Sheeri K. Cabral at the Mozilla Foundation wrote about an issue with the June 30th 2012 leap second affecting at least MySQL, Java and Minecraft servers. It now appears that the underlying cause is a Linux kernel bug, as noted by John Stultz (IBM) on the Linux Kernel mailing list, and the team Sheeri is part of deserves due credit for doing awesome pattern recognition and being the first to bring it to public attention, enabling people to quickly correlate their own experience with that of others and finding a practical solution as well as helping figure out the cause.

Sheeri’s original post MySQL and the Leap Second, High CPU and the Fix describes how MySQL servers would suddenly exhibit high CPU usage during a period of low load. …

At a time when most companies are doing all they can to maintain the status quo, SkySQL is daring to imagine a new “normal”. We’re on a mission to change the way companies interact with and manage their data, both in the enterprise and in the cloud. Along with our strategic partners, in particular MariaDB, we’re working to develop new open source database solutions that challenge proprietary enterprise solutions and business models.

To help us achieve our goal, we’re looking for a few daring open source engineers to join our team and take on the status quo:

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New quick-start guide for MySQL DBAs: SkySQL™ Enterprise Monitor makes managing your MySQL & MariaDB databases that much easier

We’ve just published a new Quick Start Guide to SkySQL™ Enterprise Monitor for all MySQL & MariaDB DBAs out there, who are looking for ways to manage their databases more easily.

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When computers were still using large black text oriented screens or no screens at all, a computer only knew how to store a limited set of characters. Then it was normal to store a name with the more complicated characters replaced by more basic characters. The ASCII standard was used to make communication between multiple systems (or applications) easier. Storing characters as ASCII needs little space and is quite strait forward.

Then DOS used CP850 and CP437 and so on to make it possible to use language /location specific characters.
Then ISO8859-1, ISO8859-15 and more of these character sets were defined as standard.

And now there is Unicode: UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS2, etc. which allow you to …

Hosted by Binlogic, the MySQL/NoSQL/Cloud Latin American Conference at the Hilton Buenos Aires in Argentina, June 26-28th, will bring together key members of the of open source database community for two intense days of technical talks and tutorials on popular open source databases like MySQL, MariaDB, and Drizzle; NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and CouchDB; and related technologies such as the Soir and Sphinx search engines.

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As I reported via Twitter late last week, we encountered an issue that got some of our mail delivery delayed by about a day and a half. I’ll explain more about what happened as I believe in openness on these matters, and also the experience has educational content for others.

Our mail server doesn’t have direct external interaction, it’s shielded by two relays that handle both the inbound MX and the outbound queue. This setup works remarkably well in terms of exposure to spam and other malicious activity. As previously discussed, it appears that it’s more difficult to make mail server infra more resilient without expending lots more time/effort and infrastructure expenditure. Just because of the way the common tools for mail delivery and imap are built, having two or more of each in a semi-active setup gets quite complex. Complexity is in itself a risk so it has to be considered in relation to the costs and risks of the …

It is not a secret that we’ve been kicking the tires and playing with JIRA for project management. After using it since the beginning of the year most of us like the feel of it and we’ve decided that it makes sense to start using it more.

As you know, the MariaDB project has many fragmented resources. We report bugs in Launchpad. We store our plans in worklog. We’ve never used the Launchpad Blueprint feature for this very reason. We don’t use Launchpad Answers because we have the Knowledgebase.

With this move to hosted JIRA (yes, this is an important link: …

Dan Berry and Heather Sullivan discuss how Constant Contact architected their replication strategy. Recorded at  SkySQL & MariaDB: Solutions Day for the MySQL® Database.

Robert Hodges & Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent present this talk on Tungsten. Continuent Tungsten's architecture makes creating complex topologies, such as multi-master, really easy and allows for outstanding performance using parallel replication and pre-fetching. Users of this technology can deal with their clusters as if they were a single server, thanks to the transparent connectivity that

Over the past few days extensive conversations around a new security vulnerability in MariaDB and MySQL have taken place.

It all started as a chain reaction when Monty Program publicly disclosed information about the flaw they had found and about how to make sure your MariaDB and MySQL installations can be fixed. The initial information got assigned the security vulnerabitlity identifier CVE-2012-2122 and the contents can be seen e.g. here http://seclists.org/oss-sec/2012/q2/493 .

The bug was found two months ago on April 4th.

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