At the 2004 Foo Camp, Danese Cooper, a few other FLOSS advocates (forgive me, Foo Camp is a blur and I don’t remember who you were) and myself gave an ad hoc session on the methods and strategies that we each used to advocate FLOSS and to help people working closed environments become more open.

The session was a blast (and well-received), so much so that Danese and I proposed the session for last year’s OSCON. We didn’t make the cut, but I still tried again for this year’s EuroOSCON and, this time, the session was accepted.

The session should be fun to present, but a bit of a bear to write. I have only 45 minutes to try to fit in the most …

One image I shot on the last day, which is quite perfect:

(Click on the link for a larger image)

"Hot Backups" of your MySQL Database on Linux

Would you like to take consistent snapshot backups of your entire database without a SAN or external software, and without slowing or locking your database for the duration?

RedHat? Enterprise Linux (and Centos Linux) install an LVM by default.
LVM, Logical Volume Manager is a layer that sits on top of any file system (default ext3).

You can tell if you're already running on an LVM, by checking your file system with "df -h" — an entry like "/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00" shows that your disk is mapped through the LVM.

LVM brings you features such as the ability to grow and shrink volumes, add hard disks without migrating data, RAID0, and for the purpose of this article: file system SNAPSHOTS.

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;
\! lvcreate --size 100m --snapshot --name snap …

"Hot Backups" of your MySQL Database on Linux

Would you like to take consistent snapshot backups of your entire database without a SAN or external software, and without slowing or locking your database for the duration?

RedHat? Enterprise Linux (and Centos Linux) install an LVM by default.
LVM, Logical Volume Manager is a layer that sits on top of any file system (default ext3).

You can tell if you're already running on an LVM, by checking your file system with "df -h" — an entry like "/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00" shows that your disk is mapped through the LVM.

LVM brings you features such as the ability to grow and shrink volumes, add hard disks without migrating data, RAID0, and for the purpose of this article: file system SNAPSHOTS.

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;
\! lvcreate --size 100m --snapshot --name snap …

"Hot Backups" of your MySQL Database on Linux

Would you like to take consistent snapshot backups of your entire database without a SAN or external software, and without slowing or locking your database for the duration?

RedHat? Enterprise Linux (and Centos Linux) install an LVM by default.
LVM, Logical Volume Manager is a layer that sits on top of any file system (default ext3).

You can tell if you're already running on an LVM, by checking your file system with "df -h" — an entry like "/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00" shows that your disk is mapped through the LVM.

LVM brings you features such as the ability to grow and shrink volumes, add hard disks without migrating data, RAID0, and for the purpose of this article: file system SNAPSHOTS.

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;
\! lvcreate --size 100m --snapshot --name snap …

"Hot Backups" of your MySQL Database on Linux

Would you like to take consistent snapshot backups of your entire database without a SAN or external software, and without slowing or locking your database for the duration?

RedHat? Enterprise Linux (and Centos Linux) install an LVM by default.
LVM, Logical Volume Manager is a layer that sits on top of any file system (default ext3).

You can tell if you're already running on an LVM, by checking your file system with "df -h" — an entry like "/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-LogVol00" shows that your disk is mapped through the LVM.

LVM brings you features such as the ability to grow and shrink volumes, add hard disks without migrating data, RAID0, and for the purpose of this article: file system SNAPSHOTS.

FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;
\! …

In Chicago now, and tonight is the (moved from Monday) local MySQL UG meeting, from 7pm. See : http://mysql.meetup.com/5/ (the group) and http://mysql.meetup.com/5/events/4892024/ (this event) for full details.
If you're in the Chicago area, do drop in, say hi, and ask any questions! Mark Matthews (MySQL Java and Windows lead) and I will be there from MySQL, plus assorted users. Should be good! I've got an autographed book by Guy Harrison (the new Stored Procedures one) to hand out to someone, and a few "what's your uptime?" shirts.

This is probably a dumb question, but I’ll put it forth anyway. Is there a routine or easy way to limit the number of items in a group? What I want to do is limit the number of items in a group to no more than a certain number. For instance, the last 10 times someone logged in.

I’m thinking of a routine that takes in field1, field2, # limit, and then an optional keyword of {FIRST,LAST} and maybe an optional WHERE clause. So in an example, the routine would take in:

uid
lastLoginTime
10
FIRST
uid=12345

and the routine would find the number of times uid 12345 logged in. If it’s less than or equal to 10, leave it alone. If it’s greater than 10, delete it so it gets to 10, deleting the oldest records first.

This is not something that could be done with a trigger (ie, on insert of a new login, check to see how many logins there are, and if there are 10 delete the first (oldest) …

So, the “MySQL Gotchas” page was mentioned in one of the talks at the conference last week. The page itself is at:

http://sql-info.de/mysql/gotchas.html

Now, to go through it all…..

Our site went from weekly crashes during our two busiest nights to not even peeping this week (during the two busiest nights), and the only thing we changed was that we did some table maintenance. We hadn’t done table maintenance at least as long as I’ve been around, which is 6 months. We are a site with high volumes of both reads and writes. This article will talk about the care and feeding of tables; feel free to use this for justification to have a maintenance window, or even permission to run table maintenance statements.

MySQL uses a cost-based optimizer to best translate the written query into what actually happens. This means when you write:

SELECT foo FROM t1 INNER JOIN t2 USING (commonField);

The optimizer looks at the statistics for tables t1 and t2 and decides which is better:
1) To go through each item in t1, looking for a matching “commonField” in t2
or
2) To go …