Our contest to give away one of our blazingly fast Kickfire Analytic Appliances to a deserving organization is heading into the home stretch. We have already had almost 1,000 people voice their opinion and encourage everyone interested in data warehousing, business intelligence, MySQL, open source, or any other aspect of this contest to vote for their favorite semi-finalist before 5:00P PT Tuesday, December 1st.  We will announce the winner on Wednesday, December 5th.

To enter the contest, we asked organizations to submit their most compelling story of “data warehouse pain.” Our esteemed judges, Curt Monash, founder of Monash Research (www.monash.com) and publisher of DBMS2, Joy Mundy, principal at the Kimball Group (www.kimballgroup.com), Peter Zaitsev, founder and chief executive officer of Percona ( …

If you have more then a single MySQL database for your production environment, e.g. a development and test environment, or a MySQL replication topology, ensuring your schema’s are in sync can be task that requires some time if not managed correctly.

There is a tool I do use for MySQL environments called Schema Sync – a MySQL Schema Versioning and Migration Utility. There are many reasons why schema’s get out of sync. Developers may not ensure their changes are reflected in any software to be deployed, and when not tested you could end up with broken functionality. A DBA might try some different index strategies on a slave, but not the master, and never implement or revert.

While some people want the quick and hidden just sync version akin to Rails, I really like this product as it produces proper patch and revert SQL scripts. As a DBA I really want to know what’s going to …

It just works. In absence of any MySQL monitoring for your site, I have found no solution that gets you operational as quickly and easily. MONyog can be deployed in 60 seconds, and configured in another 60 seconds. Within 5 minutes you can have visual monitoring of your MySQL environment.

MONyog is an agentless process, which is an advantage for easy install, but does not provide for monitoring redundancy in the capture of information due to agentless nature. It’s a static standalone executable which is great if you need something to work out of the box. You can easily configure multiple servers in a replication topology, or different servers in your environment. You get the ability to monitor all the usual information, with a dashboard and detailed graphs. While MONyog does provide customizations of rules for the graphs and presentation order, that’s about it. You can’t at this time …

I attended the Bay Area Startup Weekend in Mountain View this previous week-end. This was the first such event I attended and it was an amazing experience – so I thought I’d share it.

The idea behind the event was that a bunch of folks would show up, some of them would pitch ideas for new startups and the others would join them if they liked the idea and/or had the necessary skills to build it. The goal was to build a working prototype over the course of the week-end.

This seemed like an impossible task to me – not the part where you build a prototype but the idea that random people could come together and actually form a startup. And on talking to one of the organizers, he confirmed that the goal was really to form a community, help people get to know each other – sometimes the team does gel and a successful startup is formed.

Nevertheless, there were …

I am working with a client that is using managed hosting on dedicated servers. This has presented new challenges in obtaining the right permissions to undertake MySQL tasks but not have either ‘root’ or ‘mysql’ access and not have to involve a third party everytime.

Adding the following to the /etc/sudoers file enabled the ability to restart MySQL.

User_Alias      DBA = rbradfor, user2, etc
Host_Alias      DB_SERVERS = server1.example.com, server2.example.com, etc
Cmnd_Alias      MYSQL = /etc/init.d/mysqld, /usr/sbin/tcpdump

DBA DB_SERVERS = MYSQL

As you can see I also got tcpdump, which I find valuable to monitor via mk-query-digest.

Next, permissions for log files.

Beyond simple basic vitualization, there are added new and interesting layers of management abstractions and features offered that MySQL users will benefit from by understanding. Being aware of how you might use these features in your enterprise may be beneficial in your next architecture design. To assist we explored using those HA, FT, load balancing features in VMware in the context MySQL. So if your interested please check out the mysql whitepaper http://preview.tinyurl.com/y8n9ktq

As always looking for feedback or your experience.

The main focus of MariaDB staff has been the MariaDB 5.1.38 release in recent weeks, but this doesn’t mean that we’ve abandoned everything else for it. There are several non-release projects going on, one of which is adding binlog filtering and markup capabilities.

In order to see how the new features fit in, let’s first look at what binlog filtering options are already present in MySQL (and so, MariaDB):

This release has now been replaced with 7.0.9b

The source version for MySQL Cluster 7.0.9a has now been made available at ftp://ftp.mysql.com/pub/mysql/download/cluster_telco/mysql-5.1.39-ndb-7.0.9a/

This replaces MySQL Cluster 7.0.9.

You can either wait for the binaries to be released or if you’re in a rush then you can find instructions on building the binaries for yourself in the earlier article: “MySQL Cluster 7.0.7 source released“.

A description of all of the changes (fixes) that have gone into MySQL Cluster 7.0.9a (compared to 7.0.8a) can be found in the MySQL Cluster …

So, MySQL 6.0 was ditched, and a few weeks ago 5.4 was also – its features to be added in other (earlier) versions (I’m told 5.2 but not sure). I reckon that’s good news, regardless of the version number. There was also an announcement about a change in the release mechanism at Sun/MySQL.

Now for practicals. If I look on Launchpad, the 5.1 branch is the only active one (next to 5.0 fixes, of course). 5.4 was last updated 15 weeks ago. There is no 5.2 on there that I can find. Wasn’t looking for it really, just happened to notice its absence while I was trying to find 5.5. And the reason for that was that Miguel closed a bug I was following, noting it was no longer reproducible in 5.5. He pastes some code that reports mysql as 5.5, so it’s not a typo.

So, in addition to the above list of …

This entry provides instructions for “silently” installing MySQL on a Microsoft Windows server.  I use the term “silent install” to describe the method of passing parameters to the Microsoft Installation Package (MSI) to bypass installation screens.  This allows you to deploy MySQL with your application and to install MySQL without end-user intervention.  The developer can define the install location, the appropriate storage engines, the root password and the server configuration.

Most application developers use some sort of software for creating an application installer.  Common tools include Install Shield, Wise Installation, InstallBuilder and Windows Installer.  These installation software tools can also be used to install MySQL by launching the MySQL MSI and the MySQL Instance configuration utility ( MySQLInstanceConfig.exe ) from the command-line.

To get started, download the Windows …