One of the most frequently needed functionality in the MySQL Proxy is the need to know which server you are on. This is not given, on purpose, by the proxy, because the proxy is supposed to be transparent. It is not supposed to matter which back-end server you are on.

However, for testing purposes we often want to know which back-end server we’re on. Thus I developed functionality for SHOW PROXY BACKEND [INDEX ADDRESS OTHER].

SHOW PROXY BACKEND INDEX — gives the index of the server you’re on (backend_ndx, ie 1)

SHOW PROXY BACKEND ADDRESS — gives the address of the server you’re on (ie, foo.bar.com:3306)

SHOW PROXY BACKEND OTHER — gives the address of all the other servers except those you’re not on, in multiline format.

Note that I was pretty lazy and the commands are case-sensitive. But I figured that since this is supposed to be used …

mysql-proxy defaults to round-robin load balancing. There are fancy tricks around to get mysql-proxy to balance connections based on how many idle connections there are in a proxy-based connection pool.

But there is no code that I found that would simply load balance based on “always go to one server, go to another server only when the first server is down.”

Well, I spent way too long figuring this out today, again running into the problem where the manual hasn’t been updated. I have indeed made a Forge snippet of this code, but it does not hurt to post it here.

This was in fact taken from …

Like in the years before, I (and some other colleagues from MySQL) will be attending FOSDEM 2008 in Brussels, Belgium on February 23rd and 24th.

The schedule is packed as usual and lists several MySQL-related topics and sessions:

• Main tracks: Unicoding With PHP 6 by Andrei Zmievski and the talk about CakePHP by Garrett J Woodworth are certainly relevant for web developers using PHP.
• Lightning …

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening inside of MySQL AB. But due to the distributed nature of our company it's hardly possible to get a good overview about what the various teams of our development department are currently working on and what they have achieved since the last time we met.

So one cool new idea for our currently ongoing MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg was to let developers show off their work to each other. They were encouraged to prepare demos, either in the form of slide shows or by running live demonstrations from their laptops. Last Thursday and Saturday we allocated time for these team exhibitions and the exhibitors set up tables in the meeting rooms for others to sit next to them, see the new and cool stuff and chat about it. The non-exhibiting attendees received a sheet of paper where they could collect signatures for each demo point they visited, the one that managed to see the most demos was eligible for …

Tomorrow, Thursday 13th Sept. at 13:00 UTC (15:00 CEST/9:00am EST/6:00am PST) Jan will perform a MySQL University session providing an Overview of the MySQL Proxy. If you like to attend, please add your name to the session page and read the Instructions for Attendees. All you need is a PDF viewer to see the slides, an IRC client to post questions and comments and an application capable of playing an OGG audio stream.

Version 0.6.0 of the proxy has just been tagged and we're waiting for the mirror sites to catch up before we publicly announce …

In addition to the binary downloads that we provide from our site, Linux RPM builds of the MySQL Proxy (both the latest stable version as well as SVN snapshot releases, named mysql-proxy-snapshot) are now available for download from the server:/database repository of the openSUSE build service. It provides packages for a number of Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora 5/6, SLES 9/10 SuSE/openSUSE 10.x. By the way, this repository also contains RPMs of the current 5.0.45 MySQL Community Server for the distributions mentioned above. Thanks a lot to Darix for the initial checkin of the proxy package!

When seeing that the MySQL Proxy was released, I decided to try to experiment with it since I see strong potential with this tool, both for replication and for other uses (recall that I'm a replication guy, so this is my primary focus). I'm actually on vacation, but this will of course not stop me from tinkering with things (I know, I'm just a hopeless case in this aspect ;) ).

After reporting a minor bug, I managed to build and run it with some sample scripts. I'm using Kubuntu Feisty, and had some initial problems, but it was actually pretty straightforward. I'll repeat the steps anyway, in case anybody else have problems.

1. Get the source from the repository svn co http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysql-proxy/ mysql-proxy
2. Make sure you have all packages necessary. Several of the packages …

As I felt the itch to do some quick hacking yesterday, I decided to provide an RPM spec file for the MySQL proxy. The changes have been commited to the SVN trunk now and I added some hints to the INSTALL file on how to perform an RPM build.

Here is a quick summary of how to convert the current SVN code into an installable RPM. You build environment needs to fulfill a few additional prerequisites (a gcc compiler and the C library header files are taken for granted here), I added the versions I used on my openSUSE 10.2 system for reference:

• autoconf 2.56 or newer (autoconf-2.60)
• automake 1.9 or newer (automake-1.9.6)
…