Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.

In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!

• Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
• Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
• Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
• While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix …

Hurry up!
The call for papers for the Users Conference 2008 is closing on Tuesday, October 30th.
If you haven't submitted a proposal, now it's the time to do it.
Read the unofficial but very effective guidelines offered Baron Schwartz and Colin Charles and write down your well thought abstract
NOW!

The OpenFest 2007 is under way in Sofia, Bulgaria. The event is hosted in an elegant building in Sofia center and it's packed with enthusiastic open source lovers.
The star of the show was Georg Greve president of the EFF Europe. A passionate speaker, he gathered a huge audience just at the start of the event.
Then, during break, the organizers called for an impromptu press conference, where Georg, Jonas Öberg, Erik Josefsson, Domas Mituzas, snd yours truly enjoyed the spotlight for a hour, while asked about recipes to win the ongoing battle between good and evil in the software industry.
I had a session about getting started with MySQL Proxy, which got me a full hall and a great degree of interest. (slides) …

Morgan is looking in to EC2 on MySQL, so I thought I’d pipe up about stuff I’ve been playing with.

The ephemeral nature of the data is troubling, because at best you’re going to have some lag before you can back stuff up to S3 or some other place. (Unless that was happening continuously… but we’ll come back to that) On the other hand, if you’re doing app sharding or something similar, this essentially just makes you plan that your machines can all die at any time. If you used Google’s semi-sync replication patch, you could easily spin up little replication clusters as needed.

Hm. Clusters. Well, I’m also a fan of MySQL Cluster. What if you ran MySQL Cluster on a single ec2 node (both data and sql nodes)? What if, further, you wrote (and by you, I mean me… code coming soon, I promise) an AsyncFile implementation for Cluster that …

According to this article in ComputerWorld, MySQL to get injection of Google code. Google has signed an agreement to contribute to MySQL (oddly enough called a contributer license agreement) and will contribute source code for a variety of technical items.

In a way, this can be considered a very strong endorsement of MySQL by Google. Google even has an engineer dedicated to working with MySQL and the MySQL development team. I didn't realize that Google was such a heavy user of MySQL. Google will contribute some code related to replication and monitoring.

Also noted in the article is that MySQL, in the future of course, will support role based security and even Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). TDE is a big selling point for financial companies and other companies heavily regulated by privacy concerns. TDE puts the burden of encryption …

I'm a little curious to know how MySQL will run on what is essentially a virtualized environment. Normally a database server would be disk-bound, and it seems that for at least the interim, Amazon is not giving you much choice in the way of disk subsystems, since essentially shutting down a node means you loose all data. I have an EC2 account, so I plan to begin running sysbench tests shortly.

I was pointed to this link via one of the attendees of the MySQL User group in Montreal.

The concept is nice - and it's true that it's good to be able to fire up new instances so you can get your system up and running while you audit through what happened. I'm not sure I would use someone else's …

In Part II in this series, I talk about how these three databases compare in some particularly crucial areas.

For instance how do the optimizers of these different database engines behave, and why does that matter?  What type of indexes are available, particularly with respect to typical applications.  I then move on to datatypes available and which are missing.  You’ll find some surprises here.

Lastly the holy grail of any modern relational database, I discuss transactional support. Relevant concepts include ACID compliance, read-only versus insert and update activity, and so on.

Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/

The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has the rights to the name.

I chose to name my podcast “OurSQL: The MySQL Database Podcast for the Community, By the Community.” I chose every word carefully. For instance, I call it “the MySQL Database Podcast” so that anyone looking for a podcast about “database” will find it.

I could have just called it “MySQL Podcast”. But if …

Peter makes an interesting post about the MySQL company’s trademarks at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/10/26/mysql-support-or-support-for-mysql-mysql-trademark-policies/
The point is that Peter is not selling “MySQL Support” — he is selling “Support *for* MySQL”. “MySQL Support” is the name of a product that MySQL offers. Even if some other consulting company used the name before the MySQL company ever did, MySQL still has the rights to the name.  More »

This morning I prepared and uploaded a Debian package of mylvmbackup, which provides a quick way to create backups of MySQL server's data files using an LVM snapshot. While it's waiting in Debians NEW queue for approval by the FTP masters, you can get it from here. It was built on and uploaded to unstable, but the package works fine on stable (etch) as well.