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 …

Looks like MySQL Camp 2006 was really interesting and useful for its attendees and for entire MySQL community. As the result of this meeting of many MySQL-related professionals we’ve got lots of interesting publications and I want to refer one of them in this post. Very interesting list of 84 MySQL performance tips has beed created on first day of this year MySQL Camp at Google headquarters:

1. Index stuff.
2. Don’t Index Everything
3. Use benchmarking
4. Minimize traffic by fetching only what you need.
   • Paging/chunked data retrieval to limit
   • Don’t use SELECT *
   • Be wary of lots of small quick queries if a longer query can be more efficient
5. Use EXPLAIN to profile the query …

Sometimes you may need to implement controlled downloads when all downloads requests being sent to your script and then this script decides what to do: to send some file to the user or to show some access denied page or, maybe, do something else. In lighttpd server it can be done by returning X-Sendfile header from script. Nginx have its own implementation of such idea using X-Accel-Redirect header. In this short post I will try to describe how to use this feature from PHP and Rails applications.

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I was really wondered today when I came across really interesting initiative of some women in #phpc IRC channel. They are trying to create some place where PHP women will be able to communicate and feel included in the world of PHP. Ligaya Turmelle (DevZone Roving Reporter) is one of the leaders spearheading the formation of phpwomen.org. She posted an update on their progress her blog recently. She talks about their new website, www.phpwomen.org, their mailing list which can be joined here and their irc channel on freenode.net, #phpwomen. She said:

It is women encouraging women to be active in the greater PHP World. We may be a small group but we have a big impact and are proud of who and what we are. We don’t wish to be exclusive and stand …

Sometimes we may need to know geocode of some specific postal location. For example, you have some shops catalogue and want to show shop locations on the map. Then, you will need to ask some service about map marker coordinates. If geocode service is not available or it can’t parse provided address, you will not be able to show map to your users. To solve such problem I’ve created small PHP-module, that helps me to get reliable results from set of miscellaneous geocoding services.

As for now, module can use Google Maps API, Yahoo Maps Services, Geocoder.us and …

Two days ago we added the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License to the list of licenses in the MySQL FLOSS license exception. In my opinion exception is actually a badly chosen word - extension would probably be more sufficient here as it actually extends the scope of the MySQL client libraries license. From the introductionary text on top of the document:

We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software ("FLOSS") applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries (the "Program") despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License (the "GPL").

In other words, the license exception allows the distribution of a derived work including the MySQL Client …

Two days ago we added the University of Illinois/NCSA Open Source License to the list of licenses in the MySQL FLOSS license exception. In my opinion exception is actually a badly chosen word - extension would probably be more sufficient here as it actually extends the scope of the MySQL client libraries license. From the introductionary text on top of the document:

We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software ("FLOSS") applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries (the "Program") despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License (the "GPL").

In other words, the license exception allows the distribution of a derived work including the MySQL Client …

While the MySQL Server source trees are maintained using the BitKeeper revision control system, several other MySQL projects (Connectors, GUI-Tools and the Manual) use Subversion instead.

To make it easier for external developers in getting familiar with the code base of the respective project, we now installed the FishEye SVN repository browser, which provides a very nice interface to the hosted repositories and boasts an impressive number of additional features like searching, diffing and RSS feeds. …

This article is part of “Looking For Optimal Solution” series, devoted to testing various Ruby On Rails deployment schemes and doing some simple benchmarks on these schemes. General idea of testing is to find subset of most optimal RoR deployment schemes for different situations.

This small article is about Rails+Mongrel setup and its performance. List of other tested deployment schemes, description of testing methodology and, of course, all benchmark results you can find on “Ruby On Rails Benchmark Summary and Findings” page.

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Brian Aker starts work on a memcache engine for mysql. so your memcache cache acts just like a table.

the big thing here which I’ve seen asked for a couple of times on the memcached list is the ability to see a list of keys.

mysql > select * from foo1 WHERE k=”mine”;

freaking amazing.. I love these kind of mashups.

and the 2nd important event.

Django is starting a branch to integrate SQLAlchemy