After updating the AVGFree virus definitions, I was surprised to find that Zend CE (Community Edition) 4.0.6 had a worm in the JavaServer.exe file. There was greater surprise when Zend CE 5.3.9 (5.6.0-SP1) also had the same worm.

This is the message identifying the worm (click on it to see a full size image), and you can read about this particular worm on the Mcafee site:

Unless you have the full version of AVG or another security program to try and fix the file, you can only quarantine the file. Quarantine or removal disables Zend CE from working. It begs the questions, “how does Zend release a core file with a worm?”

I’ll update this when there’s a fix to this problem.

As MySQL continues to grow (as a technology and as an ecosystem) the need and importance of creating and deploying robust MySQL backup solutions grows as well. In many circles Zmanda is known as “The MySQL Backup Company”. While we provide backup of a wide variety of environments, we gladly take the label of backing up the most popular open source database in the world, especially as we kick off our presence at the 2012 MySQL Conference.

Here are some of the updates to our MySQL backup technologies that we are announcing at the conference:

Announcing Zmanda Recovery Manager 3.4

We have updated the popular Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL product for …

Vadim Tkachenko of Percona benchmarks Galera versus standalone Percona Server and stock MySQL replication using tpcc-mysql.

Now that flash storage is becoming more popular, IO alignment question keeps popping up more often than it used to when all we had were rotating hard disk drives. I think the reason is very simple – when systems only had one bearing hard disk drive (HDD) as in RAID1 or one disk drive at all, you couldn’t really have misaligned IO because HDDs operate in 512-byte sectors and that’s also the smallest amount of disk IO that systems can do. NAND flash on the other hand can have a page size of 512-bytes, 2kbytes or 4kbytes (and often you don’t know what size it is really) so the IO alignment question becomes more relevant.

It was and still is, however, relevant with HDD RAID storage – technology we have been using for many years – when there’s striping like in RAID0, 5, 6 or any variation of them (5+0, 1+0, 1+0+0 etc.). While IO inside the RAID is perfectly aligned to disk sectors (again due to the fact operations are done in …

I use Aspersa tools a lot and I find myself going to the website just to download one of the tools all the time. I love I can download maatkit with a simple wget maatkit.org/get/tool command so I made bit.ly shortcuts for all of the current aspersa tools. Here’s the full list with my favorite on the top and least favorite (but none the less very useful) on the bottom:

• http://bit.ly/aspersa-diskstats
• http://bit.ly/aspersa-mext
• http://bit.ly/aspersa-collect
• http://bit.ly/aspersa-stalk
• …

1. Phantom of the Flopera (YouTube) -- Bach's Tocata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565) as performed by floppy drives. Creative intimacy with one's tools is a sign of mastery. (via Andy Baio)
2. Save Entire BBC Archive (Ben Goldacre) -- I pointed earlier to the questionable BBC closure of scores of websites in the name of cost-cutting. It's a torrent of an archive of spidered BBC websites. (via Andy Baio)
3. Android Hidden NFC Capabilities Unlocked -- Gibraltar Software Factory, based in Argentina, …

Congratulations to the Drupal community for getting version 7.0 released! This is a major mile stone and an excellent reason to celebrate!

If you want to give Drupal 7 a try without having to install anything, I've now updated my Drupal 7 appliances on SuSE Studio to the latest release. The appliance is based on openSUSE Linux 11.3 and is available in two variants:

• A text-mode only appliance to which you connect using your local web browser via the network.
• A …

In our latest article at Database Journal we talk about Character Sets in MySQL.  What are they?  How do they affect searching?  How do they affect data that is inserted or updated?  How can I set and control the for an application or globally in my database?  And what pre-tell is collation?  We answer all these questions and more.

Database Journal – Understanding MySQL Character Sets

A company wiki can be easily configured in under 10 minutes using Mediawiki the open source LAMP software that powers the top 10 website Wikipedia.

A company wiki is an ideal means for a centralized and user contributed documentation system. The following steps show you how to download, configure and get your Mediawiki site operational.

Software Pre-Requisites

• Installing MySQL on Oracle Enterprise Linux
• Installing a LAMP Stack on Oracle Enterprise …

I recently had a run-in with a very popular PHP ecommerce package which makes me want to voice a recurring mistake I see in how many web applications are architected.

What is that mistake?

The ecommerce package I was working with depended on caching.  Out of the box it couldn't serve 10 pages/second unless I enabled some features which were designed to be "optional" (but clearly they weren't).

I think with great tools like memcached it is easy to get carried away and use it as the mallet for every performance problem, but in many cases it should not be your first choice.  Here is why:

• Caching might not work for all visitors - You look at a page, it loads fast.  But is this the same for every user?  Caching can sometimes be an optimization that makes the average user have a faster experience, but in reality you should be caring more that …