Previously.
As usual, hit up the homepage for the latest and greatest downloads. Or simply 'git pull' and use the tag release-6 if you're cool enough.

I'd like to use this post to explain in a more general fashion about what DPM is and why it's different from the rest of the proxies.

First, milestones since R5:
- BSD licensed. You are now free to roam about the cabin.
- Several C level bugs fixed.
- Many improvements to the lua library dpml.lua
- All of the demos were rewritten using dpml.lua, and are now far easier to use.

Now, what is DPM?
- It's a proxy for MySQL. It is event driven, embeds lua, and is written in C. It allows you to write plugins in lua, and …

Work on the next generation of MySQL Database Administrator Exams has started and it raises the question of 'What does a DBA actually do?

The vivacious Sheeri Kritzer Cabral had a list of Best Practices for Database Administrators that is a good starting point. A lot of the items she lists are hard to quantify, especially for someone who has to write performance reviews and make salary increase recommendations.

I used to work for a program manager who was very good at managing developers by the numbers of lines of code generated, bugs fixed, and number of hours spent in the little gray cubicles. DBA work is not as easy to quantify. It was frustrating for both of us as there was no discrete output to log, report and graph. And how can examining buffer cache hits rates be valued by an employer in comparison to someone putting …

Here's one for you... imagine you have a properly normalised schema, but you need to output it to CSV for a spreadsheet. So, you have multiple attributes for each item. The number of items is larger than the max # of joins (61) that you can do in MySQL. How to do this in a single query?

My slides from this year’s MySQL Conference are available for download at the Conference Site or right here: mysql_backup_basics.pdf

I’m going to be migrating to using ZooKeeper within Spinn3r for a myriad of reasons but this one is especially powerful.

One could use ZooKeeper to configure external monitoring systems like Munin and Ganglia.

ZooKeeper enables this with its support for ephemeral files.

If you have an external process like a webserver, database, robot, etc you can have it create a ephemeral file which registers its services and presence in the cluster.

For example:

/services/www/www32.mydomain.com/80

Would represent a machine named www32.mydomain.com.

You can then have munin connect to ZooKeeper and enumerate files in /services/www and have a cron script continually …

I am, for the most part, a do-it-yourself type of person. I fix my own car if I can; I even have four healthy tomato plants growing in pots outside as we speak — the plants will take that little extra CO2 out of the air and give me great tasting tomatoes (soon… i hope!)

But I digress.

Whether to use an ETL tool such as Kettle (aka Penatho Data Integration) for a project involving large data transfers is a typical “build vs. buy” type of decision, one that is fairly well understood and I don’t wish to repeat it all here — putting together some Perl scripts to do the job, you typically get great performance, development speed and accessibility. This would need to be balanced against the benefits of ETL tools and their potential drawbacks (development speed, license costs and performance …

You may never have heard of BitRock, the company that has traditionally competed with OpenLogic, SpikeSource, and SourceLabs in the "open-source stacks" business but has seen much more success with its excellent installers, which upwards of 60 percent of commercial open-source projects use including SugarCRM, JasperSoft, Ringside Networks, and more. The name may be unfamiliar to you, but not for long.

Why? Because BitRock is about to claim the center of the open-source world's attention, as Stephe Walli, an advisor to BitRock, pointed out two months ago following the Open Source Business Conference. It's called the Network, you're likely to be buying into one very soon, if you haven't already.

As open-source companies seek ways to monetize their code, a common theme has emerged: …

Again a week late, but hey, I only need to keep up with this stuff, not comment on it all the time. MySQL changed their minds and turns out the core server will continue to be open source, allowing customers to depend on being able to inspect it if required, extend on any bit as needed, and most importantly, get the benefits of a large community using and testing all features. Thanks for that. I just hope you're going to be consistent about this, for precisely the reason that as a MySQL Enterprise customer, I don't pay you to deliver bits that haven't received that community testing, but to rapidly fix problems if they exist despite that exposure.

It was interesting to hear Monty Widenius comment about it in this week's Open Tuesday event, and I also got to talk to him about attending a MySQL Users session in Helsinki next …

How can this happen?

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

Well, just use a temporary table.

mysql> CREATE TABLE t (i INT);
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)

mysql> CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t (d DATE);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> DROP TABLE t;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

I will add more such silly/hard/cool/whatever questions from time to time here.