Dave Edwards has offered me to write this week's Log Buffer, and I couldn't help but jump at the opportunity. I'll dive straight into it.
OracleI'll start with Oracle, the dust of the Sun acquisition has settled, so maybe it's time to return our attention to the regular issues.

Lets start with Hemant Chitale's Common Error series and his Some Common Errors - 2 - NOLOGGING as a Hint explaining what to expect from NOLOGGING. Kamran Agayev offers us an insight into Hemant's personality with his Exclusive Interview with Hemant K Chitale. My favorite quote is:

Do you refer to the documentation? And how often does …

How To Back Up MySQL Databases With mylvmbackup On Debian Lenny

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly creating MySQL backups. It uses LVM's snapshot feature to do so. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, creates a snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. This article shows how to use it on a Debian Lenny server.

Check out how Linden Labs, creators of the popular game Second Life, upgraded their MySQL database. The MySQL they use? Straight out of Debian! Of course, now, they’re running with the Percona patchset, against MySQL 5.0.84. Definitely a good read.

Its good to see Lars post about contributing to the MySQL replication & backup codebase. It sounds like the replication & backup team have decided that mentoring is the way to go – you get a “coach developer” if the idea is accepted. I like this very much, and sincerely hope it spreads to the rest of the server; it will help decentralise …

I really like ZRM for MySQL Community Edition for backups. I find
it very simple to install and configure and it gets the job done. It's default settings suits most installations. The challenges arise once you need to adapt it to more complex organizations. Please note that all the issues described on this article refer to Linux installations.
What If DBAs Have No sudo?This was the 1st challenge that I ever faced. ZRM requires full root access at least during installation and in some cases, it requires some sudo permissions to be able to manage its files as well. Some organizations don't grant these permissions to the DBAs complicating the installation. When I looked into the scripts, I didn't see any reason why they wouldn't run in the user space, other than a few hard coded paths. I posted the question in the Zmanda forums and I got an answer with some …

Creating scheduled backup using administrator is an easy task. Follow the GUI and you’re done. But I observed something different! MySQL Version: 5.0.83 Community MySQL Administrator: 1.2.17 Machine: Intel P4,…

The post Scheduled Backup MySQL Administrator & Windows Scheduler – Odd first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

Every time I need to install or reconfigure a new workstation, I review the set of tools I use. It's an opportunity to refresh the list, reconsider the usefulness of old tools and review new ones. During my first week at Open Market I got one of these opportunities. Here is my short list of free (as in 'beer') OSS tools and why they have a place in my tool chest.
Testing Environments
Virtual Box
Of all the Virtual Machines out there, I consider Virtual Box to be the easiest to use. Since I first looking into it while I was still working at Sun/MySQL, this package has been improved constantly. It's a must have to stage High Availability scenarios or run tools that are not available in your OS of choice.
MySQL SandboxDid you compile MySQL from source and want to test it without affecting your current …

I just accidentally deleted all comments made on this blog.

This blog is homegrown and hand-made. It has a very simple spamfilter that catches most spam comments. The few that make it through though, I've been deleting myself using the mysql console.

I tend to write simple queries, ending in: .. AND id = 1234, but today I forgot the id =. I had a backup from October 2008, so some old comments are back now, but I'm still pretty sad.

Lesson from today: make backups! I'm pretty good with things I do for clients, but I tend to not uphold the same standards for my own projects.

Firstly, I have to thank my co-workers Singer Wang and Gerry Narvaja for doing a lot of the work that resulted in this comparison.

After running both InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup, we have found that there is a measurable but not large difference between the resources that Xtrabackup and InnoDB Hot Backup consume.

Xtrabackup:

• Free
  
• takes 1.1% longer (2 min during a 3 hour backup)
  
• uses 1.4% more space (1G more in a 70G backup — this was for uncompressed backups)
  
• uses 1.115% more cpu overall
  
• split as 0.12% user, 0.66% nice, 0.025% system, …

MySQL backup soon becomes an important matter when the database is used in production. The pain-point comes from the fact that while backuping the database is not available to respond to client requests anymore. With mysqldump - the standard tool for performing MySQL backups - and a large database the operation can go over many tenth of minutes if not hours. If I am running my business on line this is simply not acceptable.

The classical approach to workaround this problem is to take advantage of MySQL replication. I set up a master/slave configuration where the slave acts as copy of the master. Then, when needed, I run mysqldump on the slave without any service interruption on the master.

But ZFS snapshosts bring a new straightforward approach that avoids the pain and the complexity of a master/slave replication.

Snapshots are a key feature of ZFS that allows me to save a copy of …

Save the date - October 14th, 3pm Paris & Berlin, 2pm London, 4pm Jerusalem  -  for this free live webinar where you'll have a chance to ask questions to our experts.

This webinar focuses on how ZFS, SSDs and the Open Storage line of products from Sun are changing the rules in the database storage industry. You will learn how to increase data security, scalability, and reduce the price/performance ratio with these technologies. This webinar includes ZFS best practises for databases backup and performance.

To register, click here.