This week Zmanda was invited to participate in the launch of OpenSolaris 2008.11. In his interview Chander Kant, CEO of Zmanda, explained why OpenSolaris is a big step forward from backup and recovery perspective both as a data source for backup and as a repository for backup images.

The advanced snapshot capabilities of ZFS enables fast and scalable backups for today’s most demanding workloads for servers and easy to use data protection for workstations. For example, the new Time Slider feature in OpenSolaris provides an automatic way to backup your data on the local disk with intuitive browsing and recovering of files from snapshots using the GNOME file manager. That is great, but what if you loose your local disk? Considering that Time Slider does not support network attached disk yet, you might be in danger …

We’re closing in on features left to be implemented in 5.1 and keep improving on stability. All object editors are in place now (some of them still in a basic version though) and a bunch of memleaks has been fixed already. Additionally we now statically link the ctemplate-library and therefore you won’t have to care about installing/maintaining that package on your own anymore.

We provide bin and src packages for Ubuntu and Fedora9 (both 32bit) at the moment. Please grab the latest packages from our official download page and Test-drive our latest offspring. Let us know about any problems on using or building (also for other distributions) this alpha verison.

Wasn’t there a release just some days ago, you might ask? Yes, indeed - but we had to create a quick follow-up because a nasty bug found its way through our test and into the recently released 5.0.28. A bit of debug code from our latest canvas changes was left behind and causes Workbench to crash under certain circumstances. Once discovered we found and fixed the root of the problem quite quickly. Additionally we introduced some new icons last time which didn’t find their way into the installer script as well … so frankly its a quickly delieverd follow up to fix 2 things we missed on last release.
We strongly recommend to update to this release asap.

Download version 5.0.29 from our Download Page or - for our SE users - use the integrated update wizard to get you up2date.

A couple of people have asked for a means to set the list of INSERT statements of a table from data already in an external file. While we haven’t implemented that feature in Workbench as of now, that’s something that can be easily added as a Lua plugin.

The plugin is really simple, but I’ll take the opportunity to use it as a quick tutorial on how to write a plugin from scratch, using the mini-IDE in Workbench 5.0  Note that this tutorial is meant for MySQL Workbench 5.0; Workbench 5.1 has some differences in how plugins are handled and that is not covered here.

1.  Start Workbench and Open the “GRT Shell IDE”

2. Click on “New GRT File” button

3. Select the “Lua GRT Module File” option, “Table_Plugin” template and fill in a name for the file, eg: table_utils

4. …

Last Friday I got to enjoy the benefit of being a MySQL'r and located in Finland: We were invited to Monty, Anna and Maria for a MySQL Christmas party. Now that we are part of Sun, the company of course organises its own official Christmas party (who organises parties on a Thursday???) like all companies do, but a special MySQL party was still a very good idea, thanks Monty for inviting us. I especially enjoyed meeting some of the MySQL'rs who had recently either left Sun or happened to be on maternity leave.

read more

My mind is playing "Suffering Succotash..."

I have been working on MySQL performance for a while now, and the team I am in have discovered that SysBench could do with a couple of tweaks for Solaris.

Sidebar - sysbench is a simple "OLTP" benchmark which can test multiple databases, including MySQL. Find out all about it here , but go to the download page to get the latest version.

To simulate multiple users sending requests to a database, sysbench uses multiple threads. This leads to two issues we have identified with SysBench on Solaris, namely:

• The implementation of random() is explicitly identified as unsafe in multi-threaded applications on Solaris. My team has found this is a real issue, with occasional core-dumps happening to our …

Like a few others I’ve seen this week, I had two proposals for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 accepted. I’m very excited for both topics (for different reasons), and will be blogging about each of them in more detail soon. They are:

• libdrizzle: A new client library for Drizzle and MySQL - This will be a detailed introduction of the new library, covering important topics like client-side buffering, non-blocking I/O, and concurrent queries. If time permits I’ll also go over features in the new Drizzle protocol.
• Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL using Gearman - I’ll be co-presenting this one with Brian Aker, and we will show how the work we’ve been doing with Gearman can be tied into MySQL (and Drizzle).

I spent this past week down in San Jose, CA at my employer’s office for team meetings and to officially kick-off my next big project. The design and architecture was very well received, and I drummed up some excitement with Gearman and working with the OSS community in general (which we’ve not done too much of in the past). We’ll be developing it entirely on Launchpad under GPLv2, and I’ll be writing a number of blog posts covering each component in detail. Why would anyone else find this interesting? It covers many topics of how to write a high-performance application in the cloud. Specific topics will include Gearman, persistent Gearman queues, eventual consistency data models (and related schemas), lightweight Map/Reduce for real-time applications, and how to combine all this with …

I was doing some database sizing in MySQL 5.1.30 GA for memory tables. Generally I have used INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES data_length,index_length as a reasonable guide.

However working with a MEMORY table, after deleting rows, the size did not decrease as expected. I deleted 10% of rows, and saw 0% reduction. This was confirmed by doing a subsequent ALTER where I saw the 10% reduction in memory size.

It requires more investigation, however I found these results unexpected and worthy of publishing.

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.30    |
+-----------+

+-----------------+--------+------------+------------+----------------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| table_name      | engine | row_format | table_rows | avg_row_length | total_mb    | data_mb     | index_mb   |
+-----------------+--------+------------+------------+----------------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| …

FSF sues Cisco for GPL violations. JasperSoft and Lucid Imagination raise funding. Sun updates OpenSolaris. WaveMaker launches IDE for the cloud. And more.

Official announcements
Free Software Foundation Files Suit Against Cisco For GPL Violations Free Software Foundation

Jaspersoft Secures $12.5 Million in Venture Funding JasperSoft

Sound Investment Red Hat

Jaspersoft Announces New Community Edition of the World’s Most Widely Deployed Business Intelligence Software JasperSoft

…