xtrabackup is a great tool for taking backups/snapshots, etc. and sometimes we have large amounts of data to deal with and not enough storage to mess around with.

The xtrabackup docs contain steps for how to stream your backup over the network to another host, which is fine if the end result you want is a tar/gzip type archive, however, in some cases you may want to just get the files to the other host unextracted in order to create a new slave DB.

In this case you just want to get that snapshot into the new host as easily as possible -- in many cases I don't have enough storage to first put it into a tar or tar.gz and then extract.

To work around that, here is a way you can stream your backup over the network straight onto disk on the other side, while avoiding the need for an archive file as a stepping stone in the process.


Note: My bash-fu is probably not as advanced as …

David Cornelson of TextFyre has embarked on an ambitious plan to create a new open source virtual machine, FyreVM.  This new VM will run Interactive Fiction games (e.g. Zork and newer works written in Inform) on a dozen different mobile platforms such as Android, WinPhone 7, Kindle, iPhone, iPad, Blackberry.  The goal of FireVM is to take advantage of specific user interface capabilities on each platform, whether it's the touch screen of Android tablets or the 5 way button on the Kindle.

To help with this project, TextFyre has started  a fundraising effort on Kickstarter with a goal of …

We just released the latest Drizzle tarball (2010-10-11 milestone). There are a whole bunch of bug fixes, but there are two things that are interesting from a storage engine point of view:

• The Innobase plugin is now based on innodb_plugin 1.0.6
• The embedded_innodb engine is now named HailDB and requires HailDB, it can no longer be built with embedded_innodb.

Those of you following Drizzle fairly closely have probably noticed that we’ve lagged behind in InnoDB versions. I’m actively working on fixing that – both for the innobase plugin and for the HailDB library.

If building the HailDB plugin (which is planned to replace the innobase plugin), you’ll need the latest …

Translation of appendix about methods of copying and moving MySQL databases just published. This is just short overview of possible methods and does not pretend to be detailed guide. It starts as:

Appendix. Methods of copying and moving of MySQL databases.

In this application I'd like to shortly discuss general methods of backup and moving of mySQL databases.

Easier and recommended way of data moving is mysqldump utility. You can copy data with help of following command:


$mysqldump dbname [tblname ...] >dump.sql


...

and continues here …

Yesterday I discovered that my friend Adrienne has a blog that I didn't know about - which is fine, because apparently it's new. But that highlighted a problem I've had in general, which is that there is no decent place to go for aggregated content of interesting artists rambling about whatever. I can certainly get local show announcements and audition announcements from Theatre Puget Sound, but that's not, you know - ART related, and it's also a bit more local than thoughts about theatre in general really need to be.
In my day-job life as an Open Source Hacker, we tend to have project-specific blog aggregators (known as planets) that pick up the blogs of everyone involved. planet.mysql.com, planetdrizzle.org, and …

I’ve written before about how to get accepted to the conference. We want great technical submissions in a broad variety of topics, for databases well beyond MySQL. I wanted to post a quick list of things that come to my mind as good ways to get voted down or rejected out of hand. In general, I can put it this way: you are being peer-reviewed by presenters and industry experts. You need to write your proposal for the committee as well as for attendees. Lightly edited copy-and-paste from real examples:

In this tutorial, ______ will teach a condensed version of his standard commercial training workshop, a $1,500 value.

THIS IS A MUST ATTEND FOR THOSE WHO WISH TO BECOME ______ EXPERTS.

Sometimes being a committee member is fun. My all-time personal favorite, from the 2010 conference:

NETWORKING FOR TECHIES — BUILDING BUSINESS CONTACTS AT IT …

How amusing: an ancient write-up on the first PHP Kongress in 2000 edition written by one who later became a mentor of the autor of phpOpenTracker. How boring: a silver guy talking at the 10th aniversary of the conference about some 60% performace benefit for Oxid eShop, an example of a modern award-winning software, if using the mysqlnd query cache plugin (PECL/mysqlnd_qc). How confusing: the same silver guy calls his own benchmarks irrelevant and faulty.

Award-winning technology: Oxid loves the query cache

View more presentations on …

How amusing: an ancient write-up on the first PHP Kongress in 2000 edition written by one who later became a mentor of the autor of phpOpenTracker. How boring: a silver guy talking at the 10th aniversary of the conference about some 60% performace benefit for Oxid eShop, an example of a modern award-winning software, if using the mysqlnd query cache plugin (PECL/mysqlnd_qc). How confusing: the same silver guy calls his own benchmarks irrelevant and faulty.

Award-winning technology: Oxid loves the query cache

View more presentations on …

At the MariaDB developer meeting in Istanbul, we didn't yet tackle the logistics of filming and streaming the talks given, so if you weren't there, you have to be content with the blogs and slides published. I did however take the following 3 videos and now that I'm outside of Turkey's Internet firewall, I published them on YouTube. They are not technical at first sight, but if you think about it, they illustrate and summarize perfectly the current status of MySQL/MariaDB community development.

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I have been trying to find ways to implement ROW based logging at our company, as it provides better reliability and far less chances for a slave going "out-of-sync" with a master. One of the big issues that I faced was constant replication lag from one datacenter to another because of the massive amounts of data that can potentially be generated just from one single SQL statement.

With the traditional STATEMENT based replication, one SQL statement is written to the binary log - very little network overhead there transferring that across the wire to another datacenter. But if that single SQL statement changes 20,000 rows, well that's where agony begins, and business continuity takes a beating.

And to compound situations even further, more and more operations are suddenly becoming "unsafe for STATEMENT based logging", generating hundreds upon thousands of warning statements in error log files. With 5.1.50, LOAD DATA …