One of the candidates for a marketing position (btw, we are looking for a very technical marketing talent, drop me a line at dj at zmanda dot com) asked me if Zmanda wants to change the world. The way I see it, our job is just opposite to changing the world. We want to keep the world the way it was. If your hardware dies or a user drops a table, we give you the ability to go back in time and to recover your file with Amanda Enterprise or your MySQL database with Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM).

How do we actually accomplish going back in time? Are we talking here about super-expensive and complicated Continues Data Protection (CDP) technologies? Our solution delivers the same result, but without the cost and complexity of CDP. ZRM incremental backups result in a copy of the MySQL …

I've created a survey on SurveyMonkey that I am hoping to get a bunch of responses for. The survey will help the community team identify how (in)effectively we communicate development and other goals and also what features you, our community users, most want in future versions of MySQL. So, hey, give us ten minutes of your time and help us make MySQL better.

A Blatant Bribe for Participating

And for those who need a bribe, we'll be giving away two Apress books (each) to 3 random survey takers. The survey is anonymous, but if you would like to go into the drawing for the books, just include your email address in the very last question...otherwise, just leave it blank.

Click Here to take the 2007 Community survey

Thanks!

I run mysqldump each night on my backup slave (which is set up with binary logging, can be used as a master in an emergency) is there to allow us to run backups of our various schemas without impacting the live masters. I like to create dumps that contain information such as 'STOP SLAVE; CHANGE MASTER TO...' START SLAVE' that can be used by even non-database guru personnel to be able to restore a slave as quickly as possible, without having to know the inner details of replication. Having a dump that has all the data at a given time, and a master log file position and file name for that point in time is the answer.

I have been using the option to "--master-data" before we had the backup slave on both main masters in each data center. It worked fine because it would add a 'CHANGE MASTER' statement to the dump that set the correct master in the dump. I had another script pre-pend 'STOP SLAVE;' (top of the dump) and append 'START SLAVE;' …

Get a machine to run Solaris.

Download main Solaris install.

Discover that the version you really want it is called Express... or
maybe Open Solaris... or something...

Install (pray you have a CDROM).

Then look for GNU packages.

Which means one of:

1) Getting some binaries, from somewhere on the internet, that have a
compiler, and then download from ftp.gnu.org all of the source for
all of the binaries you want. Recompile everything into /usr/local/.
For GCC you may need to do this twice.

2) Get SFW packages from Sun... which are sort of useful, and have
"most" of what you need. Those the versions are all old. See comment
one about recompiling everything from scratch off of ftp.gnu.org

3) Find a tool called pkg-get. It is mostly awesome, though it has a
weird scheme for GCC. …

Alex forwarded me a link to an awesome scaling presentation by Cuong Do from YouTube about their architecture for scaling. He describes problems with massive scale-out, moving static content serving from Apache to lighttpd, how they use Python (including ways they speed it up) for the main application, certain custom C extensions for encryption, and their long road to MySQL partitioning.

A very interesting part of the presentation is Cuong's discussion of their difficulties dealing with thumbnail images for the videos. Each video has 4 thumbnails attached to it. The went through a whole series of issues in trying to scale the thumbnail serving, including hitting the ext3 files per directory limit one fateful day...

The section on scaling MySQL is a must see for anyone working on a Web 2.0 platform that can possibly see an enormous increase …

The 56th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly compendium of database blogs, has been published on Hasan Tonguç Yilmaz’s Oracle Blog. LB always wants more editors, so please contact the Log Buffer administrator to join in the fun. Editions by Hubert Lubaczewski, Jay Pipes, and Chen Shapira are in the offing. Here is [...]

I was at MODM4 yesterday, and as always, great fun was had. One common recurring theme though, was getting MySQL to start automatically upon a Linux server’s restart, something which I would have thought just came pretty naturally to sys-admin types. Upon further probing, these systems were all generally CentOS or RHEL based, and it wasn’t just MySQL that gave them problems - it was anything they’d installed out of the stock packages (lighttpd was a popular Apache replacement, that suffered from the same fate).

While I didn’t recollect the exact part of the manual it was stored in, I was informing everyone to make use of the chkconfig tool. Its really as simple as making sure there exists a /etc/init.d/mysql (it must be executable - chmod +x), doing a …

I’ve been a big supporter of Zimbra, because I think they’re one of the few projects/companies that get email/calendering/a groupware solution, right. Sure, I don’t necessarily like the model where they cripple the open source version in terms of say, backups (but this I guess will be fixed when MySQL supports online backups natively). No AdSense zimlet? Its easy enough to write one (with spare time).

What’s annoyed me of late with Zimbra, is its lack of ability to work with my Nokia E61i. Its a known problem (since February this year?), as it also affected the E61 (and probably other Series 60 phones, when you’re trying to access the Zimbra server over IMAP). You get the certificate being displayed, you get the headers, and when you try to open any email bodies, it just stops working.

The …

I have just been notified that my proposal for a one-day MySQL Miniconf at LinuxConfAU 2008 in Melbourne has been accepted, so here's the call-for-papers! The MySQL miniconf was packed all day last time, and we had more proposals than we could fit... so, let's make 2008 a good one too!

There are about 6 or 7 slots of 50 minutes each. We could do 2x25 minutes for some, and possibly a slot with 5 minute lightning talks. A proposal should contain a short title and abstract of what you intend to talk about, what duration the talk would be (5, 25, 50), and a brief bio of yourself. Naturally you may submit multiple abstracts for different topics; chances are that at most one can be accepted so we see a good range of speakers and talks.

Please email your proposals to: m i n i c o n f 0 8 (at) l e n t z (dot) c o m (dot) a u
(so that is miniconf zero-eight at my private domain)
I'll grab one or two other people to …

Andrae and his gang will take some time, with over 100 submissions to consider, but the CfP is now definitely closed and the program committee is busy doing its thing. If you missed out on making a submission, you can of course still try to beg Andrae, but don't push your luck as things do need to move along...

Browsing through the list of proposals, I'm very pleased with the number we received, and also impressed with the quality of the speakers and diverse range of topics. Most are from within Australia, but there are also entries from around the Asia-Pacific, and even as far as Austria and the USA. This should make for a fine program.