Following the opening keynote “Dolphins, now and beyond”, Marc Delisle presented on “State of phpMyAdmin”.

phpMyAdmin is an DBA administration tool for MySQL available today in 57 different languages. This is found today in many distributions, LAMP stack products and also in cpanel. The product is found at http://phpmyadmin.net.

There are current two versions, the legacy 2.x version to support older php 3.x & 4.x, The current version 3.x is for PHP 5.2 or greater.

The current UI includes some new features including.

• calendar input for date fields
• meta data for mime types e.g images, which is great for showing the output as an image, otherwise blob data
• Relational designer with the able to show and create foreign keys …

Read this post today, http://mysqlha.blogspot.com/2010/02/dude-where-is-my-link.html. And I was amazed to find that on mysql.com it was so hard to download the community version of MySQL Server.

On the home page, could see links for

• Enterprise Products
• Resources
• Consulting
• Training
• News and Events

Couldn't find a link for Community Server Download or something similar, I've been working with MySQL for over 5 yrs, I know that the downloads and most of the useful stuff for open source devs like me is on http://dev.mysql.com. The Developer Zone hosts the following for us

• Community Server Downloads
• Documentation …

We have a new users’s group on Brijj for anyone that wants to keep up to date with discussions and wants to increase their network profile on the site. Join now: http://www.brijj.com/group/kontrollbase-users

LinuxTag is the most important place for Linux and open source software in Europe. Last year, LinuxTag had over ten thousand attendees, and over 300 speakers. This year, the 16th LinuxTag will be June 9-12, 2010 at the Berlin Fairgrounds in Germany.

LinuxTag seeks exciting and suitable proposals for presentations in the conference tracks. The Call for Papers ends today.

I am proud to be a member of the LinuxTag Program Committee. Although a lot of proposals have already been submitted, there are some topics missing that I’d personally like to see covered. So, if you’re up for a last minute submission, get your inspiration from the following list:

• Is/was the recent economic crisis an …

Finally, after many months, Oracle's long-awaited acquisition of Sun Microsystems has been completed. Having joined Sun as part of the MySQL acquisition two years ago, I think it's a good outcome both for Sun and for MySQL. The vision behind Sun's acquisition of MySQL was right on: Sun wanted to become the leader in open source and use MySQL as

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Earlier today Oracle executives, in an event spanning more than four hours, presented their strategy for integrating Sun's assets with Oracle. I'll just update readers on the section related to Sun's open source assets.

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I met Scott McNealy several times over the last year in customer meetings and to talk about Sun's open source strategy.  He's a class act all the way.  He sent out his final email to Sun employees and partners earlier today. 

Here's an excerpt:    

    While it was never the primary vision to be acquired by Oracle, it was always an interesting option. And this huge event is upon us now. Let’s all embrace it with all of the enthusiasm and class and talent that we have to offer.

    This combination has the potential to put Sun, its people, and its technology at the center of yet another industry and game changing inflection point. The opportunity is well documented and articulated by Larry and the …

If you are running your MySQL databases on the Amazon EC2 compute cloud, Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL can perform fast full backups of these databases by using Elastic Block Store (EBS) Snapshots. ZRM takes only a momentary read lock on the MySQL database during the creation of the snapshot, in order to ensure consistency of the backed up database archive. MySQL Backups using Amazon EBS snapshots are differential backups, meaning that only the blocks that have changed since your last full backup (via EBS snapshot) will be saved. For example, if you have a database with 100 GBs of data, but only 5 GBs of data has changed since your last snapshot, only the 5 additional GBs of snapshot data will be stored back to Amazon S3 during the current full backup run.

ZRM automatically deletes EBS snapshots (containing full backups of MySQL) according to the configured …

I’ve been using a lot of RESTful services these days and have been waiting for a good book that is dedicated to the topic. I recently received a copy of ‘RESTful PHP Web Services’, which does a successful job of outlining proven concepts in current web technology. If you want to learn the methods for creating and consuming RESTful services then you will find many examples in this book. From the architectural plans to well thought out code samples, the book covers a lot of ground in a relatively quick read.

The first chapter gives the reader a quick introduction to RESTful services and the most common PHP frameworks in use at the time of writing. I particularly enjoyed the section on the Zend framework due to the explanation of benefits over the other frameworks. …

My talk on 10x performance improvements – A case study has just been approved for the 2010 MySQL Conference. This will be my 5th straight year speaking at the MySQL conferences. For those in Europe wanting a sneak peek I am also speaking at FOSDEM 2010 in Brussels on Feb 7th where I’ll be giving an abridged version.

As an independent MySQL consultant, my work generally covers performance tuning and scalability and sometimes database architecture. Often however my work involves a review of a given problem and recommendations (immediate, short and long term). I’m rarely involved in the full implementation and generally do not see the full fruits of the proposed work.

Recently however I was able to work with a client, first in resolving …