I am not a fan of upgrading mySQL unless I need to. I am of the mind if it is not broke don't fix it, but when I do upgrade I follow these general steps.

If I have run into a mySQL bug, I look to see if that bug is fixed by searching the mySQL bug database.

If I've notice a performance bottleneck, I look to see if the performance bottleneck has been fixed by searching the same database.

I will NOT upgrade to the latest and greatest version of mySQL (5.4) I stay within my branch (5.0).

These are my three general motivations that drive my upgrade decisions. Anytime I upgrade I also make a list of things that might affect my environment for the stuff I use.

1. Here are my steps:
   
2. Check the change log
   
3. Ignore all the NDB changes... I don't use it …

Welcome to the 165th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Since they haven’t had any Log Buffer love for a couple weeks, let’s start this one with . . . 

PostgreSQL

Selena Marie Deckelmann was tending the garden and found a Snow Leopard amongst the Macintoshes. The result, her post Snow Leopard and PostgreSQL: installation help links.

Josh Berkus posts a poll on encrypted backup. he writes, …

I have been working with cluster, in test environments, for a long time. Setting up MySQL Cluster for testing or just to mess around with is easy. This post will explain how to set up a MySQL Cluster on one test server or workstation. Please keep in mind that this is a limited installation for testing and NOT for production.

You should always start with the latest GA version of MySQL. For this example I will be using 5.1.39. You should install the max version which includes MySQL Cluster.

After you have MySQL installed don’t start the server! Instead lets get into some details. Create the file, /etc/config.cnf in vi and add the following to the file.

# This configuration should not be used in production!
[NDBD DEFAULT]
DataDir = /var/mysql-cluster
NoOfReplicas = 2
DataMemory = 80M # Default
…

Funding for Engine Yard and DataSync. Red Hat and Microsoft joint support. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Engine Yard raised $19m in Series C funding from the likes of Benchmark, DAG, Presidio and Amazon.

# Red Hat and Microsoft are now providing joint support for virtualization interoperability options.

# DataSync raised $1.2m and announced a partnership with SugarCRM.

# Simon Phipps began building a scorecard to …

OpenLDAP includes a driver that allows it to store and access data held in MySQL Cluster. It uses the NDB-API to access the database and so the performance is extremely good. One of the great things about the solution is that it lets you simultaneously access the same data through both LDAP and SQL (or the NDB-API or any of the MySQL connectors). This article gives an example of how this can be done.

Prerequisites:

This article assumes that you’ve already installed MySQL Cluster  – if that isn’t the case then please first refer to “Creating a simple Cluster on a single LINUX host” or “ …

Mårten Mickos urges EU antitrust regulators to approve Oracle's Sun acquisition, arguing that delay hurts customers and that Oracle won't sink Sun's MySQL group.
PlanetMySQL Voting: Vote UP / Vote DOWN

Ref: Google: Computer memory flakier than expected (CNET DeepTech, Stephen Shankland)

Summary: According to tests at Google, it appears that today’s RAM modules have several thousand errors a year, which would be correctable if it weren’t for the fact that most of us aren’t using ECC RAM.

Previous research, such as some data from a 300-computer cluster, showed that memory modules had correctable error rates of 200 to 5,000 failures per billion hours of operation. Google, though, found the rate much higher: 25,000 to 75,000 failures per billion hours.

This is quite relevant for database servers because they write a lot rather than mainly read (desktop use). In the MySQL context, if a bit gets flipped in RAM, your data could get corrupted, or it’s ok on disk and you’re just reading corrupted data somehow. …

I wasn’t prepared for this. After spending months playing with GDB development trees I somehow entirely missed that 7.0 release is getting close, and took me more than an hour to spot it.

My favorite features are python scripting and non-stop debugging. I was toying around with python scripting for a while, and was planning to make backtraces make sense. Having hands that open means that one can see PHP backtraces, when gdb’ing apache, see table names and states when MySQL thread access handler interfaces, or remote IPs and users, when it is writing to network. Process inspection can simply rock, if right tools are created using these new capabilities, and I’m way too excited when I think about those. “Always have debugging symbols” gets way more meaning now.

Another issue I’ve been trying to resolve lately is avoiding long locking …

I'm happy to extend a warm welcome to two new members of the Percona team.

First is Yves Trudeau, about whom I can say many things:

• One of the top MySQL Cluster (NDB Cluster) experts in the world.
• An expert on all things High Availability, including DRBD and Heartbeat.
• Many years of experience with Huge Data.
• Half of the Waffle Grid team.
• A really nice person!

Yves joins us after a tenure of several years as a senior consultant at Sun/MySQL. Together with Matt Yonkovit, he plans to work on WaffleGrid (but as a new project under a new name, to be determined), and integration with XtraDB. Yves lives in Quebec with his family.

Next is Fernando Ipar. Fernando is our first dedicated Shift Support Captain[1]. Fernando specializes in MySQL, GNU/Linux, systems administration, and high availability. Fernando has been involved in computer programming since …

Why would you care about UNICODE? Come on now, most people can read english and english can be written using only 7-bit ASCII, so who needs more? Well, I think it's safe to say that Internet (remember that? Netscape, WWW, .com booms, pet food on the net etc) changed all that. Now applications can be found and run everywhere by anyone, more or less, so even if the application speaks english, and even if the user does, you may end up with users inputing data using some other character sets.

For someone like myself, having grown up in a "beyond A-Z" part of the world (Sweden, which is one of the easy cases), I can tell you how annoying it is when I input my address on some webpage (this happens even on swedish website)s using some swedish characters (I got 2 of the 3 beyond A-Z characters in the name of the street where I live), and it comes out looking like someone just smashed a fly prominently placed in the name of my street.
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