Last week, I described how to use the MySQL plug-in API to write a minimal 'Hello world!' information schema plug-in. The main purpose of that plug-in is to illustrate the bare essentials of the MySQL information schema plug-in interface.

Fronter, a leading provider of online e-learning solutions, has chosen to base its new open platform on MySQL and other open source software products -- making it possible to satisfy customer demands for scalability and easy integration with other systems. This investment means a complete transition to platforms with open source code.

Fronter, headquartered in Norway, has enjoyed tremendous success with its learning platform for the education sector. Today, more than 3.8 million users in over 3,000 learning institutions in the UK, Europe and Nordic countries utilise the system to streamline both teaching and collaboration.

Let’s begin by assuming you have a server that runs MySQL and lots and lots of traffic flows through it everyday, let’s say… something like 50% of the size of the partition that the mysql binary logs are written to is on, then we will assume the binary log is turned on. Then we assume that expire_logs_days is not set.

What happens? Nagios/etc alerts that the partition is reaching a usage threshold because - low and behold the binary logs are filling up the partition. Tuning this variable is also important. It may need to be set to as low as 1 day, in which case I would say we need a bigger partition for binary logs, but setting it so low can cause replication problems if the slave(s) gets behind more than 1 day - god help us if it does - then those binary logs that the slave is reading are no longer available, and rebuilding replication will be next on the task list. (or using maatkit)

While I’m at it here are some good ones …

I have seen it time and time again. And yet, every time, it irritates me to no end. You are on a professional web site. You are navigating around and at some point you hit the link for their forums. And just like that you feel transported to another place. The whole site design just changes. Colors, layout, navigation… everything. Here are some examples, including the new C7Y site from php|Architect which inspired this post. (I really do love you guys on the podcast I promise =)

• php|architect’s C7Y - main site - forums
• Zend’s Developer Zone - main site - forums
  Zend’s forums do at least use the Zend.com header, but you can’t get to the forums …

I’ve decided to start replacing L with GL in acronyms where L supposedly stands for Linux. I’m not a big user of acronyms, because I think they are exclusionist and they obscure, rather than revealing. (This wouldn’t matter if I wrote for people who already knew what I meant and agreed with me, but that’s a waste of time). However, LAMP is one that I’ve probably used a few times, without thinking that it is supposed to stand for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/Python.

The MySQL Lifecycle Policy determines which versions are actively supported, and for which platforms such support applies.
The basic principle is that old versions are supported for a quite long, but definitely limited period, once they have been replaced by a newer GA version. For example, since the introduction of this policy, MySQL 3.23 and 4.0 have been retired.
The policy contains also provisions for a different kind of End of Life dismissal. When support for certain platforms has been discontinued by their vendors, of the platform is not widely used, MySQL reserves the right to stop building binaries and testing code on such obsolete platforms.
The reason is simple. While hardware can be bought and stored, time is a commodity in short supply, and there is only a given amount of time that our engineers can devote to testing and supporting multiple …

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!

I had mentioned a while back that I submitted three proposals for the 2008 MySQL Conference.  Well, two were accepted.

From one server to a cluster

In the last 10 years, dealnews.com has grown from a single shared hosting account to an entire rack of equipment. Luckily, we started using PHP and MySQL very early in the company’s history.

From the early days of growing a forum to surviving Slashdotting, Digging and even a Yahoo! front page mention, we have had to adapt both our hardware and software many times to keep up with the growth.

I will discuss the traps, bottlenecks, and even some big wins we have encountered along the way using PHP and MySQL. From the small scale to using replication and even …

Damien has now confirmed that we will co-present the CouchDB talk at ETech. I am happy to have him with me cough so I can weasel out of the real hard questions by pointing to him — and vice versa.

But there is a treat for you, too. If you plan to come to ETech in San Diego on March 3rd to March 6th, you can get a 35% discount when you mention the code et08rdr during your registration.

Hope to see you in SoCal!

P.S. Don’t tell ay of Damien’s readers that I nicked the exclusive code!