Working through the MySQL mailing lists and forums tonight for questions/answers/problems related to backing up/restoring a MySQL database. Just one avenue for making sure the UC presentation on backups get at the heart of what people are experiencing with MySQL backups.

Back to the matter at hand. I stumbled into a post recommending a backup tool that I hadn't used before, automysqlbackup. The release notes indicate it's been around since 2002, the most recent release coming in Jan 2006. I know I've seen this before but never looked closely at it.

It's an easily configurable Unix shell script that (among other things):

• is well documented with header and inline comments (along with info on how to restore from backups)
• wraps around …

Beat Vontobel blogs about “fuþark: The silence of futhark and the state of the dolphin” which is basically about how he’s found that the 5.0.20 release of MySQL is when the 5.0 release is really starting to shine.

This confirms my theory (that I’ve had for quite a while now… like years) that a software release is never really mature until it hits about .20 (that’s dot twenty, not dot two).

When something reaches .10 (dot ten) it’s no longer going to be annoying for most uses, but .20 means that you’re going to be happy. Don’t ask me really why this is the case, but it is.

Think about the 2.6 kernel (yes, Linux Kernel - honestly, you think i was talking about something else?). At about …

The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be held in Skien, Norway from June 24th to 25th. Like the famous Foo Camp and Bar Camp, PHP Vikinger is driven by its attendees. The people who come choose and present the sessions at the event.

Attendance is by a mix of invitation and registration. 50 invitations have been sent to various PEAR and PHP contributors and 50 spots are open for people who register. Additionally, the invitees have been asked to nominate another 50 people who should be invited to the event.

The event is meant to be as affordable as possible; registration is only 20 Euros, and simple food and a place to sleep are …

I just sent out the invitations for the PHP Vikinger event. My method for choosing who to invite was pretty simple - I chose people listed in the the PHP and PEAR credits who I had written personal email to in the last few years.

Nepotistic? “Nay”, say I, “Nepotastic!” I know that the people I invited are cool, which will mean a good event for people who register. Also, as we have registrations, it won’t be too elitist or exclusive.

If you are curious, read on for the entire invitation (minus the list of attendees.)

NOTE: If you didn’t get an invitation email, then hold tight - you will still be able to register in a week or so.

Aloha $person,

This is an invitation to the PHP Vikinger - read on for details.

WHAT IS IT?
“”"”"”"”"”"
The PHP Vikinger is a community-driven PHP event that will be …

Yes, I know, my blog on MySQL was silent for a long time. This doesn't mean I wasn't dealing with MySQL 5. In fact I was more than ever. It was just not the fun part that usually makes for good blog posts. It rather meant dealing with MySQL's bugs and keeping our servers alive despite them, the slaves more or less in sync, finding workarounds and trying to keep all the resulting late projects at least somewhere near the schedule.

With all that, there was just no time for private experiments and articles on them. And yes, to be honest, I was frustrated sometimes. (Thanks to Giuseppe Maxia for cheering me up recently, I think I was so busy I didn't even respond. Sorry!)

MySQL 5 running perfectly well...

Now, don't get me wrong, there will be many installations where MySQL 5.0 will do its job perfectly. When I finally found the time last weekend to update the …

I just stumbled across a post on the forums where somebody asked for a good way to copy MySQL grants between two servers. Since about two years I mostly use a little Perl script mysqldumpgrants I've written back then for such and other related tasks. The post on the forums was still unanswered after almost three months, so I thought it might be helpful to release this little script albeit its simplicity.

When you call mysqldumpgrants without any arguments it will look up the connection information (host, port, user and password) in your .my.cnf file (of course you can also specify them on the command line, in the same way as for the other mysql command line tools), connect to the server and write all the grant statements (plus some comments) to standard …

MySQL 5.1 is moving to a new system for building the source code on Windows, based on CMake (more on this another time).

While finishing up the last bits of this, I ran into a very annoying limitation in Visual Studio (version 7.1 I think). The library include path in Visual Studio project files (.vcproj) has a very tight limit on the maximum length, around 2000 characters it seems. Put a path longer than that in the AdditionalLibraryDirectories section, and you will not get an error but the build will fail to find required libraries. This problem is made more serious by the fact that CMake tends to use absolute paths, leading to longer paths in the project files.

Googling a bit for this problem turned up nothing, so in the end I had to resort to some extremely ugly Perl one-liner build cleanup:

perl -i.bak -pe "s/[a-z]:[^,; …

Do you have a users group near you? Is it thriving? In conjunction with Mike Kruckenberg, I’ve been running the Boston MySQL Users Group for 6 months. Every meeting draws 30-60 members, and members overall are quite satisfied.

How do we do it? If you’re at the MySQL Users Conference, come find out at the MySQL Users Group BOF to get tips and tricks, or to share your own success stories and pitfalls. 8:30 -9:30 pm, Tuesday April 25th.

MySQL UC 2006 - April 24-27, 2006 - Santa Clara, CA - MySQL Cluster: New Features and Enhancements

So I’ve done some more run throughs to get things running smoother (and made some more edits along the way). At some point I will stop fiddling with the darn thing. It’s going to be fine (repeat, take 8 times and call me in the morning if pain persists).

Some features take a lot longer to explain than others. It’s quite interesting really.

I’ve tried to strike a balance between good overviews of technology and the down-and-dirty details. Hopefully it’s a good balance and fits the audience. I’m assuming a bit of knowledge about Cluster (I think the SQL knowledge should be a given - it’s a technical talk at the MySQL UC!). I’m expecting to be thrown a bunch of questions througouht - and …

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