The MySQL Cluster product seems to intimidate a lot of folks with its complexity. The North Texas MySQL Meetup had a presentation at the January meeting titled 'A Gentle Introduction to MySQL Cluster' where a cluster was setup on a single laptop. The presentation was full of information that needs to be shared to encourage others to try out this valuable piece of software.

The following covers how to set up a cluster on a single computer. The cluster will consist of two data nodes, a SQL node, and a management node. In this case the SQL node and the management node will be on one system. The data nodes will be virtual systems running on the same host. This is not the optimal performance configuration but it will let those new to MySQL Cluster try out the product with a minimal investment in equipment and time.

You will need two free software products -- …

Changes (as compared to 7.14) include:

Features:
* Added an option to use Base64 encoding for communicating XML data stream with the HTTP tunneller. Using this option can be required to work around this XML-related bug in PHP.
* Improved editor performance with large scripts if Wordwrap was enabled.

Bug fixes:
* On Windows Vista Business edition, SQLyog could crash while closing down. No other Windows OS (and also not any other Vista edition) was affected.
*  Also a ‘hang’ could occur when closing down. It could happen with all systems, but Windows Vista was mostly affected.
* Schema Sync failed with identically named Foreign Key CONSTRAINTs on identically named colums of basically same type (that could still differ in LENGTH, SIGNED/UNSIGNED specification etc.)

This Tip Of The Day answers the following comment on my blog:

How to Configure a MySql database to be able to connect Netbeans6.5.?

I've tried using mysql Server 6 many times, but it fails.
Please, let me know how to fix that problem.

• Download MySQL 6.0 from here.
• Install and start MySQL 6.0 on Mac OSX using the clearly written installation instructions.
  • Basically the download is available in .tar or .dmg format. Using .dmg format is the easiest way, double-click and follow the instructions taking all defaults.
  • MySQL is installed in …

Raj Kissu is in the papers today. He completed a Google Summer of Code 2008 project with MySQL, hacking on blob streaming for phpMyAdmin. In fact, his project was so good, he has commit access to the phpMyAdmin tree :-)

Today, The Star had an article about him (and two other students), titled For the love of code. He said:

But Raj has already heard ­inquiries for his project. “A ­company that has developed a transactional engine using MySQL server have clients who want to test BlobStreaming,” he said.

Kudos Raj. I think we’ll see more great work from Paul McCullagh and Barry Leslie, as more happens with Scalable BLOB Streaming for MySQL happens.

In fact, Barry Leslie …

Time-delayed replication is a useful feature that allows a slave to lag a fixed amount of time behind a master, thus providing a time window to recover from disasters like deleting a 10 million line table by accident. You just run over to the slave, turn off replication, and recover lost data, as the delayed updates mean it has yet to see your deadly mistake. It's a simple way to protect your administrative honor as well as your job.

Time-delayed replication has been on the MySQL to-do list since at least 2001. It's currently scheduled for release 6.0 and the fix is included in recent OurDelta builds. However, there's a very simple way to get the feature with Tungsten Replicator filters. This works for unadulterated MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 releases.

I wrote about filters in a previous post on the …

I spoke with Brian Aker last week about the issues I found with decrement and increment while working on my book "Developing Web Applications with Apache, MySQL, Memcached, and Perl". He suggested I make sure that I was using the latest libmemcached. I checked, and the version of libmemcached that is included with Memcached::libmemcached is 0.21 - this is the version of Memcached::libmemcached I obtained from using CPAN (perhaps CPAN needs a new bundle...). So, I obtained the most recent version of Memcached::libmemcached from the subversion repository at https://perl-libmemcached.googlecode.com/svn, and it includes the lastest libmemcached, version 0.25. To make a long story short, I re-wrote my test script to test each operation individualy and time that, as well as compare the times to Cache::Memcached. The numbers are great and are reason enough to use …

First of all, let me wish all of you a great year 2009! As an old year ends and a new year begins, it's a good time to do some statistics. One of the statistics that web developers are interested in is, which browsers and operating systems visitors use to access their websites. Let me share some of the interesting figures regarding the mysql.com website with you.


(click to enlarge and see more detail)

The spreadsheet contains data for December 2008 (another sheet for November 2008) in a pivot table style. In the columns you see the browsers and operating system and in the rows the continents and regions, with the shares in the respective cells. Fairly self-explanatory as I hope ;).

Usage shares on the mysql.com site generally favor browsers and …

I've been recently asked for advice on running MySQL on EC2.

• 
  
• Run only a one MySQL server process on the instance.
  
• This bears repeating. Run only the MySQL server on the instance. Not your app server, or your dev environment, or your...
  
• Use the large or xlarge size, not the small size.
  
• Dedicate the additional partitions to be InnoDB tablespaces.
  
• "Pre-heat" the tablespace partition with dd. That is, dd if=/dev/urandom of=/path/to/part bs=8K before using the partition.
  
• This is one of the times where it's worth it to run tablespace on raw devices. Don't bother to put a filesystem down on those partitions.
  
• Tune your database server. Get someone who knows MySQL tuning to do it for you.
  
• Backup and Replicate with rigor. When an instance gets shut down, it …

This keeps happening - the community I need to stay engaged with keeps jumping on new forms of communication, and if you want to stay in tune, you need to jump on too.

This first happened with blogging, and then with Facebook. These I actually don't mind. I like writing and reading blogs, and Google Reader has made it fairly easy for me to quickly digest what's going on.

Facebook is nice because I keep in touch with friends. It's not so much about work but about getting a little more connected, particularly to old friends who I don't see much any more.

But this Twitter thing - I really don't like it. Sorry. I subscribe to someone's Twitter feed because I value their thoughts, but then it's serious drinking from a firehose. Many of these Thought Leaders are just constantly (I mean constantly, like I don't know how they get any work done) …

Due to the efforts of Brian Moon and Michelangelo van Dam, I've been sucked into a meme started by Tony Bibbs. My initial reaction to this unfortunate event was ... (envision Steven Colbert, hands raised...) "Noooooo!!!" But I got over it. Hey, it's the holiday season, I might as well be a good boy and fulfill the modern-day geek's equivalent of a chain letter.

So, without further ado, here is my list of seven things about me you probably could care less about and will skip over to see if you are on my list of tagged people. (Yeah, you know you will.)

• My real name is not Jay
• I have a twin brother, …