Zmanda has introduced a new version of Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) 2.1 which adds quite a few new capabilities for MySQL users. This version now includes enhanced snapshot support working with Linux LVM, Windows VSS, Solaris ZFS, NeApp SnapManager and Veritas VxFS. When they first told me about the performance on these systems I was blown away. I thought there must be some kind of a trick going on. The trick is to take advantage of the operating system's underlying snapshot capabilities to minimize locking on the database, typically less than one second. Robin, head of our product management group,... READ MORE

It's been close to 4 months since we released Cool Stack 1.2, so it's time to start thinking about the next release. Here's what we have planned so far and as always I'm looking for feedback from current and future users on what you'd like to see. Needless to say, that all currently known bugs will be fixed and the current patches will be rolled into the release. However, if you don't tell us about the problems you've run into, we won't be able to fix them. So, once again I'd like to encourage people to please post your problem/issue/tips etc. on the forum.

Here's a list of stuff we're currently looking at for Cool Stack 1.3 :

Welcome to the 86th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s jump right in. MySQL This was the week in which Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of MySQL went through. Wow, that didn’t take long at all! Zack Urlocker reports on the celebration at MySQL AB when the deal was completed, and [...]

Tim Bowden published an interesting post earlier this week about the impact that the choice of open source license has on the potential valuation of an open source vendor. Taking the MySQL and PostgreSQL databases as an example, Bowden wrote:

“When it comes to takeovers and valuations, I think the role of GPL as a strategic weapon is often under appreciated. If you?re top vendor dog in a GPL project, other players have a very hard time unseating you. That may sound counter-intuitive given world + dog has the code, but I don?t believe it?s such an advantage for competitors as most assume. Your lesser competitors in the same space have to share their plum developments with you. Sure, the top dog has to share his plums too, but when you?ve got the top plum growers in your own yard (to push a metaphor too far), you get to go to market …

Today I uploaded MySQL 5.1.23 to Debian experimental. It is currently waiting in the NEW queue for manual approval, because thanks to Monty Taylor the libndb parts are now in separate binary packages libndbclient3 and libndbclient-dev. Until it is getting approved to experimental, the updated package is available (amd64 only) from my home directory on gluck.

Suppose you have a master-master replication setup, and you know one of the tables has the wrong data. How do you re-sync it with the other server?

Warning: don’t just use any tool for this job! You may destroy your good copy of the data.

If your table is large, you’ll probably want to use a tool that can smartly find the differences in a very large dataset, and fix only the rows that need to be fixed. There are several tools that are either able to do this, or claim to be able to do this. However, most of them are not replication-aware, and are likely to either break replication or destroy data.

To see why this is, let’s look at a typical scenario. You have server1 and server2 set up as co-masters. On server1, your copy of sakila.film has correct data. On server2, somehow you are missing a row in that table. A hypothetical sync tool will compare the two copies of the data and find …

Debugging an existing application can be hard to bootstrap. Sometimes it just helps to observe the queries a web application is sending to the database. Unfortunately, the MySQL Query log does not directly tell the user which query goes to which database.
Continue reading "Observing the MySQL Query Log"

FedEx rang on my door today, delivering a large cardboard box. The Sender? Sun Microsystems, my new employer!

Upon opening it, I discovered the following:

Continue reading "A nice welcome package from Sun arrived today"

It's been close to 4 months since we released Cool Stack 1.2, so it's time to start thinking about the next release. Here's what we have planned so far and as always I'm looking for feedback from current and future users on what you'd like to see. Needless to say, that all currently known bugs will be fixed and the current patches will be rolled into the release. However, if you don't tell us about the problems you've run into, we won't be able to fix them. So, once again I'd like to encourage people to please post your problem/issue/tips etc. on the forum.

Here's a list of stuff we're currently looking at for Cool Stack 1.3 :