I've now posted all the current talk submissions to the OpenSQL Camp Wiki. A big Thank You to everyone who contributed so far and helped us to bang the drum for this event! If you haven't heard about OpenSQL Camp yet, it's a subconference of the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany, which takes place on August 22+23. The topic of OpenSQL Camp is "Open Source databases and related technologies" and we're looking for interesting presentations in this field.

As we have 12 session slots to fill, we still have room for at least 6 more submissions! It's also a tad bit MySQL-centric at the moment, that should definitely change! We would love to get some more diversity to cover a broader range of Open Source Database technology.

So please submit your talk proposals and help …

I've been working with SMF on and off for a few weeks now and still get stung by this error. If you see something like this in the SVC log after enabling a service (i.e., svcadm enable mysql):

bash-3.00# cat /var/svc/log/application-database-mysql:v51.log
[ Jul 1 07:36:37 Enabled. ]
[ Jul 1 07:36:37 Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/mysql start") ]
svc.startd could not set context for method: chdir: No such file or directory
[ Jul 1 07:36:37 Method "start" exited with status 96 ]

head over to the manifest file for the service and check the method_context section. In my case, I had no working_directory element set so adding this element solves the problem.

Before:

<method_context>
    <method_credential user='mysql' group='mysql' />
</method_context>

After:

 …

My FC10 to FC11 yum upgrade got stuck on a zillion dependencies .. well actually libssl and mysql from Remi .. but from there it's a whole chain of other things. So I had the great idea to go for the F11 Live CD, the LiveCD works like a charm,, only upon trying to install the live CD to my OS partition it started failing on me with a bunch of squashfs errors ,

It really looks like this F11Beta blocking issue which apparently didn't get solved completely after all.. the annoying part is that I can't reproduce the issue anymore .. as my system is now fully working .. maybe on my office desktop next week :)

Oh well.. the full DVD ISO got downloaded and burned and now I can once again enjoy the annoyancies of a freshly installed distro, missing packages, configs that have lightly chaged etc :) Wonder if sound is working out of the box now :)

…

In today’s gp/bp an open door will be kicked in: take your backups offsite!
I was actually tempted to create a poll to see how many of you do not have proper backups, and how many of you do not take those backups offsite. It is a simple piece of advice and relatively simple to set up. Offsite in this case would ideally be physically offsite: to a different server in a different building in a different location. A start however is to take them to a different server. And don’t make the mistake of thinking a different VPS on the same physical server is good enough. True, that will protect you from operating system failure of the guest, but it will likely not protect you from hardware failure, or operating system failure on the host OS.

Also, take good care of how you are getting your backups offsite. A normal FTP connection might do the job, but it is hardly secure. Ideally, use SFTP or rsync over ssh to stream your backups …

Following a promotion at the registry. We will be offering .EU domain creations for €4 excl. VAT instead of €12 excl. VAT. This sale will last until August 31st and does not concern renewals or transfers.

Following a promotion at the registry. We will be offering .US domain creations for €4 excl. VAT instead of €12 excl. VAT. This sale will last until July 31st and does not concern renewals or transfers.

Summer has come and this has put us in the mood to make you happy...

So in this summer spirit, here are some things that we have come up with to please you:

• Have you not yet tried our cloud hosting service? If not to help you make your change, we are going to give you a free server this summer! Yes, from now until August 31st (and by request from this form) you can have a totally free server (equal to one free share). And like any Gandi hosting share, you can expand the power/performance instantly with no downtime by adding additional shares at your convenience
• Are you already a Gandi Hosting customer? If you feel like it is terribly unfair that you cannot benefit from this promo and are already getting ready to write a nasty comment in reply to this article: there is no need, since the price of fixed …

PHP 5.3 is released and after the release stress is over my mind is open for new ideas. While relaxing yesterday I thought about many things, among them was the Resultset iterator I recently discussed.

Now I wondered where to go next with this and had the idea that an individual Resultset is a child of the whole result and this might be wrapped in an Recursive Iterator. For doing so we don't implement the Iterator interface but RecursiveIterator. RecursiveIterator extends a typical Iterator with two methods: hasChildren() and getChildren(). But now we have a problem: The Iterator returned by getChildren() has to be a RecursiveIterator, too, which makes sense, in general. But I want to return a MySQLi Resultset which isn't recursive - so making this a RecursiveIterator is wrong. My solution now is to introduce yet another Iterator which goes by …

There are some bug reports on the auto-discovery protocol in MySQL Cluster.
The idea of the auto-discovery protocol is to fetch the .frm files for the NDB tables stored in the data dictionary of the data nodes, and put them in the data directory of the mysql server.

However, sometimes (not always, which makes it more difficult to reproduce and hence fix), the auto-discovery seems to make strange things (from this bug report):

After shuting down and restoring my cluster I get the following error.

090211  9:59:26 [Note] NDB: mismatch in frm for panel.gatewayquestions, discovering...
090211  9:59:26 [Note] NDB Binlog: DISCOVER TABLE Event: REPL$panel/gatewayquestions
090211  9:59:26 [Note] NDB Binlog: logging ./panel/gatewayquestions (UPDATED,USE_WRITE)

This is due to the files already being in the mysql data directory. After …

Some key differences for DBAs between Oracle and MySQL database servers include:Different tools used to manage and monitor database servers.Oracle architecture is process based, MySQL architecture is thread based.Different tools used for backup and recovery.Database specific SQL syntax.Database specific SQL functions.Different syntax for stored routines. MySQL has no packages.MySQL routines are