For normal Innodb "hot" backups we use LVM or other snapshot based technologies with pretty good success. However having incremental backups remain the problem.

First why do you need incremental backups at all ? Why not just take the full backups daily. The answer is space - if you want to keep several generations to be able to restore to, having huge amount of full copies of large database is not efficient. Especially if it only changes couple of percents per day.

The solution MySQL offers - using binary log works in theory but it is not overly useful in practice because it may take way too long to catch up using binary log. Even if you have very light updates and can execute updates for a full day within an hour it will take over 24 hours to cover month worth of binary logs... and quite typically you would have much higher update traffic.

Another solution is …

This morning started with a nice breakfast and the opening general session. Key speakers include:Daniel J. Berg - CTO Global Sales and Services and VP of EM Systems EngineeringPeter Ryan - Execute VP Global Sales and ServicesJonathan Schwartz - CEO and PresidentHal Stern - Senior VP Systems Engineering Highlights from the General SessionOpen source is disruptive technology. Open source is

Dare Obasanjo has a nice article on caching and why we can't just let the database do it. I love the phrase "it's caching all the way down."

http://www.25hoursaday.com/weblog/2008/11/09/InMemoryCachingWhyWeCantJustTrustTheDatabaseToGetItRight.aspx

Today Sun announced the new 7000 line (aka Amber Road) of open storage appliances. Amber Road runs OpenSolaris and ZFS on industry-standard x86 hardware and includes innovative management software developed by Sun’s FISHworks (Fully Integrated Software and Hardware) group.

Our engineers worked along with Sun’s technologists on Amber Road in Sun’s labs for past few weeks, and today we are announcing support for Amber Road with both of our products Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL.

Amber Road is another example of innovation and value created by combination of open source and open systems. Combine  Amber Road with Zmanda’s open source backup …

Mark De Visser, previously VP of marketing at Zend and Red Hat, set to lead open source tools company READ MORE

This Thursday (November 13, 2008), Martin "MC" Brown will give an overview of MySQL on openSolaris. MC is an expert on MySQL and Solaris, and has helped the openSolaris team to port MySQL to that platform. The session will start at 14:00 UTC/BST (15:00 CET).

For those of you who've never heard the term before, MySQL University is an educational program for engineers from Sun/MySQL and the MySQL community. It's free and open to anyone. MySQL University focuses on MySQL internals and on Sun technology that can be used in connection with MySQL.

Here's the updated schedule for the rest of this year. Note that 14:00 BST currently translates to 14:00 UTC – sorry for getting this wrong with the last announcement. As always, check out the …

One of the things that I've been wanting to do is build MySQL.  I checked out this blog from Neel and the instructions posted on the MySQL site and it looked fairly straightforward.  After going through the steps, I can say that it proved to be quite simple.  Note that I built the latest rc candidate of MySQL on OpenSolaris using Sun's compilers.  Here are the steps for people who are interested.

1. Install OpenSolaris.  I already have OpenSolaris 2008.05 running within VirtualBox on my laptop.  If you need the ISO image, it can be downloaded from …

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a …

I’m not someone who wakes up every day and looks at how my blog is ranked by all of the various services. I check out my WordPress stats, but that’s really about it. However, someone went and did some of the work for me, and they’ve decided that, of the blogs that they read or that were suggested to them, this blog ranks #20 in a listing of 25.

I’m really flattered, but wonder if it’s an indicator that this is a quality blog, or that they should aim higher in their blog reading ;-P  Either way, listing 25 bloggers in a flattering way is a fantastic marketing technique, because most of us are probably egomaniacal enough to say “Hey! Look!” and link back to the list on *your* blog, resulting in lots of traffic. Kudos, and thanks Mobile Maven!

Today I discovered Stack Overflow, a collaborative site that focuses on technical Questions. You can ask questions related to any language, apparently without having to register. The site is currently in beta. There are also a few MySQL questions that are currently unanswered.