If you run (or plan to deploy) high availability clusters — with or without DRBD — you might find a new section on our web site handy. Our Technical Guides collection is a compilation of LINBIT expert HA knowledge, which we’re opening up to everyone.

Yes, this also includes PDF versions of the DRBD User’s Guide and the Linux-HA User’s Guide.

More Technical Guides will be added as we go along. LINBIT Cluster Stack support customers will receive new Tech Guides approximately one month before they pop up on …

Monty Program along with various guests and our friends at the recently founded SkySQL recently wrapped up a meeting in Istanbul Turkey. Sadly it rained most days but we had a good time and got a lot done.

Besides learning how to say “Şerefe” which is “Cheers” in Turkish, we discussed the future of MariaDB, our companies goals, the MariaDB knowledge base and many other topics. Since I am the web guy, I lead the presentation / talk on the KB and thought I would share some highpoints of it with you.

If you don’t know, the KB is located at http://kb.askmonty.org. The goal is to provide one location for MariaDB and MySQL documentation along with a place to ask questions (and have developers actually answer them). To start we have both information licensed under the GPL about …

MySQL Cluster in iBooks

MySQL documentation has now been made available in ePub format (fetch the MySQL Cluster versions from http://dev.mysql.com/doc/index-cluster.html ). This format is intended for various book readers.

I’ve tried it on 2 iPhone applications; Apple’s iBooks and the iPhone version of Stanza. The documents render well in both applications but as with most reference books you get the best results if you reduce the font size so that you get more on the screen at once.

With both applications, you can add the books through iTunes but Stanza also has the advantage that if you browse to the document in Opera on the iPhone then it gives you the option of opening it in Stanza – cutting out the need to use iTunes. I also …

For a long time, the MySQL Documentation Team has been providing CHM files for most MySQL documentation we publish. Like many other formats, CHM-format docs can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/doc. CHM (Compiled HTML Help) has been the de facto standard help file format on Windows since 1997, but the technology behind it is outdated and has all kinds of quirks. The successor format introduced with Windows Vista is AP Help, but it hasn't taken off in practice so far. So, with CHM being outdated and AP Help spread anything but widely, lots of vendors have started providing documentation on Windows in PDF or HTML format.

Building CHM-format documentation is a challenge of its own. I'll not go into details here, so let me just state that it requires a dedicated Windows box (or VM), and while it can be automated using Power Shell commands, there's no way to find …

For a long time, the MySQL Documentation Team has been providing CHM files for most MySQL documentation we publish. Like many other formats, CHM-format docs can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/doc. CHM (Compiled HTML Help) has been the de facto standard help file format on Windows since 1997, but the technology behind it is outdated and has all kinds of quirks. The successor format introduced with Windows Vista is AP Help, but it hasn't taken off in practice so far. So, with CHM being outdated and AP Help spread anything but widely, lots of vendors have started providing documentation on Windows in PDF or HTML format.

Building CHM-format documentation is a challenge of its own. I'll not go into details here, so let me just state that it requires a dedicated Windows box (or VM), and while it can be automated using Power Shell commands, there's no way to find …

For a long time, the MySQL Documentation Team has been providing CHM files for most MySQL documentation we publish. Like many other formats, CHM-format docs can be downloaded from http://dev.mysql.com/doc. CHM (Compiled HTML Help) has been the de facto standard help file format on Windows since 1997, but the technology behind it is outdated and has all kinds of quirks. The successor format introduced with Windows Vista is AP Help, but it hasn't taken off in practice so far. So, with CHM being outdated and AP Help spread anything but widely, lots of vendors have started providing documentation on Windows in PDF or HTML format.

Building CHM-format documentation is a challenge of its own. I'll not go into details here, so let me just state that it requires a dedicated Windows box (or VM), and while it can be automated using Power Shell commands, there's no way to find …

I tried the Linux instructions on my Mac, and it worked without need for any changes. Things may be different when you deploy a real set of servers on separate hosts, but it's a good …

Here’s another bit of the API you may need to use in your storage engine (it also seems to be a rather unknown. I believe the only place where this has really been documented is ha_ndbcluster.cc, so here goes….

Drizzle (through inheritance from MySQL) has its own (in memory) row format (it could be said that it has several, but we’ll ignore that for the moment for sanity). This is used inside the server for a number of things. When writing a Storage Engine all you really need to know is that you’re expected to write these into your engine and return them from your engine.

The row buffer format itself is kind-of documented (in that it’s mentioned in the MySQL Internals documentation) but everywhere that’s …

Let me premise this post with the statement I think the MySQL documentation is an excellent and highly accurate resource. I think the MySQL docs team do a great job, however like software and people, documentation is not perfect.

As members of the MySQL community you can always contribute to improve the process by reading the documentation and logging any issues as Documentation Bugs.

Some time ago in a discussion with a friend and colleague, we were talking about changes in historical defaults that had been improved finally in MySQL 5.4 The specific discussion was on the new default innodb_buffer_pool_size and we both agreed it increased significantly. One said 1GB, the other said 128MB. Who was right? Well we both were, and we were both inaccurate depending on versions.

Referencing the 5.4 Manual in …

Just a quick bit of news to let you all know that additions to the standard Kontrollbase and Kontrollkit userguides are being halted while we migrate the documentation to a new wiki system run by the very nice Trac software. You will be able to access the Kontrollbase and Kontrollkit documentation at http://wiki.kontrollsoft.com when it [...]