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 …

MySQL Conference & Expo attendees will have the opportunity to enter a drawing for cool prizes by having an expo hall passport brochure stamped at each participating sponsor and exhibitor booth.
Once attendees have obtained all "stamps" they will be entered into the drawing and eligible to win one of several prizes.
…

So you're running dedicated MySQL Linux box with plenty of memory, so the good question arises if you should have swap file enabled or disable it ? I've seen production successfully running on boxes both with and without swap file so it is not the question of you must do it this or that way but rather understanding advantages of both approaches.

I also would like to hear what you do yourself, and why

The rationale behind disabling swap is what there is nothing you want to swap out on such box anyway and if you disable swap file kernel will not swap and possibly will be able to manage memory smarter knowing it does not need to look for pages to swap out or balance memory for reducing a cache or swapping something out.

And indeed if you run with swap disabled you would not have the issue of swapping happening on the box as there is just nowhere to swap.

So what is about enabled …

Over-the-Top Tales from the Trenches.
Motto: Bringing order to the chaos of every day DBA life.

So you have got your nice MySQL Master-Slave replication pair setup. Everything is sweet, then the master dies/restarts or you have a slightly extended network outage.

Your monitoring software (in our case Avail) fires off a page and you are rudely interrupted from reading the Pythian blog.

These real world interruptions, what can I say… it pays the bills.

Anyway being the rounded DBA or enlightened DBA as Babette would say, you are capable of handling any type of database. You log into the machine and check out why the slave threw an error or if your monitoring is slow, why the slave is lagging by 2 hours.

You run SHOW SLAVE STATUS\G

mysql> show slave status \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
             Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event …