Finding a proper license for our BigData Software «i(2)»

Usually, all the hip web2.0 guys that recently got VC money start their first blog post with laying out their vision, telling the world that their invention will mean a revolution to everybody's daily life. I will not do so.

Instead, I am free to admit: I don't know what the heck I'm actually doing right now. To make a long story short: we are writing software that shall be a toolkit for data-driven software. Think of the role of Hadoop for processing unstructed data or RoR for developing web-apps. We aim to produce a toolkit and framework to really simplify the creation of advanced data-driven software — non-humbly speaking, the Ruby-on-Rails for data-driven apps.

Now this if far-off from being concrete enough to give you a basic understanding of what we do, clearly a topic for a future blog post. Instead, this post shall be about an obvious question: which …

The MySQL database is a crucial part of a wide variety of products, particularly web applications. Naturally, it is very important to monitor the health status of MySQL.  However, there is constant disagreement on which of the many MySQL status variables provide the best overview on MySQL health status and indicate that something is not right with a server.

It certainly depends on what your application does – tuning read performance is different than optimizing write operations and everything changes when you have a cluster. The average user can use small subset of variables while advanced user want to get more detailed picture of the situation. So there cannot be one set of “magic variables” to quietly optimize every situation. However, it is possible to have a more-or-less optimal set of metrics that will allow to get a “good enough” notion about the general health status of MySQL Server.

The new white paper “ …

Heartbeat is a project from Linux-HA. http://www.linux-ha.org/wiki/Heartbeat. Heartbeat will be helpful when we would have pair and/or more servers which are configured to replicate in circular fashion. I.e  In MySQL Replication, if master will be fail we have to do manually failover or we have to make script which will manage this thing. But if [...]

When asked this question a flurry of thoughts came to me and I stuttered to get them out. Here is my list and the reasons why. Note the basics of my reasoning comes from the desire not to wake up at night to fix a bug.


Agree to a base language:

Syntactic sugar should be agreed upon. Building things in different languages at the start without the teams acknowledgement is just building a walled garden.

Agree to use the same code format:
The team needs to agree to make the code look the same. Make a decision on tabs over spaces, DOS or UNIX format, class / directory layout, MVC or procedural etc.

Agree to a source code repo:
Revisions are good, use source control

Agree to a bug tracking system:
Don't just use email or spreadsheets use a free open source bug database and make an interface for users to add bugs. If a user is …

There are been many non-quantifiable (but valid) reasons why the bugs database at http://bugs.mysql.com should remain open and have as many bugs open to the public as possible.  However, while researching an article recently I uncovered a simple, concrete reason why the bugs database needs to stay as open as possible:

So we know when to upgrade.  Really!  I was looking at the CHANGELOG pages for MySQL 5.5 and was trying to figure out which changes were pushed into MySQL 5.5 along with being pushed into MySQL 5.1 and which were unique to MySQL 5.5.  

While it is fairly simple to figure out some of that -- for instance, all of the patches regarding semisynchronous replication are unique to MySQL 5.5 - it was not clear on most of the fixes, particularly the bug patches. …

I’ve been accepted to present at the brand-new and very exciting Postgres Open 2011 about system scaling, TCP traffic, and mathematical modeling. I’m really looking forward to it — it will be my first PostgreSQL conference in a couple of years! See you there.

Related posts:

1. Postgres folks, consider the 2011 MySQL conference
2. O’Reilly MySQL 2011 conference CfP is open
3. My sessions at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2011
4. …

This was a sad day for me. I once, when I was at MySQL, was a big fan of a better installer for MySQL on Windows. Something that would install all you wanted on just Windows, in a way applicable for Windows and integrating with the appropriate Windows products. So installing MySQL would not just install MySQL, it would also install the Visual Studio plugin for MySQL, for example, if you so requested (and the installer might even be so smart so it could check if VS was installed, and then ask you politely if you wanted the plugin). The same goes for ODBC drivers, .NET drivers and what have you not.

Fact is, I had this idea a long time ago and was promoting it inside MySQL with my usual frenzy when I think I have a good idea, although I wasn't the first to have this idea.

So, now, after all these years, and I have even left MySQL since, this Installer is soon ready for prime time, MySQL Installer is at it's last RC before …

I wanted to download MySQL Proxy 0.72 (the latest stable to my best knowledge) but I found ..

1) This page: http://www.mysql.com/downloads/ does not list MySQL proxy at all.

2) Anyway all versions up to 0.81 are available from FTP mirrors (like ftp://ftp.easynet.be/mysql/Downloads/MySQL-Proxy/) so I was able to get my hands on it.

Accidentially I found shortly after that ..

3) This page: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/ (only) has 0.81 ALPHA listed.

4) Here http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=61474 MySQL supporter references a version 0.9 that is nowhere referenced on mysql.com nor dev.mysql.com but seems available from Launchpad.

It happens that sometimes you need to access a remote box which supports ssh key authentication. Recently I was trying to reproduce a bug related to SSH public key authentication, so here I would like to share some of my experience.

There will be no explanation of the public key authentication itself here, rather the actual setup and steps to have a public key auth for Windows(client) -> Linux(server) working. Why Windows you would ask? Because interactions for Linux->Linux and for Mac OS X -> Linux simply work using the Unix way, while for Windows you may need some extra actions to do.

Setup

What I had at endpoints:

• Linux –

Ubuntu 11.04, sshd is set up to deny password auth.
Windows – well, it is an XP SP3 i386 box. MySQL Workbench 5.2.34+ is installed

First of all I created an encrypted pair of RSA keys, …

All DBAs understand the importance and priority of quick, reliable database backup and recovery operations.  In fact, dating back to my early days with MySQL, the most commonly requested product features from the MySQL user base have been around online, non-blocking backup solutions for running MySQL servers.  In response, Oracle now provides MySQL Enterprise Backup ("MEB") which performs high performant, online "hot" backups for MySQL databases.  MEB provides all of the backup/recovery features and functionality DBAs expect, all from a scriptable command line interface.  You can learn all about MEB in the related MySQL docs.

My congratulations and appreciation go out to Lars Thalmann and the MySQL Enterprise Backup engineering team for the …