Here is how to install and start MySQL Cluster 7.0.5 in eight steps:

1. Go to the configurator and setup the configuration you wish to have. Make sure you select "MySQL Cluster 7.0.x" in the first drop down.
   
2. Copy the package you either download or receive by email to one of the computers that will run one of the management servers.
3. tar xvfz mysqlcluster-70.tgz
4. cd mysqlcluster-70/scripts/install
   
5. Download MySQL Cluster 7.0 from MySQL website and put it in mysqlcluster-70/scripts/install
6. sh dist-tgz.sh
   
7. sh bootstrap.sh
   
8. cd .. && sh start-cluster-initial.sh

Okay, step 1) …

Cacti is a great tool for collecting information about systems and graphing it. However, it likes to use SNMP, and SNMP is often not desirable. Instead, I often see the need for a method that is:

• Secure. Use trusted, well-known, encrypted communication. Do not open up new ports.
• Zero install on the monitored system.
• As little installation or modification on the monitoring system as possible.

Over the last several years, I’ve slowly created more and more software to create Cacti graphs via standard POSIX command-line utilities over SSH with key-pair authentication. (I’ve also created similar software for Nagios, but that’s another matter.) The major problem with the work I’ve done is that it’s totally un-publicized.

The system works by passing command-line arguments to a local PHP script like any other Cacti script. This …

The MySQL UC 2009 is over and I got bored in the evening before I had to leave Santa Clara and decided to play again with query caching in mysqlnd. I have always said that mysqlnd is ready for it, the infrastructure is there and that we need just few changes to make it work. Well, I decided to bite the bullet and do it. Spent about 4h in the evening and on the next day 2h while waiting on the San Jose (SJC) airport and continued on the flight to Denver, where I am having vacation. On the plane I was almost ready and today I made the final changes to the preliminary patch, that seems to work :)

I did a small benchmark, a microbenchmark.

The slides for my session on Maatkit at the MySQL Conference are uploaded. They should appear on the speaker presentation files page, but I have heard that it can take a few days. Please let me know if they’re not there by May 1, 2009.

I did not have time to plow through everything in the slides. (I deliberately prepared more material than I could cover, and just stopped when I ran out of time.) Alas, I did not remember to take my voice recorder that day, so I have no audio to share with you!

Selena Deckelmann has posted some ideas about a “hacker’s cooperative” for PostgreSQL.

As you may have noticed, Calpont has been advertising themselves as an open-source storage engine for MySQL. And yet there is no source code.

A bit of back-story. When we were choosing speakers for the Percona Performance Conference, I personally reviewed Calpont’s submission and sent them an email on March 19th:

I cannot confirm that this is an open-source columnar storage engine. I can’t find source code or a download of the software. Can you point me the right direction on that? I want to be sure we are describing things accurately.

The response was

Calpont is indeed going to be placed into …

MySQL 5.4 was released this week at the MySQL conference, and billed as the “community release.” This seemed odd to some of us, and I heard lots of comment on it in the hallways. After all, the release was a surprise; the community didn’t know it was happening.

A source from within Sun, who is familiar with the details and wishes to remain anonymous, told me the story behind the release. I want to say that after this conversation, I fully support the release of 5.4 and I want to praise it generously. It is a great step in lots of right directions! It’s good for everyone. The secrecy was a necessary strategy.

The details must remain a secret, but perhaps someday it’ll be known.

Thank you Sun!

Open Query too is exploring utilising SSDs in a MySQL infrastructure, but we wouldn’t be us if we didn’t also try some alternative perspective on it. Right now we’re running some comparative tests against various spinning HD setups in the same box, using the same controller, so we’re looking for differences rather than absolute speed.

The results so far are interesting, but the selection of SSDs we have available is limited (never enough toys!) So, a request: do you have an SSD, it’d be great if we could run our test tool on it for a bit. It won’t take long, but naturally the box shouldn’t be used for something else while the test is running. We can either log in remotely, or exchange code and results over email. Simply contact us through our site’s contact form, and we’ll sort things out! Thanks.

If you work for a vendor and would like to have your gear put …

We had to apply a weird tweak as the default Ubuntu Jaunty packages are named something like 5.1.30really-5.0.xx. Several people have filed bugs on it with Ubuntu on Launchpad.

What I suspect happened (unconfirmed!) is that Canonical was contemplating putting 5.1 into Jaunty, had it in a beta but went back to 5.0  before release. Since downgrading by version number is a manual process in apt-get, the above hack allows a downgrade that looks like an upgrade…

Our original Jaunty build worked fine if you were starting from scratch, however an upgrade from the default MySQL on Jaunty would not work. Peter has built 5.1.30really-5.0.77-d8-ourdelta, which upgrades happily from the default Jaunty install or any other earlier install (such as from Intrepid). If you upgrade from an earlier Ubuntu version, do make sure you fix up your /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ourdelta.list with …

The Configurator has undergone some serious fixing as 2.0 had some issues.
Here is a brief list of the enhancements:

• error handing and progress reports - I have rewritten almost all scripts with better error handling and progress reports. E.g, if a node fails to start during a rolling restart, then the rolling restart script is aborted and you get a suggestion how to recover. If you run start-cluster-initial.sh on an already started cluster, it will refuse to run. There are many more changes like this to check the status of the nodes (both data nodes and sql nodes) during startup
  
• download link to package - When you have entered the email address, then you will also get a link where to download the package, in case you experience problems with receiving the email (I have raised an issue to the hosting company about this)
…