The latest from the MySQL community

One may wonder what is sshfs and why would you want it?  Well simply put, sshfs allows you to mount another server’s filesystem into a folder on your local system which in the background is doing ssh commands and transfers.  As a mounted folder, you are able to move about and copy files back and forth as everything was on local server.  As you can see this makes it very easy for you to work with files on multiple servers.

Note:  you only have to do the following installations on the server where you are doing the mounts on.

Let us download and install the filesystem framework which is a requirement for sshfs called fuse.

wget http://voxel.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/fuse/fuse-2.7.4.tar.gz
tar zxpfv fuse-*.gz
cd fuse*
./configure

If you get the following error, you will either have to point to the location of the kernel source or …

My presentation, entitled “MySQL for non-DBAs” went well…considering the very broad topic and that the laptop I was going to present from decided to have a hissy fit. It was my work-sanctioned XP Pro laptop and the registry decided to corrupt itself, causing it to reboot over and over and over and…. Oh joy! Luckily, the group organizer allowed me to borrow his Mac and since I had the presentation on a USB drive (OpenOffice.org format, of course) we were rockin’ and rollin’ in no time.

I took the “MySQL 5.0 for DBAs” course last year. That was a 5-day course that used over 220+ slides. I compressed over three quarters of that content down to about 40 slides for a 2-hour talk with some live demo work thrown in for good measure. It was a tough presentation to put together given such a large amount of information. I tried to highlight the design, the engines, the commands, etc.. I relied on audience questions to act as tangents …

We’ve just finished the next alpha-release of our 5.1 version. It has become a bit more stable, we’ve cleaned up the source code, added fixes for building on distros other than Ubuntu and we’ve brushed up our packaging mechanism for Ubuntu - so we can now offer a Repository for use with apt (either on command-line or via Synaptics). There’s only one package - google’s cTemplates - that you’ll still have to install manually before handing the work over to apt to fetch and install workbench on your Ubuntu system.

So first head over to google’s cTemplate-Pages to get libctemplate0. It’s best to fetch the latest .deb package, which you can then install with one simple command like this:

sudo dpkg -i libctemplate0_0.91-1_i386.deb

The next step is to add our Repos to your apt-sources. Do this by adding following lines to your …

On his blog, Kaj Arnö has been writing about MySQL news, events, community and business developments for some time.

His most recent posts include (1)  a thank you note to David Axmark, one of the MySQL founders, for his 20-year contributions to MySQL and FOSS, and (2) an announcement regarding the move from MySQL contributor license agreement (MySQL CLA) to Sun Contributor Agreement (SCA), which is expected to be more contributor friendly.   

Solutions

Using PHP function intval().

Code example: echo intval(”05″);
Returned value: 5

Using PHP function ltrim().

Code example: echo ltrim(”005″,”0″);
Returned value: 5

ShareThis

Last week I had the great opportunity to sit in on a DBA class session taught by George Trujillo. I know that most of the folks administrating and programming MySQL databases are self taught. Learning by the 'RFTM' has benefits but many lessons come directly from the education institution know as The School of Hard Knocks. And some knocks are much harder and larger than other.
Self-teaching is a valuable way to learn but a lot depends on the quality of the materials you can discover. The MySQL DBA class is well structured so that concepts are presented in easy to understand portions and build on each other to cover the information. It really beats trying to read the online documentation at three in the morning.

I was shocked and somewhat …

Large databases, long mysqldump times, long waits for globally locked tables. These problems basically never go away when you rely on mysqldump with –all-databases or a list of databases, as it dumps schemas serially. I’m not going to explain serial vs parallel processing here since that’s a larger topic. Suffice to say that in these days of multi-core / multi-cpu servers we only make use of one processor’s core when we serially export databases using mysqldump. So, I have a new script that attempts to alleviate those issues and now I need testers to provide feedback/improvements.

In order to keep some sanity when dealing with hundreds of database servers, the script takes care of the following:

1. low global locking time requirements: solved by parallel tasks / forked processes
2. backup file checking: with mysqldump files; it checks for “–Dump completed” at the end of the sql file …

Background Knowledge

Since MySQL v4.1 timestamp and datetime data types are formatted “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS”. Prior to MySQL v4.1 the timestamp was formatted as YYYYMMDDHHMMSS” and datetime formatted as “YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS”. Refer to MySQL Reference Manual for further details.

The Unix timestamp differs from MySQL. Unix’s timestamp is a integer value of seconds since January 1, 1970. For further explanation of Unix timestamps refer to Wikiepedia or UnixTimestamp.com.

Solutions

In MySQL you can use Unix_Timestamp() function.

Query Example: SELECT …

Tomorrow, at 1pm EDT/10am PDT, I'll be giving a webinar on performance tuning MySQL for commercial application developers. The webinar is open to all participants. I'll be covering my normal Join-fu material but will try to tailor the talk to developers working on applications for the commercial market. I'm actually looking forward to the different questions this group might propose. I can't say I'll have answers to all the questions, but I'll certainly try my best! See you online tomorrow.

At the end of the Orlando meeting in January this year when the Sun acquisition was announced, I remember sitting next to MySQL’s co-founder David Axmark in the bus going to some evening event. “What do you want to do now, with so many opportunities opening up?” was my question to him, partly as his friend, partly as his colleague and partly as his line manager. David seemed very confident in the future of MySQL within Sun, but less sure about his own future role.

With that as a background, and knowing David since well over 20 years, I was not all that surprised to read his resignation letter, and in particular his reasoning for resigning:

I have thought about my role at Sun and decided that I am better off in smaller organisations. I HATE all the rules that I need to follow, and I also HATE breaking them. It would be far better for me to “retire” from employment and work with MySQL and Sun on a less formal …