Over the last weeks I wrote a mysql-proxy which changes the way you operate with the MySQL Server.

A proxy can operate as Man in the Middle and pass through to network packets to the MySQL Server, but it also change the packets when needed. This opens the several possibilities like a

• pseudo server done
• injection proxy done
• load-balancing proxy done
• connection pool
• XA Transaction Manager
• replication client
• replication filter
• replication off-loader

Some of them are already implemented, some are only ideas for the future.

• http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_Proxy has the source and the binaries
• …

The MySQL proxy got some final touches to make it ready for the first release:

• a command-line interface
• some more mode descriptions for the different modes of operation

You can choose between three modes for now:

• pseudo server
• injection proxy

* replication client

For the future we plan:

• connection pooling

* replication filtering and off-loading

The options so far:

$ mysql-proxy --help
  --listen-port=<port>                  port the pseudo mysql-server should listen on in server-mode (default: 4040)
  --server-port=<port>                  port of the remote mysql-server in proxy- and reverse-mode (default: 3306)
  --server-ip=<ip>                      ip-address of the remote mysql-server in proxy- and reverse-mode (default: 127.0.0.1)
  --replication-user=<user>             user-account …

MySQL Table Maintainer is a new utility to help you run table maintenance commands (ANALYZE, CHECK, OPTIMIZE, REPAIR) on your MySQL tables. It’s part of the MySQL toolkit. Overview This tool is designed to help you run maintenance commands on your MySQL tables. There is a MySQL-provided tool (myisamchk) that fills some of the same purposes, but there are important advantages to doing it with SQL commands instead. Unlike using myisamchk, you don’t have to ensure this tool has exclusive access to the tables!

I’ve just released updates to all the tools in the MySQL Toolkit. The biggest change I made to most packages is using DBD to read MySQL’s option files, though some packages got more significant updates. Overview I discovered some features I didn’t know the Perl MySQL driver had – features to read MySQL’s option files, mostly, though there are some other nice features I use occasionally (but which are very relevant to innotop).

Through Kristian Köhntopp’s blog, I ran into a funny posting about “The real difference between MySQL and PostgreSQL” on Andreas Scherbaum’s mostly PostgreSQL related blog. I’ve taken the liberty below post a cropped version of the central picture of that blog entry:

The picture shows Susanne Ebrecht and Lenz Grimmer at the Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting FOSDEM …

We had about a 70% increase in applications for the Google Summer of Code, in the last 24-hours. This prompted me to post to the summer-discuss list, pimping some new projects. We’re rocking in getting external mentors, for projects that will benefit the community:

• I already pimped Sheeri a few days ago, and she’s got the MySQL Auditing Software up her sleeve
• We’ve also got …

I use del.icio.us a lot. I have one tag topost to save those things I find on the Internet which I want to write about later, but I have around 100 right now, so I was interested in picking random links from that list.

Bad news you can’t do that neither from the del.icio.us interface nor the API provided, so I took a different approach. I downloaded MySQLicious, a set of PHP scripts to mirror your delicious links into a local MySQL database. Once you edit your connection parameters, it’s quite easy to use:

$ ./mirrorlog.php
Update may be needed. Checking now.

Updated http://members.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=*starlightstarbright*
Deleted eacb873e503b1b407c2ec69e541b8838

1 updated.

1 deleted.

You can …

On Thursday/Friday this week, I visited Linbit in Vienna. They are the creators of DRBD. Quoting Wikipedia,

DRBD is an acronym for Distributed Replicated Block Device. It is a Linux kernel module, that, working together with some scripts, offer a distributed storage system, frequently used on high availability clusters. DRBD works as a kind of network RAID.

This means DRBD can give high availability to MySQL users. Through configuring DRBD to be used on your system, you can have synchronous replication between two different servers, giving a MySQL database a failover server to redirect to instantaneously, should the main server running MySQL fail.

For those interested in more detail on how to combine DRBD …

When I work on Apache I need to normally run my regression tests against many different versions of Apache, and I do this across Linux, OSX, and Solaris. I commit, and the bots on different hosts poll the repository for pushes to build against (and the data on the results is then sent via HTTP/XML back to my logging host for me to see).

I had a request this week to add Solaris X86 for testing... now I don't have Solaris X86 and I am not too inclined to add a new machine for it (even if the hardware was to be a donation). But... I do have an EC2 account, and access to a Solaris Omni. It would be easy for me to kick it on long enough in the EC2 cloud, to run through a test and get a result back.

My cost for a test build? 10cents? The Electricity is more then that for me to keep the machine running at home.

Now my regression test for my Apache modules is only about half of what the MySQL regression test is …

In his well-written blog entry Open Development: Diversity matters, Gianugo Rabellino quickly replied to my blog entry from yesterday on Defining “Participatory Open Source”. He sees plenty of common ground in our reasoning, but defends the existence of requirements for neutrality in the definition. I agree with nearly all of his reasoning for why neutrality is important for the development of a community of contributors, but I draw partially different conclusions.

The main reason why my conclusions are different from Gianugo’s is the starting point for my reasoning: There is no inherent conflict of interest between participatory open source and pursuing for-profit business goals, so we must not create artificial …