Originally Posted by Adam Bird

There needed to be a better way for agents in Zendesk to track the tasks that had been assigned them. Using the Cronofy calendar API we created an app that keeps those assignments synchronized with the agent’s calendar.

This post shares our learnings from interacting with the Zendesk API, hopefully to help you with your own Zendesk project.

The Ruby source code for our integration is also available.

When a Ticket is a Task

Tickets are the core entity in the Zendesk domain. Tasks are just Tickets of type : ‘task’. This gives them an additional attribute due_at.

We also need to track the status of the ticket to know when it’s …

There needed to be a better way for agents in Zendesk to track the tasks that had been assigned them. Using the Cronofy calendar API we created an app that keeps those assignments synchronized with the agent's calendar.

This post shares our learnings from interacting with the Zendesk API, hopefully to help you with your own Zendesk project.

The Ruby source code for our integration is also available.

When a Ticket is a Task

Tickets are the core entity in the Zendesk domain. Tasks are just Tickets of type : 'task'. This gives them an additional attribute due_at.

We also need to track the …

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our recent live webinar on ‘Schema Changes for MySQL Replication & Galera Cluster’ led by Krzysztof Książek, Senior Support Engineer at Severalnines. The replay and slides to the webinar are now available to watch and read online via the links below.

Watch the replay

Become a MySQL DBA - Webinars - Schema Changes for MySQL Replication & Galera Cluster (Replay) from Severalnines AB

Read the slides

Become a MySQL …

I recently gave Terraform a test drive, using HP Cloud (Openstack-based) as the cloud provider, and have to say I was pleasantly surprised that it was one of these “just works” types of tools.

Why??

I am a member of HP Cloud’s Advanced Technology Group and an important part of our mission is to look for new technologies and exciting new trends. One project I was asked to look at is Terraform. What is Terraform? A project by HashiCorp that is for “building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently”. From my experience, it’s a logical way of setting up virtual resources that supports multiple sources.

Installing Terraform

Installing and setting up Terraform was extremely simple and straightforward, and I was able to get up and running rather quickly, …

Percona Server 5.6.21+ and MySQL 5.7.8+ offer the super_read_only option that was first implemented in WebscaleSQL. Unlike read_only, this option prevents all users from running writes (even those with the SUPER privilege). Sure enough, this is a great feature, but what’s the relation with GTID? Read on!

TL;DR

Enabling super_read_only on all slaves when using GTID replication makes your topology far less sensitive to errant transactions. Failover is then easier and safer because creating errant transactions is much harder.

GTID replication is awesome…

For years, all MySQL DBAs in the world have been fighting with positioning when working with replication. Each time you move a slave from one master to another, you must be very careful to start …

The MySQL Fabric team is pleased to announce that a new (GA) release is now available. This release includes several improvements in terms of stability and usability (bug fixes and feature enhancements). In a nutshell:

• Two new types of users for backup and restore are now available allowing a better managements of the required privileges for each user type.

…

The MySQL Fabric team is pleased to announce that a new (GA) release is now available. This release includes several improvements in terms of stability and usability (bug fixes and feature enhancements). In a nutshell:

• Two new types of users for backup and restore are now available allowing a better managements of the required privileges for each user type. More information: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-utilities/1.5/en/fabric-create-user.html 
• An example script for pacemaker was added to the source packages to help provide an HA solution using a single Fabric node. More information: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-utilities/1.5/en/fabric-pacemaker.html
• The Connector/Python minimum …

In Python it is easily possible to findout the name of a Unicode character and findout some properties about that character. The module which does that is called unicodedata.

An example:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name('☺')
'WHITE SMILING FACE'

This module uses the data as released in the UnicodeData.txt file from the unicode.org website.

So if UnicodeData.txt is a 'database', then we should be able to import it into MySQL and use it!

I wrote a small Python script to automate this. The basic steps are:

• Download UnicodeData.txt
• Create a unicodedata.ucd table
• Use LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE to load the data

This isn't difficult especially because the file doesn't have the actual characters in it. It is …

Recently, we had an issue in our application which is a single page application(SPA). We have all the functionality in a single page and most of the data and view changes happen through ajax requests and iframe page displays.We are using CodeIgniter framework for this application. So sometimes what happened was the user was logged out while accessing the application and this occurred once a while for 1 or 2 users, not a reproducible case one would say.Before starting on the case, I would like to specify the steps which CodeIgniter takes for checking session for any request.Steps:
1. Read session cookie sent from browser.
2. Read session cookie process proceeds with below step checks (If any one step fails below, it results in create one session cookie)
2a. Checks if session cookie is present
2b. Checks if it is a valid session cookie by using it's decryption algorithm check
2c. If  valid session, then check if …

It's migration time. There was another project that I use often and was still in Launchpad. The Sample Employees Database is now on GitHub, under the same license it had before (CC A-SA 3).

Figure 1 - Employees database
This database is interesting because it is not too small (like Sakila) and not too big. It has enough data to allow you to test in a non trivial way.
Installation and testInstalling the database is easy:

$ git clone https://github.com/datacharmer/test_db.git
$ cd test_db
$ mysql < employees.sql
INFO
CREATING DATABASE STRUCTURE
INFO
storage engine: InnoDB
INFO
LOADING departments
INFO
LOADING employees
INFO
LOADING dept_emp
INFO
LOADING dept_manager
INFO
LOADING titles
INFO …