Hi,

I needed to install AMP on my OpenSolaris laptop to do some PHP development, and I thought some people would be interested to know how to do this.

Here we go.

AMP is available from the OpenSolaris Web Stack project, which also includes other open source components such as Perl, Ruby, Memcached, Lighthttpd, etc.

The nice thing with OpenSolaris is that - assuming my laptop is connected to the Internet - I can use the Package Manager to automatically download and install AMP on my laptop. I access the Package Manager through the menu System/Administration.

Once the Package Manager is launched, I make sure that the Repository is set to opensolaris.org and  I do a search on amp:

The amp and amp-dev packages are now listed in the selection …

Morning, I saw Monty's post asking for contribution to drizzle's i18n efforts. I did checked out Hindi language and well I must say translation is a fun activity. 
If you think that will be as easy as using some online translation tool (I tried Google Translate), you may be wrong. Many sentences that make direct sense in English get completely screwed when translated word by word. Sometimes they are translated into a perfect meaningful sentence and that is when you can laugh out loudly.
As of now I'm doing Hindi (already 80 translations down) and next I'm gonna pick Punjabi. Wow! I know languages.

We have been looking for a new standard method for serializing objects from the server. Schemas, Replication Events, Tables, etc... all for one reason or another have to be serialized at some juncture at the moment. Each type has its own method/language which makes it a bit of a pain to deal with in the server.

Worse?

Few of the formats are upgradable. You end up with all sorts of incompatibilities that over time have become a real PIA to deal with.

Introducing Google's Protocol Buffers:
http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/

In short, this buys us an upgradable format and a lot less code. It also makes it much simple to write trivial little tools to pull apart objects from the server.

I pushed the first bit of this into Drizzle last night, and picked a low hanging piece of fruit, the …

Just on the train after my morning tutorial on MySQL Replication and Backup Strategies.
I had 10 attendees, and we had a very good interactive session with many questions and discussions.
The attendees tell me they liked it.

I've rented a car here for the week, but just parking at a station outside the city to avoid parking problems.
Also allowed me to explore the area a bit more, including the fab wine regions (McLaren Vale, Barossa, etc).

Tonight is the LinuxSA meeting (a week earlier), and I'll be doing a talk there on MySQL and Drizzle.

Download Maatkit

Maatkit version 2152 is ready for download. This release is also known as the “is this project really alive?” release. We thought we should delay until MySQL released a new Community Server version. Just kidding — it has nothing to do with that.

This release is also very significant in that it’s the first one that has large code contributions by someone other than myself. As you may know, Percona (my employer) has hired the very talented Daniel Nichter, author of mysqlreport and other goodies, to help with Maatkit. So far it is a match made in heaven, and Daniel did …

The Skoll Client retrieves a set of commands from the Skoll Server to compile and test MySQL; these commands are UNIX shell commands. My Google Summer of Code project is to work on the Java Skoll Client, I spent a great deal of time and effort getting these shell commands to run well in Java. Running shell commands in Java is not always straightforward, here are some techniques I learned to get the job done.

Use Java's ProcessBuilder class instead of Runtime class for Java 5.0+ projects. There are two reasons. First, ProcessBuilder has redirectErrorStream() method that automatically merges the standard output and standard error together so the output of a command would make more sense and more importantly the process won't freeze if the developer doesn't clear the error output stream. Second, the environment() method returns a nice Map the developer can use to manipulate the environment in which the command should run. Unfortunately, I must …

KEY ACCOMPLISHMENTS LAST WEEK

• Finished per test runtime information collection modifications.
• Collected and analyzed per test runtime information for a few suspicious configurations and tests.
• Refactored and cleaned up source code.

KEY TASKS THAT STALLED LAST WEEK

• None

KEY CONCERNS

• None

TASKS IN THE UPCOMING WEEK

• Refactor and clean up source code.
• Update JavaDoc.

Problem Statement : 386 GB of MySQL 5.0 Compressed MyISAM tables (Merge engine used)  need to be migrated to MySQL 5.1 Compressed/Partitioned tables. Also we had to add a few new columns and change the datatype of few existing columns.

Initial plan : Setup the MySQL 5.1 database with the schema with partitioning to which the data needs to be migrated and then run scripts to copy the .MYD ,.MYI and .frm files to the 5.1 database. Disable the keys using “Alter table <> disable keys“. Then migrate the data using the insert into newtable select * from old table. Then to compress the tables run myisampack and myisamchk.

As per plan we started the migration process. The plan worked perfectly though a bit on the slower side for most of the tables. For few of the tables, the import process kept dragging on and on. It was well past a week since the import was started and the system …

Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.

The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages - it also seems like he’s still the only developer).

?This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)?

I couldn’t help but grin …

A concise compilation of today's news of interest to TheAquarium readers: