11g: SQL Fundamentals I: A real-world Certification Guide
Author: Steve Reis

Database books are hard to write. Databases are not warm, easy to understand and the many concepts can require a student on the subject to concentrate on many obtuse factors all at one time. Presenting the material in a clear and concise fashion can be hard. Providing examples that show the various concepts without being silly or obtuse is harder. And keeping the book readable …