So, the new DST changes in the US caused a small stir among system administrators recently. We got all of our servers updated and verified they were working before the even. Or so we thought.

I noticed today that our 3PM Eastern newsletters arrived in my inbox at 3PM alright. However, I am in Central time. My immediate assumption was that we missed the server that sends that email out. Logging in I found the time correct on the server. It had received the appropriate updates thanks to portage. So, what happened? I looked at /etc/crontab and all was fine. I then looked at the system log where cron jobs are logged. Oddly, that log line said the job started at 15:00. I knew that was not correct. I started looking around at other cron jobs on other servers, especially ones that wrote files to disk. Sure enough, every server I checked was doing things an hour behind except one. It just so happens we had restarted cron on this server however last …

OK, Roland already spilled the beans a few weeks ago, but here’s the first semi-official announcement: Starting Monday next week (that’s the 19th), the MySQL certification team will offer a brand-new certification title: Certified MySQL Cluster DBA (or CMCDBA for short).

The MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification (CMCDBA) is a specialization exam for those that design, deploy and administer MySQL Cluster setups. Cluster certification is part of the DBA track, As such, CMCDBA can be attained only by Certified MySQL DBAs.

The Cluster certification exam consists of a single exam, You can find more information on the contents of the exam in our Candidate Guide.

As always, best preparation for any MySQL certification exam …

This week I am working with Chris one of our developers working on
Falcon. In 5.1 we have the ability to create plugable information
schema. The nifty thing with this is that we can provide data from
engine internals (or really any internals) to the user. If you have
seen my earlier work doing this with the memcache engine you have seen how this can be used.

I had Chris do a snapshot from his laptop to show off the data we are
exposing at the moment. This is not likely to be the final schema,
but it gives an idea as to what the potential is at the moment. There
will be more on this as we approach the MySQL User's Conference, and we should have plenty to show off there.

Oh, …

Due to a small mail filtering glitch we did not notice a number of new feed submissions for Planet MySQL that had been sent to us via the submission form since the beginning of the year. Doh!

Today I discovered them in a separate mail archive and have now added all the ones that were not spam or unrelated to MySQL.

So if you recently submitted your RSS feed and you don't see it aggregated on Planet MySQL by now, please resend your submission. Thanks and we're sorry for the delay and inconvenience!

The good news is that MySQL Conference & Expo (April 23-26, Santa Clara, Calif) is selling even faster this year than in past years, due to an even stronger program and great marketing work from O'Reilly and our Community team.  But the bad news is that it's likely some tutorials are approaching capacity and may sell out shortly.  Performance tuning is always a hot topic, as is using MySQL Cluster, and some of the new capabilities like partitioning, row-based replication and the new Falcon storage engine.  In past year's we've had companies send entire teams to the conference in order to solve their most difficult problems.  It's a smart move.  There's more MySQL brainpower per square mile in Santa Clara for one week than you could ever hope to get through any other means.  We …

The second Free and Open Source Conference "FrOSCon" takes place on August, 25th and 26th 2007 in Sankt Augustin, near Bonn, Germany. The conference is once again hosted by the faculty of computer science of the University of Applied Sciences Bonn-Rhein-Sieg in collaboration with the student body and the Linux/Unix User Group Sankt Augustin.

In a Call for Papers, the organizers ask for submission of contributions. A broad variety of topics concerning free and open source software is desired.

Contributions can be submitted in …

The early registration of the MySQL Conference & Expo 23-26 April 2007 closes today, 14 March 2007. So if you want to cut your attendance costs by 200 US dollars, register now!

Quoting the About The MySQL Conference & Expo page:

The MySQL Conference & Expo will feature:

• Over 100 sessions for a wide range of skill levels
• Tutorials to help develop technical skills and learn new tricks
• More than 2000 MySQL developers, gurus, experts, and users under one roof
• Dozens of new tools and technologies from third party vendors in the Expo Hall
• Birds …

Yesterday, my trusted iPod Nano died. It had been acting flakey for a couple of days after many months of fail-free service. I had to reset it a couple of times recently, which is fairly uncommon. And then it locked up Sunday in the middle of a 12 mile run. I felt like my running partner was bailing on me with 3 more miles to go! After resetting once again, I got a very creepy error message saying "Use iTunes to Restore" in four languages. (This looked like the iPod equivalent of a blue screen of death.) I tried a few more times, but it would invariably lock up within minutes. I stopped worrying about it since it was slowing down my running. But with a trip to Europe coming up I …

PayMaster by Treshna in New Zealand. Treshna has released a previous in-house product under GPL, and ported it to Linux.

It currently uses pg, but I've looked at the schema and MySQL 5.0 shouldn't have a problem with it. So, if you're currently looking for a little project, port it for MySQL and submit back the changes!

And if you do, please do tell me about it - apps in this realm are very important for the adoption of OSS in small business environments.

I have been working on large databases for the last few years. This includes areas such as story archives, data warehouses, high-end OLTP databases, all with quite a large amount of data. The smaller ones are usuall in the range of 10GB or more.

Well, I came across a situation this week that was a bit of a surprise. A business had somehow lost all the data out of one table in the database. The first surprise was that it appeared to happen at 04:00am according to the binlogs. However, nobody logs on then, there was no evidence of intrusion (behind a secure firewall as well), and their intranet showed no activity for that time either? So where the DELETE FROM tablename; command came from is still a bit of a mystery.

The second surprise was trying to fix up the problem. I was looking at recovering from backup and running a point-in-time-recovery process with the binlogs to get it back to the updated state. Now, there were only 2 tables …