So, here’s the rough plan of what I will attend next week:

Monday AM:

Secure Your PHP and MySQL Web Applications, Laura Thomson

Monday PM:

Data Warehousing with MySQL, John Paul Ashenfelter

Tuesday AM:

Welcome!, Arjen Lentz

State of the Dolphin, Kaj Arnö, David Axmark, Michael (Monty) Widenius

Introduction to Database Normalization and Joins, Mike Hillyer, Arjen …

A Texas jury has awarded $133 million in damages to David Colvin, after finding Microsoft and Autodesk guilty of infringing upon Colvin’s two software patents for software antipiracy protection. Colvin’s company, z4 Technologies Inc., filed patents for ‘passwords and codes assigned to individual software copies to prevent unauthorized copies.’ Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 [...]

I know that it's a risky thing to run a MySQL version from the development source tree. But a lot of work has been done since MySQL 5.1.7 and I have experienced that the latest development version runs better than the most recent released version 5.1.7, so I dared to update MySQL 5.1 to 5.1.10-beta.

Maybe it's a little consolation for those who cannot participate at MySQL Users Conference, so you can in the meantime try all the new features at the very latest state of development. But be aware that there can be bugs that can usually not be found in a release version.

So take good care of db4free.net while I am trying to collect new experiences at the Conference, that I will certainly be able to use to make db4free.net even better :-).

Yet another funky dns problem :)

/etc/init.d/mysqld start

Initializing MySQL database: Neither host 'DB-A' nor 'localhost' could be looked up with /usr/bin/resolveip Please configure the 'hostname' command to return a correct hostname. If you want to solve this at a later stage, restart this script with the --force option

It's unbelievable how fast the last five months went by. In November, there was that huge surprise when I (together with Roland and Beat) won the MySQL 5 Contest, but it seemed very unreal and very far away.

Now, I'm 15 hours away from leaving towards the MySQL User Conference, and even though it still looks a little bit abstract, I am slowly starting to realize that the most exciting week of my life is right ahead of me. And it's a big challenge, too. It's the first time for me at all to leave Europe.

I'm really looking forward to meeting all of you! I used to have contact to many people by email and I have seen photographs (and from some even videos) from many of the attending …

Just got Bug#16993 closed, which provides a good lesson into the complications of replication. The original title was RBR: ALTER TABLE ZEROFILL AUTO_INCREMENT is not replicated correctly, but the problem is not related to row-based replication (RBR) nor to ZEROFILL. The culprit is adding an AUTO_INCREMENT column to a table, and it is not actually a bug (to be frank, it depends on your point of view, but "fixing" this bug causes more headaces than it solves as you'll see in a moment).

What the example code in the bug description does is creating a table on the slave and the master, but inserting (identical) rows into the tables in different order on the slave and the master; for example in this way:

master> CREATE TABLE ages(name CHAR(30), age INT);
master> SET SQL_LOG_BIN=FALSE;
master> INSERT INTO ages SET …

OnLamp has just published an article I wrote about some interesting things you can do with MySQL 5.x and replication.

• You can create an array of peer-to-peer nodes that are at the same time master and slave, without much worry about insertion conflicts, thanks to some server variables introduced in MySQL 5.0;
• You can achieve automatic failover using a combination of federated tables (MySQL 5.0) and events (5.1)

The article is a proof of concept that using such techniques you can achieve your goals without help from external applications.

If you want to get your hands dirty, using the companion package …

As promised when I talked about the MySQL Sandbox and as mentioned in this (very) recent article on replication, I have released a testing environment for replication, called the MySQL 5 Replication Playground.
It's a package that creates in one single server an array of four replicating nodes using MySQL 5.0 or 5.1. The purpose of this package is to help developers and administrators when they need to test applications involving replication. You don't need to use several boxes. One machine is enough. With just one instance of MySQL installed, the Replication Playground will install four data directories and it will create the necessary scripts to start, stop, …

Just in time for the user conference, Giuseppe publishes a great article on how to handle auto increment columns in bi-directional replication. The article is a nice tutorial on how to use the new auto increment varibles that has been introduced in MySQL 5.0.

Check it at OnLamp:
Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques
Thanks Giuseppe for this excellent article!

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RDBMSs (or for clarity, Databases) are a basic element of any
computer-based appliance in the same way as are an Operating System,
Web Server and software development platform.  As is common for
developers of Open Source software, I am quite familiar with Linux as
the Operating System, Apache as the Web Server, MaxDB and MySQL as
Databases and Perl (and to a lesser degree, PHP) as the software
development platform.  This combination is often called the "LAMP"
stack [4].  Take the following as coming from that background.

Databases are the storage mechanism of the content presented to the
user of any computer-based appliance.  This content may be displayed
via a desktop application or through a web browser.  The main display
mechanisms I think of when writing applications are 1) Through the end
users's computer in real-time via a desktop application, in an
interactive manner.  2) Through a web server, not in real-time, via a
user's web browser (I prefer to think of …