Our contest to give away one of our blazingly fast Kickfire Analytic Appliances to a deserving organization is heading into the home stretch. We have already had almost 1,000 people voice their opinion and encourage everyone interested in data warehousing, business intelligence, MySQL, open source, or any other aspect of this contest to vote for their favorite semi-finalist before 5:00P PT Tuesday, December 1st.  We will announce the winner on Wednesday, December 5th.

To enter the contest, we asked organizations to submit their most compelling story of “data warehouse pain.” Our esteemed judges, Curt Monash, founder of Monash Research (www.monash.com) and publisher of DBMS2, Joy Mundy, principal at the Kimball Group (www.kimballgroup.com), Peter Zaitsev, founder and chief executive officer of Percona ( …

In my previous post, Capturing Erroneous Queries with MySQL Proxy, I showed how to capture erroneous queries, along with relevant information, that one could not effectively obtain from the MySQL general query log. However, in that post, I simply output the information to the terminal. Therefore, in this example, I want to show how to write this information to a proxy log file.

To change this to log to a log file does not require too many changes, and so this is a useful example on how to log any proxy-related information to a log file.

1. I perform a check for an existing log file (at least using the variable of name “log_file”), and then assign log_file to the location of where I want the log file to reside (at the beginning of the lua script).

   if (log_file == nil) then
     log_file = "C:/Program Files/MySQL/mysql-proxy-0.7.2/proxy.log"
   end

…

This is a little story of a little bug. This gremlin suddenly appeared in a CGI.PM web-based application I work with. To make a long story short, an email was coming out something like this . . . 

389939
Subject:Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins Description:389939 #389939: TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

 . . . when it should have been some thing like this:

Subject: TPDD Update to Report #389939 by B. bloggins

TPDD Now Deploying to monitoring for the MySQL servers.

After about an hour tracking things back, my team and I narrowed it down to this line of code:

$self->send_TXT_email(CGI::param("rep_no"),$rep_object,
                     $subject,$user_ref);

We scratched our respective heads on this for a while, because for user type ‘A’, it worked fine; but for user type ‘B’, it did not. And …

Once again the holidays season is upon us and many of you will be looking for gifts. I would like to recommended the following.

For many years I felt the best overall MySQL book was The MySQL 5.0 Study Guide. It is still a very good book but it does not cover third party tools and is getting slightly dated. My new favorite MySQL book is MySQL Administrators Bible . It covers everything from installing and monitoring MySQL servers to tuning and scaling. This book is written in a clear, easy to read style and deserves to be on the bookshelf of any MySQL DBA. This will be one of those books that you will dog-ear pages and festoon with PostIt notes.
…

Our contest to give away one of our blazingly fast Kickfire Analytic Appliances to a deserving organization is heading into the home stretch. We have already had almost 1,000 people voice their opinion and encourage everyone interested in data warehousing, business intelligence, MySQL, open source, or any other aspect of this contest to vote for their favorite semi-finalist before 5:00P PT Tuesday, December 1st.  We will announce the winner on Wednesday, December 5th.

To enter the contest, we asked organizations to submit their most compelling story of “data warehouse pain.” Our esteemed judges, Curt Monash, founder of Monash Research (www.monash.com) and publisher of DBMS2, Joy Mundy, principal at the Kimball Group (www.kimballgroup.com), Peter Zaitsev, founder and chief executive officer of Percona ( …

It's often not desirable to expose your Drupal server directly to the end users. This document describes how to “hide” a Drupal server behind a reverse proxy server. This is typically done for a number of reasons:

• protection: the topology of the server, the database server can be hidden from the front end

• caching: The proxy server take away load from the backend system through caching

• flexibility: the topology behind the reverse proxy can be changed more easily

• scalability: the proxy server can be used for future load balancing

The technical problem isn't new. It has been solved before. I had however problems finding a solution in a single document.

The configuration is basically a platform neutral AMP stack …

A community member recently noted, that it takes quite a long time to compile MySQL Workbench. So he started wondering about how big the project actually is and asked for the Lines Of Code we have in our MySQL Workbench 5.2 repository.

We did not have this information at hand and therefore Alfredo ran some scripts during the weekend and generated this nice breakdown.

As you can see, we almost have 700k lines of code to maintain. Given that the MySQL Server itself has about 900k lines of code this is a pretty decent number I think, especially for a small team of 7.

I’ve been trying to dig a bit deeper into the European Commission’s investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun Microsystems, to look beyond the received wisdom about the EC’s concerns about the deal.

We know they revolve around the open source MySQL database, the European Commission has said that much. But the Statement of Objections weighs in at 155 pages, and even those that have read it admit to being confused by it. Meanwhile some of the most vocal parties in the public debate have vested interests in encouraging opinions for or against the deal.

Without knowing precisely what the European Commission wants to achieve it is impossible to come to any conclusions about the investigation. However, here are a few statements and observations:

…

I’ve just published an article that explains how a PHP-based product can gain a good position in the market and be made appealing to customers by using marketing communication. The focus is on products licensed under an Open Source license. Yet, most of the recommendations also apply to proprietary offerings.

The article has initially been published in German by PHPmagazin. It has now been translated to English and is available on the Initmarketing website: Commercialization of PHP Software.

I have never had much to do with Solaris, until recently. I have heard a lot about ZFS, and it's many advantages, but when I read about the upcoming deduplication in ZFS, I had to try it out. I talked to some people here more familiar with ZFS than me, but the indication from them was that they were getting away from ZFS. High I/O rates were bringing it to it's knees. We are using an EMC SAN here, and while reading about ZFS it occurred to me that what may be happening is that no one planned out the raid groups so that each slice of the SAN came from separate raid groups. I decided to test this out.

I did not have a spare system to run OpenSolaris on, and I needed a system with more SATA ports so I could have more hard disk drives. Here is what I came up with:

Gigabyte MA790FXT-UD5P Motherboard
AMD Phenom II 955 Quad Core 3.2GHz
4 x Mushkin Silverline PC3-10666 9-9-9-24 1333 2GB Ram
Gigabyte …