MySQL AB today announced that the Swedish National Police are implementing an enterprise-wide project for building all future IT systems on an open source software (OSS) infrastructure based upon Linux, MySQL and JBoss. Several existing systems are currently being migrated and all future projects will be developed on this OSS foundation.

Per-Ola Sjöswärd, Executive IT-strategist for the Swedish National Police, will present at the upcoming MySQL Customer Conference in London, October 16, as well as during a free Web seminar on October 24.

I wrote a couple weeks ago about my work on the Backup and Recovery chapter for High Performance MySQL, 2nd Edition. Thanks for your comments and suggestions, and thanks to those of you who helped me over email as well. I’ve had several questions about what is included in the chapter, so I thought I’d post the outline as it stands now: [Introduction] It's All About Recovery Topics We Won't Cover Why Backups?

This release of MySQL Toolkit adds a new parallel dump tool for multi-threaded backups, fixes some minor bugs, and adds new functionality to one of the helper scripts.

MySQL has a quite unique feature: the pluggable storage engine interface. Thanks to it MySQL supports different Storage Engines for different needs: MyISAM is perfect for heavy read, InnoDB for transational data and blackhole .... for sending data to /dev/null.

Thanks to some advance science we now have a wormhole Storage Engine. While the blackhole can only be written to but nothing ever comes back, the wormhole is the inverse of it. You get data from another galaxy, but all writes might have no effect on your side. Sounds useful ?

What's the deal ? The wormhole SE is a lua-based storage engine. The data is "stored" in a script-language. ... Ok, this explaination doesn't help very much. Let's take a look at an example:

The CREATE TABLE for a wormhole table is pretty simple. No magic:

root@127.0.0.1:test> show create table t1\G
CREATE TABLE `t1` (
  `id` int(11) DEFAULT …

Split brain, with DRBD, is much less of a disaster than in conventional cluster setups employing shared storage. But, you ask, how can I protect my DRBD cluster against split brain in the first place? Here’s how.

Let’s briefly reiterate what split brain, in the DRBD sense, really means. DRBD split brain occurs when your nodes have lost their replication link due to network failure, and you make both nodes Primary after that.

When just the replication link dies, Heartbeat as the cluster manager will still be able to “see” the peer node via an alternate communication path (which you hopefully have configured, see this post). Thus, there is nothing that would keep Heartbeat from migrating resources to that DRBD-wise disconnected node if it so decides or is so instructed. That would cause precisely the DRBD split …

(Credit: Kate Geraghty)

I just pre-paid $20 for the newest Radiohead album (available on October 10). Radiohead, now without a label/ball and chain, has decided to let its fans choose how much to pay the company. I'm actually feeling cheap right now, even though I'd pay $10.00 or less on iTunes (if Radiohead sold through iTunes, which it doesn't, because of a somewhat silly "artistic integrity" argument).

How much will you pay? It's nice to think of all the money going to Thom and crew, rather than to a Larry in a lounge suit somewhere in Los Angeles. Just as I'd prefer to pay Marten Mickos for my database than Larry Ellison. :-) But that's not the only open-source analog here.

...

Sorry, the MySQL conference in Japan and my vacation came up, but now we're finally ready to annouce the next (and hopefully last) beta of the next XAMPP release.

New in this beta are: PHP5 (5.2.4), Apache (2.2.6), phpMyAdmin (2.11.1), and eAccelerator (0.9.5.2).

XAMPP beta versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Get the downloads at XAMPP BETA.

Last Sunday, just before the MySQL Dev Meeting in Heidelberg ended, we went to see a falconry. Strictly speaking, the German Raptor Research Centre isn’t a falconry (which is a commercial venture for raising falcons), but a privately funded research station dedicated to the preservation of birds of prey, or “Eagles, vultures & co” as they say on their home page at deutsche-greifenwarte.de. Their actions over the past 30 years have given concrete results for many raptors, such as the eagle-owl (”Uhu” in German and Swedish), which is no longer on the list of endangered species in Europe. The German Raptor Research Centre has successfully set out 37 sea eagles (Seeadler, …

As I mentioned in my earlier post (http://arjen-lentz.livejournal.com/94693.html), the earlybird registration for the Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 in Brisbane (26-29 November) is only until 14th of October. The earlybird ticket is $275 for the main conference (including dinner), whereas the main conference ticket after that will cost $325. So you can save an easy $50 by being fast.

Registrations are coming in nicely at this stage. From the organisation and volunteer perspective, it's good for us to get more registrations early, as it gives us a better view of the overall numbers.
There are actually some practical caps. Like, if you book later, you could lose out on the (otherwise included) conference dinner. Very simply, the big room will be full and that's it.
Personally, I wouldn't …

This weekend I was doing some development for one of our projects and we needed to make screenshots of a web pages (see my next posts about this task). I’ve managed to develop small piece of code which uses GtkMozEmbed component (Mozilla Gecko-based renderer for web pages) to create screenshots of any page, but there was some problem… The problem was a following: GTK+ library can’t work w/o fully-functional X server running on your machine. Obviously I didn’t want to run such software (no monitor/keyboard/mouse, dumb graphics adapter on the server, etc, etc) so I’ve tried to find some solution… And in this tiny article I’ll describe the method I’ve managed to find.

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