MySQL Proxy didn't got a (public) update for half a year now. But these dry times are over now.

We abonded the svn repo a long time ago and it got tricky to keep our internal repository and the external, public one in sync. The backlog of patches to merge over piled up to a point where we could keep up anymore. That was in June 2008.

Now, in January 2009 are up to date again and dropped the user of svn in favour of bzr. This will make inclusing of external changes a lot easier.

Repository

To get the latest source just install bzr and pull it from lauchpad:

$ bzr branch lp:mysql-proxy

Up to today that was giving you the old svn tree, but this is now all fresh, pure bzr.

If you used …

There is significant portion of customers which are still using MyISAM when they come to us, so one of the big questions is when it is feasible to move to Innodb and when staying on MyISAM is preferred ?

I generally prefer to see Innodb as the main storage engine because it makes life much simpler in the end for most users - you do not get to deal with recovering tables on the crash or partially executed statements. Table locks is no more problem, hot backups are easy, though there are some important things which we have to consider on case by case basics before recommending the move.

Is MyISAM used as default or as a choice ? This is the most important question to ask upfront. Sometimes MyISAM is there just because it is default, in other cases this is deliberate choice with system being optimized to deal with MyISAM limits, for example there is a dedicated slave available for all long reporting queries. In case …

MySQL is hosting a webinar on MogileFS tomorrow at 10am PST.

http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-255.html

MogileFS is the crazy distributed file manager used in a bunch of large websites. Userpics on livejournal, videos on Veoh, thumbnails on Digg, and avatars on Gaiaonline. Storing hundreds of millions of files across dozens of servers, at least.

I just kicked off a new release last night:
http://search.cpan.org/~dormando/mogilefs-server-2.30/

... which features greatly improved scalability for replication, fsck, and its async deletion workers. As well as the usual array of bugfixes.

My brain's a little fried, so uh. If you're looking at alternative blob …

Since a few months we are monitoring our infrastructure at Days of Wonder with OpenNMS. Until this afternoon we were running the beta/final candidate version 1.5.93.

We are monitoring a few things with the JDBC Stored Procedure Poller, which is really great to monitor complex business operations without writing remote or GP scripts.

Unfortunately the migration to OpenNMS 1.6.1 led me to discover that the JDBC Stored Procedure poller was not working anymore, crashing with a NullPointerException in the MySQL JDBC Driver while trying to fetch the output parameter.

In fact it turned out I was plain wrong. I was using a MySQL PROCEDURE:

DELIMITER //
CREATE PROCEDURE `check_for_something`()
READS SQL DATA
BEGIN
SELECT …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

This is Zak Greant's weekly report on his activities for the Mozilla Foundation from December 29th, 2008 to January 4th, 2009.

Overview

Another week of the Christmas and New Year holidays with many of my Mozilla colleagues unavailable. As with the previous week, I focused on 2009 program development and engagement.

The program development work was in the form of brainstorming, planning and research for upcoming 2009 Mozilla activities.

The engagement work focused on participating in the Mozilla blogorama. I kept up with Planet Mozilla, commented on blog posts I found interesting and continued a series of lightweight blog posts.

More details on both activities follow:

Program Development

I finished drafting a new statement of work and sent this to …

We've now concluded our call for papers for the MySQL Developer Room at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium, which will be open on Sunday, 8th of February from 09:00-17:00.

We received some excellent proposals and I am very excited about the schedule. Here's the quick summary of the talks:

• Vladimir Kolesnikov: Practicing DBA's Guide to the PBXT Storage Engine
• Kris Buytaert: Monitoring MySQL
• Geert Vanderkelen: MySQL Cluster
• Roland Bouman: MySQL 5.1 Plugins
• Kaj Arnö: MySQL, powering and using Social Networks
• Ewen Fortune: Percona MySQL patches and the XtraDB storage engine
• Giuseppe Maxia: Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• Jurriaan Persyn: Database Sharding

See the …

I wrote last week about the commercial open source business strategies that I expect to dominate in 2009.

The flipside to that is the commercial open source community strategy. You simply can’t have one without the other, and I expect community strategies will be a hot topic in 2009 and beyond.

Savio Rodrigues wrote recently that “By the end of 2008, virtually every successful open source vendor has a fairly tightly controlled development process and this hasn’t hurt their revenue growth.”

Based on my prediction that proprietary licensing strategies will be increasingly important in the next two years I am inclined to agree with him.

However, I am also …

Open Source is global in nature. You can develop a database in, say, Finland or Sweden, and become known in, say, Ukraine or the United States.

This would imply that Open Source knows no borders.

In practice, borders hamper Open Source work a lot. I have been familiar with the hassle involving MySQLers in Russia and the Ukraine trying to get Schengen (European Union) and US visas for meetings. And I have myself gone through a lot of hassle travelling to Russia and once even (out of my own stupidity and carelessness, though) been denied entry to India when I already was on Indira Gandhi airport in New Delhi.

But now, I’ve experienced what I had expected the least:

Several Sun Microsystems Inc employees, especially related to the Database Group, have been denied short stay business visas to Australia, over the last few months, …

Background Knowledge

Today (2008-01-12) I loaded Pidgin and discovered that I was no longer able to connect to MSN. It appears either Microsoft is blocking the connection or a new version has been release. What the cause of the matter is I have not been able to verify with certainty at this time.

UPDATE: Pidgin v2.5.4 has been released that temporarily fixes the problem.

Error Message

“Unable to Retrieve MSN Address Book using Pidgin”. See screen shot of the error message below.

Solution

1. Close Pidgin application.
2. Download and install “msn-pecan“.
3. Run Pidgin application.
4. In Pidgin “Show Buddy List” and go to the menu “Accounts” -> “Manage Accounts”.
5. Modify your MSN account, ensure the protocol shows “MSN”.
…