Today I decided to package all of my various scripts together into a useful toolkit. Some are perl, some are shell script. These scripts are, in general, one off scripts that I wrote in order to get things done that weren’t available at the time. Now they’re nicely organized and will receive updates at the google code repo.

So far the toolkit includes the following scripts:

• mt-backup-parallel -> the parallel backup script I wrote about in my last post
• mt-check-replication -> script to report on replication status for slave servers
• mt-check-rhcluster-filesystems -> reports on redhat cluster filesystems (for mysql active/passive clustering)
• mt-connections-log -> logs connections to mysql to disk, reports on threshold overages
• mt-flush-tables-sequence -> runs through schema.tables to …

Hi,
How that I have the latest release of PBMS out the door I thought I would post some of the ideas I have had for possible ways in which the BLOB streaming engine could be expanded upon. 
What if the BLOB streaming engine supported the idea of having it's own BLOB storage engines that could be plugged into it the same way that storage engines are plugged into MySQL. The API for these BLOB storage engines would be dead simple, all they would need to support would be a 'get', 'put', and 'delete' method. The BLOB streaming engine would handle the reference counting and still provide the simple HTTP server for direct access to the BLOBs but the BLOB engines would handle how and where the actual BLOB data would be stored.
Currently the blob data is stored locally in blob repository files, which is very efficient but may not be ideal for some applications. Here are a few ideas I have had for possible BLOB storage engines:

Background Knowledge

I’m trying to determine the difference in minutes between two timestamps. I’m using Pear::Date to do this. The issue comes into play when I noticed that the wrong timezone was being used by Pear::Date, UTC. If I do not use Pear::Date the timezone is set correctly.

I have tried using date_default_timezone_set() and it does set the timezone back, however I feel this shouldn’t be necessary as the default timezone should be used. I have been using date_default_timezone_get() to determine what timezone is being used.

It’s my understanding that Pear::Date uses UTC when it is unable to determine the default timezone. As far as I know I have the default timezone set correctly and with a …

The errmsg plugin interface is almost done.

The next plugin interface will be fairly more fraught, but useful. Making the configuration interface as a plugin.

This means that instead of keeping the configuration in the /etc/my.cnf and/or /etc/drizzle.cnf, the configuration variables could be kept in the Gnome registry, or in LDAP, or via lookups in some online configuration database server.

This would make managing and configuring huge arrays of Drizzle servers much much easier.

Alpha version 5.06 of the BLOB streaming engine for MySQL has been released. You can download the source code from www.blobstreaming.org/download. The documentation has also been updated.

What's new in 5.06:

• The BLOB streaming engine can now be used with MyISAM tables as well as tables created by any other MySQL storage engine. 
• The name of the PrimeBase BLOB streaming engine has been changed from MyBS to PBMS which stands for "PrimeBase Media Streaming".

This version introduces a couple of new term:

• streaming-enabled table: This is any table created by a streaming-enabled engine such as PBXT, or has triggers defined on blob referencing columns that notify the PBMS engine when BLOB references are inserted, updated, and deleted.
• BLOB reference column: This is a column in a stream-enabled table that contains PBMS BLOB references and …

What or who is Amira?Well... Many would know Amira is to David as My is to Monty.Amira also has all the same letters as Maria, except that it is in PDP "middle-endian" byte order.It is also the codename of a little known project while I was at MySQL: Soon after Oracle acquired Innobase OY, the powers that be at MySQL did not want to solely rely on InnoDB (or BerkeleyDB) as a transactional data

Belgian consultancy company Element 61 has just posted an opinion piece under the disguise of a review on open source ETL.

What a load of utter nonsens.  Try reading this:

Instead of using SQL statements to transform data, an Open Source ETL tool gives the developer a standard set of functions, error handling rules and database connections. The integration of all these different components is done by the Open Source ETL tool provider. The straightforward transformations can be implemented very quickly, without the hassle of writing queries, connecting to data sources or writing your own error handling process. When there are complex transformations to make, Open Source ETL tools will often not offer out-of-the-box solutions.

Well Mr Jan Claes, we’re perfectly capable of handling …

This one was to planned to leave the hangar late last week, but a well hidden bug in the table-comparison kept us from finishing the release. But now it’s ready, the next release of our current GA release of MySQL Workbench, Version 5.0.26.
We did some minor tweaking on the UI - the property-pane now shows object-properties for objects on the MySQL-Model-Page too and we’re using another algorithm for the Autolayout-Feature (this needs to be optimized, it’s a basic implementation for now). Please check out the new version right from our main download page.

The other day we began to encounter weird and random errors on small and innocent queries that shouldn’t give any errors at all. It all lead to one of our most basic health checks failing for no apparent reason.

The first clue that popped into our minds was related to case-sensitivity, since the failing check was looking for the column names of the only table in the schema with UPPER CASE name. This symptom was especially weird since all of this was happening on MySQL setups running on Windows, and so we’re not sure if this was being caused by some internal code library, MySQL, or Windows itself.

Since that was the only clue we then had, it seemed obvious that we should start fiddling with the lower_case_table_names system variable. After a couple of restarts, this approach was leading us nowhere, so we finally gave up on it. …

Can you hear me back there? Anyone have a problem hearing me?

Let's have a look here then... Blog is active, name chosen, sidebar seems to work. Hmmm this Sun blogging system isn't too bad. Looks like I can configure this pretty much how I want it as I get some time.

Well, this is Dups on the Sun/MySQL Web Team and this will be my technical blog of things done, of things to come, of things to do and of things a-happening for anything that isn't well, personal and about photography. If you're interested in that kind of stuff, you might want to mosey on over to http://www.dups.ca/blog and my photo blog at http://www.dups.ca

So what's my expertise?

I always joke that I am the dumbest person in the room. My "expertise" often involves me …