In my time at MySQL I've travelled to various cities around New Zealand, but there have not been many open MySQL training courses over the years. Open Query has DBA course days scheduled in Auckland, with the following topics:

• Mon 8 Sep: MySQL Installation, Security and User Management (AUD 475)
• Tue 9 Sep: MySQL Backup and Recovery (AUD 475)
• Wed 10 Sep: MySQL InnoDB Performance Tuning (AUD 575)

Book now for $25 discount (per training day, per person)

This post is SEO bait for people trying to scale MySQL’s write capacity by writing to both servers in master-master replication. The short answer: you can’t do it. It’s impossible.

I keep hearing this line of reasoning: “if I make a MySQL replication ‘cluster’ and move half the writes to machine A and half of them to machine B, I can increase my overall write capacity.” It’s a fallacy. All writes are repeated on both machines: the writes you do on machine A are repeated via replication on machine B, and vice versa. You don’t shield either machine from any of the load.

In addition, doing this introduces a very dangerous side effect: in case of a problem, neither machine has the authoritative data. Neither machine’s data can be trusted, but neither machine’s data can be discarded either. This is a very difficult situation to recover from. Save yourself grief, work, and money. Never write to both …

TOTD #39 explained how to create an Autocomplete widget (server-powered autocompleting of text fields, similar to Google Suggest) using Prototype/Script.aculo.us libraries with NetBeans, GlassFish and MySQL. This Tip Of The Day (TOTD) builds upon that project and shows how same functionality can be achieved using jQuery Library.

1. Use the NetBeans project created in TOTD #39. Right-clicking on the project, select "New", "JSP...", enter the name as "index2" …

I would’ve written sooner about Joomla! Day Malaysia 2008, but I spent most of Sunday cringed in between the bed and the toilet. Here are a bunch of quick notes I took at the event, with some thoughts tacked on to it.

Overall impressions? It was good for a Joomla! beginner. While I would consider myself a Joomla! beginner, I’ve seen many a CMS and maybe am a tad bit jaded. There is a great amount of interest in Joomla! - about 200 people registered for a paid for event (not cheap either - RM70 for a Joomla! forum member, and RM150 for regular visitors). So there’s definitely money to be made in Joomla! and CMSes in general.

Location? This is the first time I’ve been to the rather infamous Cititel hotel, tacked to MidValley. Held at the 5th floor, I noticed that people were allowed to smoke within the corridors. I consider this a …

Yesterday I had lunch with Sriram Rao, lead developer of the KFS project and compared notes about distributed databases.

KFS is basically a GFS-style clone developed at Kosmix and then released as open source.

Basically, a no-BS distributed filesystem implemented from the ground up in C++ to scale and actually get real work done. KFS is running on a 200 node cluster within Kosmix. I just found out that it’s deployed in a 700 node cluster at Quantcast.

What’s really cool is that he just left Kosmix (great and smart guys btw) to work on KFS full time at Quantcast extending KFS.

This is a win for both companies. The guy leaves Kosmix and can literally keep working on the same source code! OSS FTW!

Quantcast is obviously …

I have my first SQL Server project lined up. So I am just interested in hearing some stories from the trenches form people that have been there already. How does PHP and SQL Server 2005 work out together? How do they work out together with *nix or Linux specifically? How do they work together with a Mac (since all the developers on the projects use Macs)? What are the limitations?

I heard some issues with NCHAR's when going through FreeTDS. Since this is a swiss client, we will of course have to make the application localized in German, Italien and French. What extensions are you using? Is PDO_DBLIB worth a look or should one better stick to ext/mssql? I do not envision I am going to do ueberfancy things. Well looking through the requirements we will have to read a PDF from the server. We will also make extensive use of FULLTEXT …

I have my first SQL Server project lined up. So I am just interested in hearing some stories from the trenches form people that have been there already. How does PHP and SQL Server 2005 work out together? How do they work out together with *nix or Linux specifically? How do they work together with a Mac (since all the developers on the projects use Macs)? What are the limitations?

I heard some issues with NCHAR's when going through FreeTDS. Since this is a swiss client, we will of course have to make the application localized in German, Italien and French. What extensions are you using? Is PDO_DBLIB worth a look or should one better stick to ext/mssql? I do not envision I am going to do ueberfancy things. Well looking through the requirements we will have to read a PDF from the server. We will also make extensive use of FULLTEXT …

Hi!

On August12th, we will host a live webinar which introduces MySQL products. Here is general information:

• Title: Introducting MySQL Products

• Date: Tuesday, August 12 at 2:00 pm JPT,at 3:00 pm in Sydney, at 1:00 pm in Singapore, Beijing and Manila Philippine, at 2:00 pm in Seoul, at 10:30 am in Mumbai (the presentation will be approximately 45 minutes long followed by Q&A)

• Presenter: Ryusuke Kajiyama,MySQL Senior Technical Evangelist

• Registration URL: http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-183.html

Join us for this informative webinar which will deliver a comprehensive introduction of MySQL products and services such as MySQL Enterprise,  MySQL Cluster, MySQL Embedded, consulting service, along with examples of …

Today marks a big day in the history of the Malaysian Government - they’ve released their first fully open source software package, MyMeeting.

Poking around their Trac installation, they use PHP and MySQL 5 (5.0.51a from Ubuntu, even!). Of course their install documentation suggests a lot of Windows usage, but this is a step in the right direction.

Give it a twirl. Report bugs. How many more governments out there are writing and releasing open source software packages? Or is this a first?

Thanks to Glynn for pointing me to the right thread on opensolaris.org (in a comment on my Good adventures with OpenSolaris post). The package verification thingy (pkg verify -v -f SUNWfirefox) did actually throw an error (indicating some sort of problem). So that’s pretty neat. The fact that it got into trouble in the first place isn’t good, but corruption detection is the next best thing.

I still occationally hit the bug in VirtualBox where if you have 127.0.0.1 in your resolv.conf on your host (e.g. running a local caching nameserver), VirtualBox passes this through to the guest, so the guest tries to use the guest 127.0.0.1 as a nameserver - this usually doesn’t work so well.

The good news is, Firefox now works in my OpenSolaris VM.

The bad news is that even though I’ve gone and …