After I published my article on how to build MySQL with the new Falcon storage engine from source, the free BitKeeper client was updated to version 2.0. I have now updated the instructions accordingly, our manual has been updated to reflect these changes, too.

However, it is currently still not possible to clone the Falcon tree with this client, some kind of obscure locking error message appears, even though the admin console on bkbits.net does not reveal any active locks in the repository:

$ bkf clone bk:// …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Some time ago, our GUI tools development team started a contest to shake out the bugs in the MySQL GUI applications, especially the MySQL Administrator and the MySQL Migration Toolkit.

The contest ran for about 3 months and resulted in more than 170 bug reports, of which the team fixed all the significant ones (over 120) by now. This is quite impressive, especially considering the relatively small size of the GUI development team. I am very happy to see that the quality of these tools has been improved, they are quite useful, especially for users not keen on using the command line.

The new MySQL Administrator 1.2.8 and MySQL Migration Toolkit 1.1.8 have now been declared production …

Some time ago, our GUI tools development team started a contest to shake out the bugs in the MySQL GUI applications, especially the MySQL Administrator and the MySQL Migration Toolkit.

The contest ran for about 3 months and resulted in more than 170 bug reports, of which the team fixed all the significant ones (over 120) by now. This is quite impressive, especially considering the relatively small size of the GUI development team. I am very happy to see that the quality of these tools has been improved, they are quite useful, especially for users not keen on using the command line.

The new MySQL Administrator 1.2.8 and MySQL Migration Toolkit 1.1.8 have now been declared production …

With great pleasure I today noticed that we finally have daily snapshot builds of all current versions of the MySQL server source trees (4.0-5.1) available on http://snaps.mysql.com/ again. Unfortunately this has not been the case for quite some time - a few issues that caused the 5.0 and 5.1 snapshot builds/tests to fail have now finally been resolved. I also made some changes to the build script that performs the snapshot builds, e.g. to use the Perl-based test suite where available instead of the Shell-based one, which is going to phased out in 5.1 anyway. Let's hope that from now on the snapshot builds will now be available more frequently again, I'll keep a close eye on that.

Sorry for the long delay, I know that some of you depend on receiving updated source tarball snapshots on a regular basis instead of having to use the free BK client...

With great pleasure I today noticed that we finally have daily snapshot builds of all current versions of the MySQL server source trees (4.0-5.1) available on http://snaps.mysql.com/ again. Unfortunately this has not been the case for quite some time - a few issues that caused the 5.0 and 5.1 snapshot builds/tests to fail have now finally been resolved. I also made some changes to the build script that performs the snapshot builds, e.g. to use the Perl-based test suite where available instead of the Shell-based one, which is going to phased out in 5.1 anyway. Let's hope that from now on the snapshot builds will now be available more frequently again, I'll keep a close eye on that.

Sorry for the long delay, I know that some of you depend on receiving updated source tarball snapshots on a regular basis instead of having to use the free BK client...

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been …

I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:

• It is now possible to use an external configuration file /etc/mylvmbackup.conf to store the options. This is probably more convenient than having to pass a slew of options on the command line or having to hack the script itself to change the default values. This new feature requires the Config::IniFiles Perl module to be installed, a sample configuration file is included in the package.
• The logging to the console has been …

I am happy to announce that version 0.2 of the mylvmbackup tool is now available!

mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly performing backups of a MySQL server's databases using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It creates a consistent LVM snapshot of the server's data directory which is then backed up without further blocking the server's operation.

After version 0.1 was published in May this year, I did not really get much feedback about it. I had some ideas for improvements (see the TODO file included in the package), but never got around to actually start working on them.

Thanks to Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing a number of new options and features as well as some code …