Yes, if you are running backing on a large database that is also handling production traffic (not a very smart idea to begin with). This is especially important for backups created using snapshots based on copy-on-write algorithm.

Brian makes an important point in a comment to my post regarding backup. He points out "Backups are always onerous on IO" and that a better way to backup is to use slaves or a standby master (if using multi master replication).

If you *must* run backups on a production server, then ibbackup becomes very important as it doesn't affect performance as much as the evil snapshots created by snapshot tools like fssnap and LVM. I have found that in our case purchasing ibbackup licenses …

Google's announcement tonight is much bigger than I thought. Google is releasing Google AppEngine (site goes live at midnight EST) tonight, a fully-hosted, "automatically scalable" web application platform that consists of Python App servers, BigTable and GFS.

By making App Engine available only for Python, Google is giving the language a big boost.

Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) allows developers to choose their own stack. Furthermore, Amazon's …

Amazing that there is such disconnect in service communications in these modern days when communications are seemingly instantaneous.TriNet, the HR company which formerly managed MySQL Inc's personnel payroll and benefits, agrees that they have received my COBRA enrollment and first month's payments last Thursday, all information has been forwarded and that my Blue Shield coverage should continue

Tonight’s Hamburg MySQL Meetup was a packed room of 60-70 people at Sun in Hamburg. The most I’ve seen @ a MySQL Meetup across three cities, countries, continents and years (my first Oct 5, 2004).

As expected most was in German. Pity, I would have liked to hear about Open Office and MySQL. Giuseppe, CCO (That’s Chief Cartoon Officer - I liked that one) gave in English a general review of MySQL. He highlighted the reasons “Why did Sun by MySQL?” including most popular, most dynamic and people with the Freedom to work anywhere.

Three points I would like to re-iterate for the community.

• The

MySQL Forge contains the Worklogs, i.e. what is going to be developed in current & future …

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, …