Let me start out by saying: the best response to a disaster is backup you can count on.

Found a scary story today about hundreds of thousands of websites using Microsoft IIS and SQL Servers being affected by Internet-wide SQL injection attacks. The story originally reported by F-Secure is now on Slashdot as well.

On the IIS forum, panic is visible. Those who had backups are breathing a sigh of relief like one administrator who commented, "We have been hit by this as well. Lucky backup ran last night just prior to the attack."

Others without backups are just screwed.

F-secure …

Here is number 5 in my series of six podcasts from last week's MySQL conference and expo.

Just after lunch on Tuesday, I was able to corner Brian Aker, former CTO of MySQL, introduce myself and ask him if he was up for a podcast.  Without any convincing or arm twisting he happily agreed. :)

My interview with Brian (9:18)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Brian's lenses adapt to match the art around him. 

Some of the …

At this year's MySQL Conference I was invited to be a keynote panelist at Scaling MySQL Up Or Out keynote. Other keynote panelists included Jeff Rothschild (VP of technology at Facebook and a consulting partner with Accel Partners), Paul Tuckfield (DBA at YouTube), John Allspaw (manager of operations engineering at Flickr) and Domas Mituzas (DBA at Wikipedia). There were also representatives from MySQL (Monty Taylor) and Sun (Matt Ingenthron).

I really enjoyed being a keynote panelist with my peers. We were seated according to our Alexa ranking with the highest ranking YouTube on the right side. Even though I was representing the thirteenth largest site, our traffic compared to Facebook and YouTube was humbling.

All of the keynote panelists met early in the morning to get equipped with microphones and to go over the format.
…

Or, When MySQL Lies!

When I do a show slave status\G, sometimes mysqld will lie to me and give me a wrong Exec_Master_Log_Pos. Let me explain with a situation from last night.

This is the output of show slave status\G from mysql version 5.0.41-community-log:

mysql> show slave status \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
                Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
                   Master_Host: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
                   Master_User: replic_username
                   Master_Port: 3306
                 Connect_Retry: 60
               Master_Log_File: mysql-bin.000480
           Read_Master_Log_Pos: 690470773
                Relay_Log_File: db2-relay-bin.000028
                 Relay_Log_Pos: 683977007
      Relay_Master_Log_File: mysql-bin.000480
              Slave_IO_Running: Yes
             Slave_SQL_Running: No …

While being subscribed to the full blogs.sun.com feed certainly feels like drinking water from a firehose, every once in a while I stumble over very well-written and useful articles about MySQL. Below is a collection of helpful posts, especially if you run MySQL on Solaris (surprise!). And while I still am an avid Linux user, I must admit that Solaris has a few neat features - particularly DTrace and ZFS are quite intriguing. If only userland would not feel so weird for someone coming from a GNU/Linux background!

From Jenny Chen's blog:

• DTrace Integration with MySQL 5.0 - Chime demo
…

By drinking “Brainiac” at Google of course.

All my photos from the Conference Here

The slave failed with the error that the relay binlog is corrupt. It had copied close to 12 binlogs from the master and they were yet to be applied. Unfortunately those binlogs have been purged on the master. Now to sync up cleanly we might have to refresh data from the master which can be costly since it was a 290 GB database. We had the option of shutting down the server. We thought we can try our luck with a crazy hack. We shutdown the server. Tried reading the binlog using mysqlbinlog utility from the corrupt position. It failed as expected. Then we tried reading from the next immediate position and it went through fine. Now we had a proof that our hack might work. We opened the relay-log.info and incremented the second row by a value of one. Then we started the server. Boom, the slave started running and we were saved from a great pain of resyncing the slave.

PS : We might have missed one transaction in this hack, but that was ok for …

Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, welcomes back for his record-breaking record-tying (Sheeri, are you reading?) third edition Ronald Bradford of Opinions, Expertise, Passion.

Why does Ronald write Log Buffer? Perhaps it’s because he knows that LB is and established and widely read feature, and hence likely to bring his own blog some new readers and improve its ranking. Or maybe he enjoys the fun and challenge of comprehending and presenting the entire DBA blog scene, not just the part that deals with his own favoured technologies. (Or maybe he just likes me? Ronald?)

Since Log Buffer is open to anyone, I encourage you also to join in. If you’d like to edit and publish an edition yourself, …

April 25th, 2008 - by Ronald Bradford

Welcome to the 94th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of the database blogsphere. Adding to the list of usual database suspects, I have some more alternative considerations for our readers this week.

We start with Conferences

Still some discussion from last weeks’ 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo.

Baron “xarpb” Schwartz calls it correct in Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo. Matt Assay of c|net gives us some of his opinions in three posts …

A buddy of mine just upgraded to an iPhone so he lent me his old iPod Touch to try out. I used it at the MySQL Conference along with my Palm Centro chick-phone to see if I could get away without dragging my laptop everywhere. And if I was successful, then I'd upgrade to an iPhone myself. I must admit, I was more impressed with hands-on use of the iPod Touch than I expected. It's small enough and light enough that you barely notice it in a jacket or pants pocket. And despite the small screen, the browsing experience via... READ MORE