I asked people to share with me their experiences moving to Zimbra, and I've had a great deal of responses. One, in particular, I found interesting from Time Out New York. I glommed onto this one immediately because I reference Time Out whenever I'm in London. It's the best source of information for what's going on.

Jeffrey Vargas of Time Out New York related: [Used with his permission]

Time Out New York is a weekly print publication, so we rely heavily on Macs. Out of 150 computers, about 125 are Macs. Even are servers are Xserves, for a majority of our work.

We've been using Apple's mail services in OS X since 10.2. After a messy migration to OS X 10.3 and several issues with an update from OS X 10.3.8, we were over frustrated with Apple's frugal mail services.

Having upgraded to two new Intel Xeon servers late last year, …

I wanted to write a quick shout-out to congratulate the PostgreSQL development team, the folks at Sun who work with Josh Berkus, and the folks at EnterpriseDB, all of whom contributed to the excellent benchmark results for this quarter's SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark suite. I'm looking forward to seeing Josh at OSCON in a couple weeks and meeting a few more of the PostgreSQL developers than I did last year.

I know that the PostgreSQL developer team has spent a considerable amount of time and effort improving performance bottlenecks and streamlining code for the PostgreSQL 8.2 release, and the benchmarks show the results of that hard work. It's great to see the pressure put on Oracle and the "big guys" from …

Ok…I’ve been crazy busy with job and home stuff. Doesn’t mean I stop thinking about stuff.

• Do we really need another text editor/Personal Information Manager/MP3 player? I monitor Gnomefiles and Portable Freeware RSS feeds and I’m constantly seeing these types of apps being created, promising to be a better than anything out there with whiz-bang features not seen anywhere else. Got news for you, you aint showing us nuttin’ new.
• The First Bank of Delaware needs to DIAF for offering loans at 99.25% interest. That’s right, 99.25%! It’s done through their CashCall marketing arm. Yes. The one offered up by has-been Gary Coleman. They’re preying on people who can’t manage their money.
• MySQL-Proxy is …

Todays most confusing error message award goes to MySQL, for this error(?) message of mysqld_safe when trying to start the mysqld daemon:

db1:/usr/local/mysql# bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql
Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data
STOPPING server from pid file /usr/local/mysql/data/db1.pid
070713 14:16:50  mysqld ended

Finding the problem was easy...

db1:/usr/local/mysql# ldd bin/mysqld
        librt.so.1 => /lib/librt.so.1 (0x00002b43be382000)
        libdl.so.2 => /lib/libdl.so.2 (0x00002b43be48b000)
        libpthread.so.0 => /lib/libpthread.so.0 (0x00002b43be58f000)
        libcrypt.so.1 => /lib/libcrypt.so.1 (0x00002b43be6a4000)
        libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1 (0x00002b43be7d8000)
        libm.so.6 => /lib/libm.so.6 (0x00002b43be8f0000)
        libstdc++.so.5 => not found
        libc.so.6 => /lib/libc.so.6 (0x00002b43bea72000) …

Like an invincible psycho with a knife, Log Buffer is back, with a Friday the 13th issue (”Larry’s Revenge!”). Daniel Fink of OptimalDBA is the lucky one to do this 53rd edition of the weekly review of database blogs. Please read Log Buffer’s homepage and drop me a line if you’d like to [...]

Todays most confusing error message award goes to MySQL, for this error(?) message of mysqld_safe when trying to start the mysqld daemon:db1:/usr/local/mysql# bin/mysqld_safe --user=mysql
Starting mysqld daemon with databases from /usr/local/mysql/data
STOPPING server from pid file /usr/local/mysql/data/db1.pid
070713 14:16:50  mysqld ended
Continue reading "Confusing error message"

To deal with Drupal's growth, we're adding a second database server to drupal.org which is useful for at least two reasons. First, we'll be able to handle more SQL queries as we can distribute them between multiple database servers (load balancing). Secondly, this new server can act as a "hot spare" that can immediately take over if the other database server fails (high availability / fail-over).

The current plan is to configure both database servers in master-slave configuration, which is the most common replication model for websites. This model provides scalability, but not necessarily fail-over. With a master-slave configuration, all data modification queries (like INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE queries) are sent to the master. The master writes …

To deal with Drupal's growth, we're adding a second database server to drupal.org which is useful for at least two reasons. First, we'll be able to handle more SQL queries as we can distribute them between multiple database servers (load balancing). Secondly, this new server can act as a "hot spare" that can immediately take over if the other database server fails (high availability / fail-over).

The current plan is to configure both database servers in master-slave configuration, which is the most common replication model for websites. This model provides scalability, but not necessarily fail-over. With a master-slave configuration, all data modification queries (like INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE queries) are sent to the master. The master writes …

The Certified MySQL Associate certification that we’ve mentioned a few times by now will be available in all Pearson VUE testing centers as of Wednesday, July 18 2007.

Yay!

It’s not an exam that will impress hard-core DBAs with years of experience, but I actually expect quite a lot of this certification. The Developer and DBA certifications are pretty tough, and in many cases go beyond what you need, at least for an entry-level position. With the Associate certification, you get good proof that you know the basics of MySQL without straining yourself or your wallet.

The exam has 50 questions, and lasts for one hour. It’s also somewhat less expensive than the other exams. Unlike other MySQL certifications, the Associate exam does not carry a version number and is regarded as perpetually valid once you have obtained it (we do, however, …

Many times you need to produce XML output from your MySql database. MySql has no built-in support for creating XML in it's SQL implementation but you can easily add support using the stored function feature.

To make xml output easier I have made three small stored SQL functions. They produce xml fragments, which you can easily put together to get a complete xml:

xml_escape(value) replace characters not allowed in xml with the escape sequences
xml_attr(name, value) create an xml attribute
xml_tag(tagname, tagvalue, attrs, subtags) create a tag, optionally with


Lets see some examples. First a real simple one:

select xml_tag('table',table_name,null,null)
from information_schema.tables
where table_schema = 'INFORMATION_SCHEMA'

Gives you something like:

<table>CHARACTER_SETS</table>
…