This week, after 3 months in the works, we’ve finally released version 1.7.0 of DbCharmer ruby gem – Rails plugin that significantly extends ActiveRecord’s ability to work with multiple databases and/or database servers by adding features like multiple databases support, master/slave topologies support, sharding, etc.

New features in this release:

• Rails 3.0 support. We’ve worked really hard to bring all the features we supported in Rails 2.X to the new version of Rails and now I’m proud that we’ve implemented them all and the implementation looks much cleaner and more universal (all kinds of relations in rails 3 work in exactly the same way and we do not need to implement connection switching for all kinds of weird corner-cases in ActiveRecord).
• Forced Slave Reads functionality. Now …

As announced on the Maatkit and Aspersa mailing lists, Daniel and I have created a new toolkit that represents the union of the two, and will be focusing efforts on this Percona Toolkit moving forward. The goal is to make them simpler and significantly more powerful, and to create more tools. The tools will continue to be open-source, but will be developed primarily to meet our MySQL support and consulting staff’s needs.

I am obsessed with making things faster without spending an extraordinary amount of time reconstructing the wheel. I ran into an issue with sending mail-that I couldn't work around with a pure sendmail configuration. I needed to write the body of mail and have it queue, then sendmail send it. From the way sendmail works I couldn't force mail to queue then send without doing ugly hacks like blocking outbound port 25 connections. I tried all the common tweaks to make sendmail send faster, such as

  disabling sendmail from using dns
 Using options such as FEATURE(`accept_unresolvable_domains') and FEATURE(`nocanonify')

but none worked. In fact I was generating so much traffic that sendmail would refuse to accept anymore commands. Thus I lost emails. Let me describe some background of the setup and the growth rate to …

Save the date ! Tuesday, October 04, 2011 7:00 PM – 9:00 PMYou’re all invited to Oracle’s MySQL Community Reception. This event is open to everyone. No OpenWorld registration is required to attend.
Register Now !

I will be speaking at Oracle Open World on MySQL for Oracle DBAs, or How to Speak MySQL for Beginners on Tuesday, October 4th in the Golden Gate B room in the Marriot Marquis. And at the same time down the hall, Sunny Bains will be presenting on InnoDB Performance Tuning. And just a short time later there will be a MySQL Community Reception.

Webinar, Thursday, September 8th at 10am PT/1pm ET

MySQL is great for front-end web facing applications. Oracle has proven itself in the demanding back-end data warehouse and reporting solutions. But how to bridge MySQL and Oracle together without paying an arm and a leg for Oracle's GoldenGate replication solution?

In this webcast we'll describe how to design real-time cross-database

How many in your household again?

One of President John Kennedy’s most memorable phrases is “ask not what your country can do for you –  ask what can you do for your country”.  I got to thinking about this over lunch with a fellow colleague in the big data space. After comparing named customers for a while, we realized we had forgotten one of the biggest “big data” customers whom we both have in common – the government.

Whether you believe in small or big government, one thing is for certain – it has some very big data on its hands. Some of this is freely available, such as the …

MapR and Funambol raise funding. VMware virtually supports PostgreSQL. And more.

# MapR raised $20m series B for its Hadoop distribution from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners and NEA.

# Funambol raised $3m in funding from previous investors HIG Ventures, Pacven Walden Ventures and Nexit Infocom.

# VMware launched vFabric Postgres as part of vFabric Data Director database-as-a-service launch.

# Citrix released a new edition of CloudStack, …

Database Administration and Management is as important under MySQL as it is under other enterprise database platforms such as Oracle or SQL Server.  Be proactive with your database operations, and avoid outage or loss of your most crucial data.

• MySQL Management and administration
• MySQL Performance, Optimization & tuning
• Remote Database Management
• Database monitoring & metrics collection
• MySQL Security Auditing
• Migrating applications and data to MySQL
• Migrating MySQL to the Amazon cloud
• Migrating MySQL to Amazon RDS
• Amazon RDS management & administration
• MySQL scalability
• Amazon RDS scalability
• MySQL High Availability
• MySQL Disaster Recovery
• Database Management & replication for highly available architectures
• Database security in the cloud

…

WikiLeaks Cable Offers New Insights into Oracle-Sun Deal (PC World)

Nothing too new or shocking in there, but the cable does offer some interesting insights.