One of my resolutions recently was to start committing all code I write to my source control system.

Why?

Because of problems like this...

I need an Apache module to dump XML status pages. This would be for 1.3 and 2.0 servers... now this is something I have written like five times in my life.

The code has been written in my head, I just need to type it out. This is one of the projects that I am getting tired of writing over and over again... and you would think I would have gotten the hint the third time I wrote the code to save it. I do publish some of what I write, there are something like 60+ pieces of code I have made publicly available, but I don't do it all of the time.

And for some reason I have never bothered doing it with this particular bit of code.

This post is not about that code though... but about the idea it inspired this morning. One thing …

I’m not the first person to run into this and I certainly won’t be the last. This is also already covered in: Bug #19093 I just want to say again how annoying it is that the default for show status is session instead of global. It bit me again yesterday. I ran show status and was confused because most of Com_* is 0 yet uptime was a few days. Then it hit like a brick to the face that I was working on 5.0 instead of 4.1 and the default for show status is session. I know the default has changed and it still bites me. This is going to cause people hours of confusion the first time they do what I just did.

If you want the default changed please go to Bug #19093 and add a comment.

I am talking to Marten last night over skype about a couple of ongoing projects to spread MySQL and out of nowhere he says "What about Firefox?".

Now his idea, which I am now forgetting, was a little weird.... it was one of these mashup technology things that make your brain hurt a little bit.

Years ago, something like seven, I was sitting in an interview at a company and they were asking me about modifications that could be made to Apache and I was asked "Think you could write a module for Apache that would be a clone of Word Perfect?"

What do you say to ideas like this?

I politely said that, "no... its not really viable".

Marten's plan had a similar ring to it, but it got my thinking. How could Firefox be used to extend open source? In the open source world, we do not have much of a distribution channel for our software on the Windows platform. If we are lucky, they …

In an Active Active Master Master setup there is a special procedure to do when recovering a down server.

Assumptions:

• 
  
• Your application can handle 1 of the servers being down.
  
• You?re a good DBA so you take hot backups at least once a night.
  
• You never PURGE MASTER LOGS to a point where a backup can't recover.
  
• I'm assuming that you already know how to set up a master master config. If not comment and I will post how to, and things to watch out for.
  

Recover from backup, lets assume your using ibbackup


%> ibbackup --apply-log --use-memory 2000 my.cnf.restore


my.cnf.restore contains the innodb definitions and the location of the backup files.

Once restored INNODB will actually print out the last slave position it was …

Log Buffer #11, a compendium of news from the database blogosphere has been published on Mark Rittman?s Oracle Weblog. Read the Log Buffer homepage to learn about Log Buffer and see how to get involved.

Klaus-Heiner Lehne, a German conservative MEP on the payroll of a leading patent litigation firm, is not amused at recent developments in the European Parliament, and in particular he is frustrated to see that other MEPs call for a more balanced approach to patent policy. Lehne much prefers commissioner McCreevy’s push for the EPLA, the Excessive Patent Litigation Agreement (the official long form starts with “European”, but “Excessive” would be more accurate).

The day before yesterday, Lehne vented his anger by issuing …

Stefan Hinz and the fabulous documentation team have created a documentation page that I believe will vastly simplify the lives of many a database administrator. What could this possibly be? Why, a table of all the server configuration options, of course!

That's right, check out the tables for both the 5.0 and 5.1 releases. You'll notice that both server and status variables are listed in the lengthy table. Each variable is hyperlinked to the area where you can find a description of what each of the variables does or affects. Alongside each variable are five columns indicating whether the variable is available via a command line option, the option file, is a server variable (i.e. will appear in a SHOW VARIABLES output), is a status variable (i.e. …

I tend to use MySQL from the interactive command line shell quite a bit (SSH to your db server and type the command mysql to start). I noticed today that there is a pretty extensive built in help system in this command.

You can access it by typing help COMMAND, so for instance if you type help ALTER TABLE you get a quick reference for constructing an ALTER TABLE statement.

If you can't remember what command you want to use, then typing help contents is your friend. It will output:

For more information, type 'help item', where item is
one of the following categories:
Administration
Column Types
Data Definition
Data Manipulation
Functions
Geographic features
Transactions

So if your looking for that command that outputs all the columns in a table, but don't know what it's called, you might now try help administration …

I'm now back from EuroOSCON 2006 which was the reason I was not posting for a while. Pretty interesting event, even though it looks like it is getting less geeky compared to OSCON in US I visited two years ago - a lot of presentations now shifted to philosophical, political and business issues. I however do not know might be this is just Europe thing.

I gave a talk on High Performance FullText Search for Database Content which is now available for download from MySQL Performance Presentations page

We have plans to turn this presentation into article to publish here with some extra information and source code for all tests …