While I mentioned in Not Stuck, “thanks to those concerned”, perhaps I did not illustrate clearly that I was suitability moved by the genuine concern of close friends regarding my plight, and I did really appreciate the comments and initial feedback.

I’ve talked with close friends such as Jay, Frank, Marc and tonight both Giuseppe and Sheeri and while I’ve been told it’s a good one, and we laughed and smiled I do value the genuine friends I have in the MySQL Community.

My apologies for any personal pain cause during April 1st. I hoped that I’d replied via email to each commenter promptly …

All production servers are normally installed using kickstart files. Unfortunately, the ks file had a bug that it didnt add a swap partition if there was only one logical or physical disk.

Once the database was setup without swap, the configuration was sized such that all processes fit into memory. But we started seeing OOM killing processes due to lack of memory. Though under normal conditions we had 1-2 GB of free memory.

Unfortunately, OOM at times picked to kill mysql. We were running 500GB+ database having myisam tables. We ended up having to repair the tables every time OOM felt like killing mysqld . Adding a swap device might help us fix the issue, but for that we might have to resize the logical/physical partitions, which wasn’t cool. Then this following idea popped up, create a file, format it as swap and add it as swap device dynamically and also add it /etc/fstab to survive reboot.

dd …

We have just officially released the WB 5.0 RC3 build and are planning the GA build to happen soon. One might ask, what is our criteria to call something GA? Well, it means that there must not be any known and verified P1 (crashing) and P2 (very serious bug with no workaround) bugs. Does it means that there are no bugs left or that we have implemented every feature request? No.

Therefore our efforts will not stop after the GA build. We still plan to get a new release out every 3rd week including all fixes and improvements that are necessary. This is a first list of things we are planning to release in a future GA release.

• Bug fixes
  Most important are bug fixes of course. Please keep reporting bugs, you did a great job in the past - and if you do so, we will keep closing those bug reports as fast as we can.

• Enable connection-end points dragging/reordering
  This has remained one major …

We managed to get the 3rd Release candidate of Workbench ready and waiting on our servers to be tried and tested.

We made Syntax Highlighting available in all schema object editors (view-, routine-, routine-group- and trigger-editor). A new description palette has been implemented that allows easy access to the description/comment field of every object. More plugins - which are better organized in plugin-submenus now - were added  and the drawing-canvas has got some speed-optimization.

Please check out our latest build and report issues you find to help us fix it for our upcoming GA release. Fetch your copy now!

We’re in the early stages of revamping a medium-size website, and we want to document the possible paths people can take to complete a given set of tasks. We have the basic site layout/map ready, but we also want to make sure that all bases are covered as far as making sure the information you need is readily available, wherever in the website you are.

What process do you use for planning web site navigation and ensuring that everything is covered? Are there standard tools (a la UML for programming) to cover this sort of task? Know any good books on the subject? If you have any experience in this area, please drop a comment!

According to TechCrunch, Google is expected to announce BigTable as a web service tonight.

For those unfamiliar with BigTable:
Bigtable is a distributed storage system for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance. These applications place very different demands on Bigtable, both in terms of data size (from URLs to web pages to satellite imagery) and latency requirements (from backend bulk processing to real-time data serving). Despite these varied demands, …

I drafted some blog entry about last week's WebMontag (de) session in Frankfurt am Main but somehow I managed forgetting posting it.
It was my first experience with the WebMontag events, so I didn't really know what to expect. However, I'm happy I attended and talked there!

The venue, Brotfabrik, is already worth mentioning. Picking up Pierre Kerchner (de) by car, we bumped into Dirk Friedenberger (de) arriving: always good to know people first time going somewhere.
The planned presentations were:

• Andreas Demmer …

I like Arjen's suggestion of having a pre-conference community dinner and wanted to put my name. I tried to register with softwareengineer99 and got this:

This kinds of usernames usually indicate spammers. If you feel like this was in err, contact the wiki administrator.

Return to MySQLConf2008CommunityDinner.

Ok, whatever. I then tried again with a "non spammer" username and multiple email addresses but kept getting this:

A database query syntax error has occurred. This may indicate a bug in the software. The last attempted database query was:

(SQL query hidden)

from within function "User::addToDatabase". MySQL returned error "1062: Duplicate entry '' for key 3 (localhost)".

So there seems to be an issue with MySQL Forge registration.

As a hard liner Linux user, I don't care much fro graphics in things like system administration. After switching to a Mac laptop, I basically continued doing the same things in the same ways, just enjoying some benefits of the Mac in terms of multimedia and networking flexibility. Thus, although I was aware of the broken MySQL installer that left the database server unusable, I didn't care much because I found a workaround one minute after being confronted with the unresponsive panel.

The last icon on the bottom right is the MySQL starter.

When launched, it shows a "start mysql" button that the user gladly clicks. With the standard installation package, nothing …

Community initiative: we want to do this event Sunday evening (13 April), while the Sun/MySQL gang has its annual pre-conf staff party at Marten's house.

Our suggested destination is the nearby (proper) Mexican which has excellent food. If you're interest in coming, please add your name to the special page on the MySQL Forge wiki so we can get some idea of how many people to expect. Further details on the wiki page! You can also note there if you have wheels available to help transport people. Oh, and bring your own wallet ;-)

I hope to see you there - there should be plenty of people, as many of you will have arrived by Sunday afternoon. And it'll be interesting for me, as this will be my first MySQL Conference where I'm neither employed by MySQL nor running the conference. A whole new perspective! Although I have to say, I will …