A new MySQL product is born. The preview release of MySQL Connector/C++ is available for download at http://downloads.mysql.com/forge/connector_cpp_preview . Connector/C++ is a new database driver to connect C++ applications to the MySQL Server. The preview mimics parts of the JDBC 3.0 API and is licensed under the terms of the GPL (plus FLOSS License Exception). Have a look at the announcement and the MySQL Connector/C++ wiki page for further “official” …

Its 12:30AM (00:30 for you Euros).  I am watching The Daily Show on Tivo.  All is well.  Then the phone beeps.

MySQL Main is critical

SSH?  no.

Digi console?  no.

About a week ago, we had a mysqldump file that was corrupt.  We cleaned it up.  My worst fears came to my mind.  We tried power cycling it.  It did not come back.

While my coworker was dealing with the facilily people, I worked on the backup server.  Had to ensure the last full backup was in place and apply the incremental data.  Suddenly, my SSH connection dies.  OMG.  THAT DUMB A** GUY POWER CYCLED THE WRONG BOX!!! --- FS corrupted.  Damn you ReiserFS!

By now, it's 4AM.  Tech took an hour to get to the rack.  It is 20 feet from his cubicle.  I get in the car.  I am two hours away from the …

“MySQL Proxy is a simple program that sits between your client and MySQL server(s) that can monitor, analyze or transform their communication. Its flexibility allows for unlimited uses; common ones include: load balancing; failover; query analysis; query filtering and modification; and many more.”

The flexibility of MySQL Proxy is based on the fact that every aspect is scriptable with Lua. Because I am new to MySQL Proxy and the Lua language I tried to implement a very simple script that waits for incoming SQL queries, tokenizes them and tries to detect SQL Injection heuristically by searching for certain disallowed SQL functions, databases, tables, statements or comments. When an SQL query is believed to contain an SQL injection is it not executed and a “Possible SQL …

I just got informed that two of my session proposals for DrupalCon 2008 got accepted - I will be speaking about the following topics there:

• MySQL Backup and Security - Best practices
• High availability solutions for MySQL: An Overview and practical demo

The second talk will be held in cooperation with Jakub Suchy, who will take over the practical demo. Sun Microsystems is a Gold …

A year and a half ago I was playing around with data visualization toolkits. What I found is that they fell into two buckets: those good for making graphs, and those good for art projects. The ones being used by design and art students were much more interesting and seem to have more possibilities for those of us delivering data visualization rather than fixed graphs.

The problem is that the toolkits / libraries are generally not as usable in a commercial setting. The most interesting one I found is Processing and I'm happy to see that there are now books out on it. I had trouble digging through the original documentation and doing anything interesting. The thing I often find is that the most interesting work is being done well outside the BI market. Here's a nice example of a Processing visualization from Robert Hodgin
…

First of all, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous OpenSolaris entry (which wasn’t really positive at all).

I recently tried again - this time starting with an ISO of build 93. I’d recommend completely ignoring the 2008.05 release and going straight for the build 93 image.

Installed easily in VirtualBox, adding the VirtualBox extensions was easy. Select “Devices -> Install Guest Additions” in the VirtualBox menu, then when logged into the OpenSolaris install, do the following:

su

pkgadd -d /media/VBOXADDITIONS_1.6.0_30421/VBoxSolarisAdditions.pkg

(you then say yes, i really do want to install it. rather obvious. I had to do this step again after the “pkg image-update” below though). Just logging out and then back in again gets you all the awesomeness you’d expect from running other guests (such as that system released by a large corporation in Redmond).

The “pkg …

While we were mostly excited to become part of Sun, there was at least one drawback too. MySQL had a worldwide policy of "Scandinavian style" 5 week vacations per year (4 Summer, 1 Winter week). Sun doesn't have such a worldwide policy, so most of us lost some vacation days there. But there is one group of employees that still enjoy this benefit... those of us that actually live in Scandinavia!

Those 4 weeks are however now gone for my part :-( So I thought I'll make a soft start to working by a) yesterday doing almost nothing and b) today blogging. A long long time ago before I left for my vacation Mark Callaghan requested more blog posts about MySQL Cluster, so I thought why not start with one right now. As previously noted there are many good MySQL Cluster bloggers out there, but admittedly some of their blog postings can be very …

... and thanks go to Harrison Fisk of the MySQL support organization who completed the port of the Ebay + Google patches advanced Memory engine for Drizzle.

This is one of the patches I have been hoping someone would get to quickly since it is a big win for databases.

For those playing at home this is the engine that runs some of Ebay and is a replacement for the memory engine distributed with MySQL. Google around and you can find articles on what makes this engine so spiffy.

Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.

For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the …

I came across another MySQL Monitoring product today, DBTuna. I’ve got a trial license of this commercial product so I’ll be looking into its installation, options and support and will be reporting back.