The LAMP stack consists of some complicated software, and this software from time to time will develop faults and security flaws. How do you keep yourself informed? Hope that the issues crop up on Digg, Slashdot? Well the best way is to join the Announce lists for each of the LAMP stack components.

The Announce lists are used by the developers of the different components of the LAMP stack to keep users informed of important events, like when a security flaw emerges or a new version of there software is released, etc.


The lists

The first one is dependent on the GNU/Linux distribution your running, in my case it is Archlinux, so I've subscribed to:

• http://archlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/arch-announce

Next in the LAMP stack is Apache, and you can find its …

Back in my formative years, during the tail end of the S&L crisis, I spent quite a bit of time working on financal software, including asset-liability management, risk management, and pool selection for the securitization of assets.

Although I’m a ‘data’ guy, for a layman I have a fairly good understanding of risk management in the financial industry. A side effect of that understanding is that I’m been following the ongoing risk management fiasco with more than a passing interest. (The media might call it a ‘credit crunch’ or a ’subprime contagion’, but as far as I can tell, it all boils down to a lack of attention to risk.) It’s also turning out to be a good source of entertainment.

Last week, …

Some friends, former customers/partners of mine from “previous lives”, family members and community folks have asked me what will happen to MySQL-the-product after MySQL-the-company is fully acquired by and integrated into Sun Microsystems.

Well, I don’t know! Those decisions are not mine to make.

I could speculate. (Frankly, I would probably be spot on, too.) But I’d rather not, and that’s not why I’ve resurrected this blog.

Many of the questions amounted to, “Should I stop using MySQL?” or, worse, “Will I have to stop using MySQL?” I decided to answer those here.

The questions were mostly from people who do not know much about Sun and who are afraid that the acquisition will result in mysqld becoming solely closed-source, proprietary, licensed software; afraid that they would have to pay if they do not today, or have to pay more if they do.

I cannot commit Sun any more than I can …

Before we go into how to set up master-slave replication in MySQL, let us talk about some of the reasons I have set up master-slave replication using MySQL. 1) Offload some of the queries from one server to another and spread the load: One of the biggest advantages to have master-slave set [...] …

Finally got around to creating a project on Sourceforge: MyHelper. Right now, it’s just some stored procedures and functions for determining data and index sizes for databases using the MyISAM and InnoDB engines. Each one is individually licensed (using the BSD license.) I have 2 more stored procedures to add (return a list of tables with no primary key and a list of tables with the primary key) but I haven’t committed my changes to Subversion yet because I’m still testing them. I’ll be adding more code as I refine the stuff I’ve written over the years (their current state is highly environment-specific so I need to “genericise” them - if that’s a word.)
A word about licensing. I’m opting to license each script/procedure/function individually. This is because the project, as a whole, is made up of individual pieces that may or may not have a dependency …

SpringSource acquires Covalent. XAware obtains $7.4m in additional funding. Sun announces details of its $1m open source awards. (and more)

SpringSource Acquires Covalent Technologies, SpringSource / Covalent Technologies (Press Release)

XAware Secures $7.4 Million in Additional Funding to Further its Open Source Data Integration Business Initiatives, XAware (Press Release)

Open Source Communities Announce Participation Details For Sun Sponsored $1Million Innovation Awards Program, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

…

It's only Tuesday and there have been two more acquisitions in the open source market. While these aren't huge deals on the scale of JBoss or MySQL, they do signify ongoing consolidation in the market. -Nokia acquires Trolltech -SpringSource acquires Covalent Both these acquisitions seem to make sense from a perspective of customers, users, and the companies on both sides. It's also interesting that these two recent deals show both the adoption of open source technology by a non-open source company and the combination of two open source companies to build a larger open source entity.... READ MORE

The last few days before the Sun-MySQL Integration Kickoff happening 29-31 January 2008 at Sun’s headquarters in Menlo Park, quite a few European MySQLers have approached me with concerns related to the potential danger of a skewed focus on the US in the integration discussions. After all, MySQL AB originates in Scandinavia and almost a majority of our employees work outside the US, so some aspects of MySQL AB should remain Scandinavian or European, even though we’re been acquired by a Silicon Valley based company.

While this geographic concern will remain on my agenda, yesterday evening provided some peace of mind on this account. Summoned by our Scandinavian CEO, a group of MySQLers (American and European) met at the Ikea restaurant in East Palo Alto.

Both the furniture and the food at Ikea looked much like in Gloms, Esbo (in my native Finland), or Kungens kurva close to Stockholm, or anywhere …

As MySQL Manual Says Query Cache works with transactions with Innodb tables but it does not tell you how and with which restrictions.

According to my tests it works but it is very restricted and one could expect it to work much better:

The result set can be retrieved from query cache (for statements both inside and outside of transactions) until there is a statement inside transactions which modifies the table. As soon as table is modified in transaction it becomes uncachable by query cache until that transaction is committed. Not only query cache can't be used inside the same transaction which modified data but also in other concurrent transactions which do not even see the changes done yet

Of course such implementation is rather restricted. Queries outside of transactions well could use query cache until it is invalidated by …

So my challenge last week was to convert almost a billion records in 37 databases and 74 tables. Oh, and I wanted to do it only during the night (between 12:30AM and 6AM) and in the least number of nights.

This was not my first massive MyISAM to InnoDB migration, nonetheless, I still manged to learn a few things. We're at a stage where MyISAM just isn't the solution any more. Our plans are to go almost 100% InnoDB and this migration project completes yet another massive step towards that direction.

The first night was depressing. I applied every trick up my sleeve but only ended up getting 9.48% complete. Second night was only half depressing allowing me to complete ~ 33%. Third night was a charm and I got ~42.5% done. I would have finished the project that night but there was some storage issue …