I’ve been working on a new project to fulfill a specific need: consistent, fast, cheap, and flexible backups for MySQL, for all storage engines1. To that end I’m creating a tool called dbsnapper—a plugin-based backup tool. The tool itself is very basic and handles a few jobs: getting configuration information from the user, running through a “run sheet” of different configurable tasks, and reporting status and errors to the user.

The tasks then—the actual backup steps—are fully configurable, via plugins. In fact, the whole process isn’t even MySQL specific, and can potentially be used for PostgreSQL2 and other database as well. Remember the requirements for backups (above):

• Consistent—We need to do some locking inside MySQL to make sure that the backups are consistent, for both MyISAM and InnoDB tables. This generally means the FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK command.
• Fast—There …

“Not good to hear Monty arguing with Brian…”

I've been watching the ruminations surrounding Red Hat's acquisition of JBoss with lively interest. Most of the past 5-10 years have been spent wondering how to beat Microsoft. Now, it seems, the struggle is to beat Red Hat...

...and it hasn't even won yet. :-)

It is testament to Red Hat's success that the Financial Times reports that Oracle has considered buying Novell. Stephe rightly points out that Oracle is not a middleware provider, per se, and so should not feel overly threatened by Red Hat's acquisition. Yet it clearly does.

Why? Because there's nothing more terrifying to a closed-source vendor, no matter where it sits in the software stack, than an aggressive, hungry, and successful open source player. Success …

Jonathan Schwartz has been promoted to CEO at Sun Microsystems as co-founder Scott McNealy leaves the CEO post after 22 years to become chairman.  McNealy's colorful style sometimes put him at odds with Microsoft, Intel and other industry giants, and some accuse him of not moving fast enough to adapt Sun's strategy and workforce to the challenges of the post Internet boom of the 21st centry.  Rumors had been floating about McNealy's departure recently and despite negative comments around Sun's recent financial losses, overall this is a good move for Sun. 

In the last few years, Schwartz has become considerable force inside of Sun, leading the charge of Sun's software strategy and their push to open source.  His promotion to COO was seen as a likely step towards taking over the reigns from McNealy at some point.  …

I'm putting together an Executive Radar event with Tim O'Reilly for this year's OSCON in Portland, Oregon. One of the sessions actually has me somewhat sleepless (literally - I'm typing this at 5:17 AM...), and results from a seemingly innocuous blog post Tim had a few weeks back.

Open Source and the Future of Asymmetric Competition
For years the software industry has largely competed on the basis of symmetry: Oracle versus IBM in databases; BEA versus IBM in application servers; etc. Feature wars, price wars, but not true competition wars. That is, competing by playing a different game, with different rules. Open source enables an alternative battleground upon which to compete, with community, code, and culture the new competitive tools. This session brings …

When I posted a few weeks ago about the end of MySQLDevelopment.com it seems the timing was a little off. I was planning to close things down on 30th April simply as it was the end of a month, what I hadn't taken into account was that this would coincide with the MySQL user conference. I won't say too much at the moment but there are plans to use the content on another site which will have some involvment with MySQL themselves, however because of the user conference the people involved won't be able to transfer the content until after the 30th.

Our visitor numbers are still growing the figures for March were twice those of January so to avoid any distruption of service I won't be pulling the plug until I can make a seemless switch.

I've been following the plethora of "MySQL User Conference":http://mysqluc.com/ postings over at "Planet MySQL":http://www.planetmysql.org/. Woah, it looks like fun!

Sadly I am missing most of it this year. I don't have time to go the whole week, so I am only making it on Wednesday to give my talk "Web Performance and Scalability with MySQL":http://mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/view/e_sess/8294.

Usually I'd worry tons about my talk, but I think it'll be lots of fun. I've been tuning and fixing up my slides and I really like how it's turning out[1]. Hopefully the people coming to the talk will like it too! :-)

The talk description says "fast paced", and it's not kidding. I have enough content for three talks - but then people would just have too much time to read their email and that's not what they come to the conference for, right? Right?? :-)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it a lot, except for the part about …

I've been following the plethora of "MySQL User Conference":http://mysqluc.com/ postings over at "Planet MySQL":http://www.planetmysql.org/. Woah, it looks like fun!

Sadly I am missing most of it this year. I don't have time to go the whole week, so I am only making it on Wednesday to give my talk "Web Performance and Scalability with MySQL":http://mysqluc.com/cs/mysqluc2006/view/e_sess/8294.

Usually I'd worry tons about my talk, but I think it'll be lots of fun. I've been tuning and fixing up my slides and I really like how it's turning out[1]. Hopefully the people coming to the talk will like it too! :-)

The talk description says "fast paced", and it's not kidding. I have enough content for three talks - but then people would just have too much time to read their email and that's not what they come to the conference for, right? Right?? :-)

Anyway, I'm looking forward to it a lot, except for the part about …

From the highly unorthodox department, a speech about stored routines that create other routines in MySQL.

Higher Order MySQL at the MySQL Users Conference, 17:20, Ballroom C.

Get the source code and examples.

Looking at my weblog traffic summary tonight and was startled by this statistic. In recent months folks have grabbed around 1.2 terrabytes of data off of this site. I guess that should be expected when posting monthly MySQL meetup videos that are anywhere from 100-300 MB. Doesn't take many of those to make bandwidth an issue.

The video hosting at Google is obviously the better choice from a data-transfer perspective. However, I've heard numerous people complain that the sound isn't right or the video freezes up on Google so I think it's nice to provide a Quicktime version that's downloadable to play it off a local machine. I had also been thinking it would be nice to provide a video in iPod format for folks on the run (and while I'm at it maybe an mp3 too for audio-only).

Is 1.2 TB a big deal? I'm not sure for everyone, but since the bandwidth is donated I like to think I'm being careful with it. Looking around it seems that there …