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I recently got a reminder mail to vote for the Sourceforge.Net 2008 Community Choice awards. Going through the list of finalists, I realized how many of these support MySQL as the database backend. It truly amazes me when I look at the wide range of available OSS applications today as well as how advanced many of these have become! More and more commercial applications can nowadays be replaced with Open Source alternatives/equivalents. And many times, MySQL is used to store the applications' data. This is a great trend!

After looking through the list, I spent a few minutes to add the relevant applications to the Project list on MySQL Forge. This section of the Forge is supposed to become a complete, "one-stop" directory of Open …

The cool features coming with MySQL 5.1 and 6.0 are the event scheduler and so called online backup.
Both of them implement something that you can do outside the database server. The event scheduler frees the DBA from the operating system dependency and the database backup and restore makes mysqldump redundant.
So far, the good news. What's wrong with this picture?
A look at the manual tells you all. You can backup and restore a database with an explicit SQL statement, but you can't use it in a prepared statement or in an event.
What?
WHAAAAT?
What do I use the event scheduler for, then? Ask any DBA about the first thing …

At the Red Hat Summit I was able to grab sometime with Chander Kant, CEO of open source back-up provider, Zmanda.

I had previously met Chander at the MySQL conference where they were named a partner of the year, but we didn't get a chance to talk much.  It was pretty cool to hear about how he originally identified the opportunity for Zmanda and then built a business around it.

My interview with Chander (13:27)  Listen …

At the Red Hat Summit I was able to grab sometime with Chander Kant, CEO of open source back-up provider, Zmanda.

I had previously met Chander at the MySQL conference where they were named a partner of the year, but we didn't get a chance to talk much.  It was pretty cool to hear about how he originally identified the opportunity for Zmanda and then built a business around it.

My interview with Chander (13:27)  Listen …

Since it took me over an hour to gather this together, I thought I would relay it here. To install the latest version of Darwin Streaming Server (6.0.3 at time of writing), you need to do the following:

1. Download a patched source RPM from Sverker Abrahamsson at http://www.abrahamsson.com/DarwinStreamingServer-6.0.3-2.src.rpm
2. Install the source RPM with rpm -i DarwinStreamingServer-6.0.3-2.src.rpm
3. Switch to the spec file with cd /usr/src/redhat/SPECS/
4. Build the spec file with rpmbuild -bb DarwinStreamingServer.spec
5. Switch to the built RPMs with cd …

Just spotted this article by Anand Rajaraman about an Indian version of Twitter that uses mostly mobile SMS rather than web access, and is built on Java and MySQL. It handles many more users and messages than Twitter currently does, and seems to be doing ok.

Anyway, have a read, the usual obvious architecture choices for scalable database apps are in there, but it's always good to read how people have actually applied these things and made something real work - serves better as an example for others... ;-)

I am happy to announce that a new version (0.9) of mylvmbackup has been released. This is the first release since the source code has been moved from Subversion to Bazaar and is now hosted on Launchpad.net. I would like to thank Robin H. Johnson and Patrick Hahn for providing the patches that contributed to this new release!

mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

From the …

That’s right. MySQL now has a user group in Paradise.

I am always looking into connecting with other MySQL professionals, to share the laughs and tears, and to enjoy what we love working with every day, MySQL. I have always wanted to bring us all together, and I thought that this would have a good chance of doing so. Since I live in Malta, this made for the perfect location for it. If you live in Malta, or perhaps in Sicily or Tunisia, and want to take a trip, please do join us at our first meeting.

We will be having our first meeting in Mellieha, and please RSVP to me personally via email, westerlund (at) pythian.com if you want to attend. The date is set for Thursday, …

Ok, I'm quite Sphyched.

I built the Sphinx Storage Engine, and it appears it'll solve a lot of pain I've had with FT, and gives me integration without having to write a bunch of perl glop to glue results of index searches into subsequent queries.

mysql> SELECT url, content,items_text.title FROM feeds join items using (feed_id) join items_text using (item_id)join items_sph_idx using (item_id) WHERE query='Kowalchik'\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
url: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=Mike+Kowalchik&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=rss
content: [This is a comment on Blogs I'm enjoying of late from Mike Kowalchik.] Hi Jack, couple of quick things. We have lots of autodiscovery features in our code …