As I mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been working recently on documenting the Cluster utilities; I’m still working on ndb_config, but should get that into the Manual Real Soon Now™. In the meantime, here’s a tip I received from one of the developers. This generates a connectstring for use with data, SQL, or API nodes, using ndb_config, which you should be able to find in your mysql/bin directory:

ndb_config −−config-file=path/to/config.ini −−query=hostname,portnumber −−fields=: −−rows=, −−type=ndb_mgmd

For this to work, you need to have the Cluster management server running, with a viable config.ini at the location specified by path/to/config.ini.

Hope that someone finds this useful.

Yesterday afternoon, the EU’s internal market commissioner Charlie McCreevy spoke in the European Parliament’s plenary in Strasbourg. The speech and ensuing debate as well as the vote on a resolution of the EP that has meanwhile been scheduled for October 12, had been announced about a week before.

In his statement on future action in the field of patents, McCreevy conceded that the proposed European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA) leaves a lot to be desired in its present form. Firstly he acknowledged the recent motions for a resolution filed by four groups in the European Parliament criticizing the draft EPLA: “I am aware of some critical voices against the …

Jeff Bar recently wrote about MySQL and EC2:
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/09/amazon_ec2_mysq.html

Here are a few of my thoughts on EC2 and S3.

S3 to me means high latency, which for a lot of applications is a no go. Where do I think it would be brilliant? Some backup vendor, like Zmanda, should write a module to plugin their backup system to it. Why? What problem does it solve?

Offsite backups. These are the bane of the backup world. Sure, you make a backup, the first hurdle, but then how do you get it off premises? S3 and something like Zmanda would solve that. What does S3 mean for a database, aka MySQL? For MySQL it would be possible to write a replication reader that read the binary logs, aka the point in time recovery logs, to S3.

The problem with this plan is that the time for recovery, aka …

Kicking off day two of the Gartner Open Source Summit in Phoenix, Gartner gurus Yefim Natis and Niko Drakos hosted a "Mastermind panel" featuring Stuart Cohen (OSDL), Brian Behlendorf (Collabnet) and Mike Milinkovich (Eclipse Foundation). Here's my best efforts to capture the session in real time and I think I got about 90% of it. If I didn't get the words completely accurate, I hope I at leat captured the spirit of the conversation.  Some of the converation is a bit basic, but that's partly a reflection of the fact that Gartner is aimed at the mainstream.

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Version 0.1.152 of innotop is a small maintenance and bug-fix release. I found some more ways to make it deal with garbage input without crashing. Of course, that means it's harder to find errors because it doesn't complain and let me know they exist, but that's what you are for :-)

Several months ago, it became clear that one could crack a SHA-1 message digest. It was still a nontrivial problem, but it could be done thousands of times faster than brute-force guessing. So SHA-1 has become undesirable as a secure message digest, and U.S. federal software security standards now call for software to use SHA-256 (one of the group of algorithms which comprise SHA-2).MySQL

SpikeSource and JasperSoft to Deliver Open Source Business Intelligence Applications, JasperSoft / SpikeSource (Press Release)

ActiveGrid Names Former BEA and Adobe Veteran Todd Hay New VP of Marketing, ActiveGrid (Press Release)

Five Reasons I’m Not Worried About Red Hat, Linux Magazine, Bryan Richard (Article)

OSDL: Patent Infringement Not a Real Open-Source Threat, eWeek, Peter Galli (Article)

Gartner on Open Source Databases, TheOpenForce.com, Zack Urlocker (Blog)

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Zack Urlocker is at the Gartner Open Source Summit this week, and has been hearing some good things about open source databases. Open source databases (Sleepycat, PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) have been around for a long time, but the analysts didn't give them much credit because even though everyone was using them, few were paying for them. Or so they thought. Now, however, open source databases are becoming big business.

Zack cites Gartner's Donald Feinberg:

Overall, Gartner is predicting that the worldwide DBMS market is around $14 billion and will continue to grow by nearly 7% per year. If this was a new market, it would not be a very impressive growth rate, but for a market of this size, it's huge. And there can be lots of movement within the market. We are at …