This is the first screen after a sucessful Drupal 7.22 install.

Drupal is a content management system that runs at least 2.1% of all websites(1). It is easy to use, extensable with over 20,000 add-ons, and runs beautifully with a LAMP stack.

At the heart of most Drupal sites is a MySQL database with, as of Version 7.22, 76 tables. Recently I was asked what needs to be done to a ‘generic’ Drupal to get it running on MySQL 5.6. It is a very easy update that provides better performance, security, and allows access to the newest MySQL 5.6 updates.

For this example, the generic box is a two CPU Dell x86_64 box running Centos 6.4. This is fairly typical of what a low-end hosted system from one of the many web hosting businesses a small busines might rent. Centos 6.4 was installed.

Now to use Yum to get the with the …

April 26, 2013 By Severalnines

This post shows you how to move from a single instance Drupal/MySQL to a multi-server environment. A well designed multi-server deployment not only allows Drupal to scale, but will also enhance redundancy by removing single points of failure. Components used are Apache, PHP, csync2, lsyncd, Keepalived, HAproxy, MySQL Galera Cluster and ClusterControl.

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With 2 of the bigger Open Source projects I care about talking about certifications programs questions pop up again ...

Should we certify ourselves ?

So let me tell you about my experiences in getting Open Source related Certifications ..

Over a decade ago, (2001) when RedHat was still Redhat and not yet Fedora the company I was working for was about to partner with RedHat and needed to get a number of people certified for that.

So I took the challenge, I bored myselve to death during a 4 day RedHat fast track training and set out to do the exam the next day. Obviosly I scored pretty well given my yearlong experience in the subject. Back then I was told that I scored the one but European Record on the exam which was actually held by another collegue (hey Ico) , our CTO however was not amused when I told that I could have scored better but I didn't bother running a chkconfig smb  on since I …

Relational databases are able to store, with minimal fuss, pretty much any data entities you throw at them. For the more complex cases – particularly cases involving hierarchical data – they offer many-to-many relationships. Querying many-to-many relationships is usually quite easy: you perform a series of SQL joins in your query; and you retrieve a result set containing the combination of your joined tables, in denormalised form (i.e. with the data from some of your tables being duplicated in the result set).

A denormalised query result is quite adequate, if you plan to process the result set further – as is very often the case, e.g. when the result set is subsequently prepared for output to HTML / XML, or when the result set is used to populate data structures (objects / arrays / dictionaries / etc) in programming memory. But what if you want to export the result set directly to a flat format, such as a single CSV file? In this case, …

Relational databases are able to store, with minimal fuss, pretty much any data entities you throw at them. For the more complex cases – particularly cases involving hierarchical data – they offer many-to-many relationships. Querying many-to-many relationships is usually quite easy: you perform a series of SQL joins in your query; and you retrieve a result set containing the combination of your joined tables, in denormalised form (i.e. with the data from some of your tables being duplicated in the result set).

A denormalised query result is quite adequate, if you plan to process the result set further – as is very often the case, e.g. when the result set is subsequently prepared for output to HTML / XML, or when the result set is used to populate data structures (objects / arrays / dictionaries / etc) in programming memory. But what if you want to export the result set directly to a flat format, such as a single CSV file? In this case, …

Devopsdays Mountainview sold out in a short 3 hours .. but there's other events that will breath devops this summer.
DrupalCon in Munich will be one of them ..

Some of you might have noticed that I`m cochairing the devops track for DrupalCon Munich,
The CFP is open till the 11th of this month and we are still actively looking for speakers.

We're trying to bridge the gap between drupal developers and the people that put their code to production, at scale.
But also enhancing the knowledge of infrastructure components Drupal developers depend on.

We're looking for talks both on culture (both success stories and failure) , automation,
specifically looking for people talking about drupal deployments , eg using tools like Capistrano, Chef, Puppet,
We want to hear where Continuous Integration fits in your deployment , do you do Continuous Delivery of a drupal environment.
And how do you …

As I updated my website, migrating from Drupal to WordPress, a welcome news followed in the evening when Swansea beating Manchester City 1-0. The female assistant to the referee, Sian Massey, gladly judging Micah Richards for an offside. United had a rough time taking over WBA, but ensuring a relatively comfortable 2-0.

New feature provides significantly faster insight and root cause analysis

SAN JOSE, Calif., February, 15, 2012 – Monitis, the leading cloud and web application monitoring software provider, today announces that it has added comprehensive MySQL database monitoring to its award-winning Application Performance Management & Monitoring platform. The robust Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) tool enables users to gain significantly faster insight when conducting root cause analysis.

The MySQL monitoring feature includes 246 monitoring variables and more than 21 different metrics to provide one of the easiest to use, yet comprehensive database monitoring tools available. It was first introduced into the free Monitor.Us platform back in June last year and has seen the code battle hardened by many hundred free users over the last 8 months.

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In my day job at SkySQL I work with Drupal as our content management system.  One thing we often need to do is provide a way for people to sign up for events and the like.  One such event is the upcoming SkySQL and MariaDB: Solutions Day for the MySQL® Database and unlike other events we needed to take into account the dietary requirements of those wishing to attend.

For events registration we use the Signup module and use a theme template function to provide a set of standard fields.  The code looks something like this:

function ourtheme_signup_user_form($node) {
  $form = array();
  // If this function is providing any extra fields at all, the following
  // line is …

In order to benchmark a Drupal site performance you need to see all the database queries related to your Drupal site. In case you don’t have access to the my.cnf file If you don’t have access to the my.cnf file, you can log the queries from the Drupal code itself: cp includes/database.mysql-common.inc includes/database.mysql-common.inc.backup.orig vim includes/database.mysql-common.inc […]