Read the original article at The Age of the Platform by Phil Simon

I picked up Phil Simon's The Age of the Platform after running into his blog, and some of his writing online. Simon is an interesting guy with an obvious strong technical background. He's also an accomplished speaker and you can find several videos of his speaking online.

The first thing that struck me about this book was how it came to be. The book was funded through Kickstarter, an online platform for people to fund their creative projects. Perhaps it was Simon trying to drive home the point of his book. But it gets better, he self-published the book through Motion Publishing. Furthermore …

I was doing some research on Percona Server, and came across this great tip by Baron: if you are using Oracle’s MySQL and want to test out and learn new/improved features that are present in Percona Server, you can just stop the mysqld instance, extract Percona Server binary from its rpm/deb package or tarball file, swap the binary, and do a successful restart. You can then do a test drive, kick the tires, learn and observe to your heart’s content. Swap the original mysqld back after you are done, as necessary.

I tested it and it worked great for me. Specifically, I did the following:
1. sudo /etc/init.d/mysql(d) stop
2. sudo cp /usr/sbin/mysqld /location/mysqldFromOracleOrWhatever
3. sudo cp /perconaBinaryDirectory/mysqld /usr/sbin/mysqld
4. sudo /etc/init.d/mysql(d) start
5. Test …

In Maximum MySQL Database Size? Nick Duncan wants to find out what the maximum size of his MySQL database can possibly be. He answers that with a list of maximum file sizes per file system type. That is not a useful answer.

While every file system does have a maximum file size, this limitation is usually not relevant when it comes to MySQL maximum database size. But let's start with file systems, anyway.

First: You never want to run a database system on a FAT filesystem, ever. In FAT, a file is a linked list of blocks in the FAT. That is, certain "seek" (backwards seek operations) operations become slower the larger a file is, because the file system has to position the file pointer by traversing the linked list of blocks in the FAT. Since seek operations are basically what a large database does all day, FAT is …

450 revisions after the 6.0 release follows the new 7.0 release of HeidiSQL now. Here are the most noticable changes since the 6.0 release:

- Basic support for Microsoft SQL Server, allowing to execute queries, edit grid data and to do a data-only export
- Introduce a separate dialog for all grid export actions, allowing to set up various options before file is created
- Threaded query execution, including a button to stop long running queries
- Enhanced completion proposal
- Grid editing support for binary primary keys
- Implement multi statements in one go for query tabs, to speed up large scripts with many single queries
- User manager: Random password proposals in dropdown menus
- User manager: Support account resource limits
- User manager: Support SSL settings
- Support pluggable authentication on MariaDB 5.2 and MySQL 5.5.7
- Indicate MariaDB and Percona Server …

450 revisions after the 6.0 release follows the new 7.0 release of HeidiSQL now. Here are the most noticable changes since the 6.0 release:

- Basic support for Microsoft SQL Server, allowing to execute queries, edit grid data and to do a data-only export
- Introduce a separate dialog for all grid export actions, allowing to set up various options before file is created
- Threaded query execution, including a button to stop long running queries
- Enhanced completion proposal
- Grid editing support for binary primary keys
- Implement multi statements in one go for query tabs, to speed up large scripts with many single queries
- User manager: Random password proposals in dropdown menus
- User manager: Support account resource limits
- User manager: Support SSL settings
- Support pluggable authentication on MariaDB 5.2 and MySQL 5.5.7
- Indicate MariaDB and Percona Server …

[Typo3 tt_news] How to fix "No news in this list":

Do you always get “no news in this list” (in German: “Keine News in dieser Ansicht”) although tt_news is correctly set up? Then maybe it’s because you have a LATEST plugin somewhere and the items shown there are not displayed in a LIST anymore. To avoid this, add

plugin.tt_news.excludeAlreadyDisplayedNews = 0

to your template (TypoScript setup).

There is a documentation bug that states it’s off by default, but it’s on…

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