Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.

The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages - it also seems like he’s still the only developer).

?This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)?

I couldn’t help but grin …

After a very long time distracted with other projects, I finally added the third component of the MyCAT project: binlog_mon, a binary log manager for MySQL.

The main feature of this tool is that it has two disk usage thresholds which determine when it purges your binary logs:

• a lower, "nominal", threshold above which binary logs will be purged if-and-only-if none of the replication slaves are still reading it,
• and a higher, "critical", threshold at which the behavior is configurable.
  

It can simply send you an alert if disk usage is above critical and the oldest file is still needed - or it can purge 1 file, all files until usage below critical, or all files until usage below nominal levels. (Other options could be added fairly easily.) The "critical" option is so configurable because purging any binary …

Here are my slides used for presentation at Red Hat Summit in Boston last week:

Zmanda: Open Source Backup (.odp open office format, 1.7MB)

MySQL Quickpolls might be insightful for people who develop products and services for MySQL. Recently I was looking again at “How do you backup your production database” poll. To interpret the results, I wanted to know who are the people answering that and other Quickpolls. Are they the DBAs responsible for running MySQL in production or the developers writing applications that use MySQL? For a backup guy like me knowing that makes a difference.

Every Quickpoll gets a time stamp when opened and tells how many people answered the poll. It occurred to me that the normalized number of people (MySQL polls run for different periods of time) answering each poll could give me some insight. The graph below shows the daily number of people answering each poll in the last 24 months.

Of course, I understand there could be self-selection …

The team just finished our second successful MySQL Con. Many thanks to Marten & Zack and all the folks at O’Reilly that put on such a great conference.

This year definitely had a different feel, and of course that had a lot to do with Sun’s influence. It felt like it was almost a new event, a chapter 2 for MySQL, and its ecosystem of vendors and customers. There were more people - I don’t know exact numbers, but it felt appeared to be twice as packed. The exhibit hall was the same, but we took up a bit more space than last year and certainly there were much fancier booths - ours included! We even gave away multiple prizes this year - our fun 8-ball tshirts, and a couple remote control helicopters. Scott Baird and Mike Hogan were the lucky winners this year.

The one thing that hasn’t changed is our fit with the MySQL customers. This year we met several of our own customers and users face-to-face - including an …

Final slides from keynote delivered this morning at the MySQL user conference. Topic was protecting live MySQL databases.

(Slides render well in both OpenOffice and PowerPoint)

You have to have been living under a rock, if you did not know that today is the first day of MySQL Users’ Conference and Expo. We at Zmanda are so proud and privileged to have been awarded the “Partner of The Year”. The award is very meaningful to our vision of Simplified, Easy to use, commercial Open Source Backup and Recovery. We appreciate the award and are committed to making the life of the MySQL DBA hassle free. We have had a ton of visitors from all walks of MySQL user community talk to us today. Its fascinating to talk to customer and prospects on how they leverage the power of MySQL. To learn more about how Zmanda provides the Best in Class Backup and Recovery solution for MySQL, you can attend Zmanda’s sessions at the MySQL Conference & Expo include:
What: “Radically Simple Backup & Recovery for Live MySQL”
Who: Chander Kant, Zmanda CEO and founder
…

No, this is not a blog about Computational Fluid Dynamics - my least favorite subject in college. This is about a more exciting (sorry mechanical engineers!) CFD: Customer Facing Data. This is the data that is typically available on the website of an organization that their customers interact with. CFD can range all the way from profiles of users on a social networking site such as Facebook to the customer information database of an e-commerce company such as Travelocity.

CFD represents today’s data protection challenge. Probably the biggest challenge while planning a backup solution for CFD is that it is very hard to figure out what to plan for. You might be starting with a very small database which might grow much more rapidly than what you think. If the data can be segmented based on users or some other characteristic, then you will find that your databases may scale-out instead of scale-up. Also, rate of change can …

We have been focusing on providing the best possible backup solution for following scenario: 100 GB+ of data stored in MySQL database, Transaction intensive workload (i.e. rapid rate of change of data), with a business requirement to be able to perform point-in-time restoration of the MySQL database. Oh, the solution also needs to take into account that the database can grow to 1TB or more very quickly.

For such a scenario, we believe that the best possible solution today is a combination of:

1. Storage level snapshots - a capability built into ZFS (Solaris), NetApp, LVM (Linux), VxFS, and VSS (Windows)
2. Transaction logs generated by MySQL
3. Point-and-click restore capability provided by Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL

Two reports came out today which go into nitty-gritty of above. First is a joint report written by …

Today Sun and Zmanda announced our agreement to deliver a comprehensive, global data backup and recovery solution for MySQL Enterprise subscribers. Starting April 1st, MySQL Enterprise customers will be able to purchase ZRM for MySQL directly from Sun worldwide.

I think Zack’s comment in the press release captures the rationale for the deal:

“Protecting corporate data through effective backup and recovery is one of the most crucial tasks for a database administrator, and it can be a complex undertaking — especially for today’s large Web-scale applications,” said Zack Urlocker, VP of products, Sun Microsystems database group. “MySQL users have told us that global backup and recovery is very important to them, and we are thrilled that we can now offer ZRM for MySQL as an easy-to-use solution for protecting all of their MySQL data.”

Of …