The latest from the MySQL community

Good location and very good presentations from our partners Magirus and Red Hat, in Milan last week.

Giuseppe Paterno', Senior Solution Architect at Red Hat (here is Giuseppe's web site, in Italian) has delivered a great presentation on the new features of RH 5.1. I think that the new virtualization features, now included in 5.1, will attract the interest of many Red Hat and MySQL users. There has been a long debate whether DB servers should stay away from virtualization or they should get the big advantage of the availability and the flexibility that a virtualised environment can provide. I think that para-virtualization may be a good compromise between a thick virtualized layer and a non-virtualized environment: it's more predictable, less intrusive and it can provide all the flexibility required for a DB server. More information on virtualization and on the new features of RHEL …

Solaris Express, Developer Edition 1/08 or SXDE 1/08 as its affectionately called within Sun is being released on monday. There are certain new features that I think needs to be highlighted specially for the PostgreSQL community.

Well for starters the versions of PostgreSQL included in SXDE are PostgreSQL 8.1.10 and PostgreSQL 8.2.5. (Unfortunately not all security fixes made it to the release though). However the big news is the PostgreSQL servers which are pretty hidden now has an administration GUI. Yes pgAdmin III is now included in SXDE.

Also there are lot of new features which now are quite well integrated with PostgreSQL.

For example take …

Ops Mantras (as made popular by Dormando).
I've been doing this shit for a while now. I'm presently acting as a MySQL DBA for SixApart, but these views are mine and not of my employer. This is an omega post of all of the generalized one off mantras I find valuable when approaching operations management. Even if these end up being idealistic, my humble view is to shoot for these and you'll be better off with what you end up with.

It's uh, long, sorry. This _was_ inspired by another post which I'll not be direct linking. Aside from the list-style, I've not stolen anything else. The Mantras are broken up into major sections:
- The Technical Element
- The Human Element
- The Practice

The Technical Element
Design for change
- The old google mantra is right. Design for change. Change is having to deploy new software, upgrade …

Ops Mantras (as made popular by Dormando).
I've been doing this shit for a while now. I'm presently acting as a MySQL DBA for SixApart, but these views are mine and not of my employer. This is an omega post of all of the generalized one off mantras I find valuable when approaching operations management. Even if these end up being idealistic, my humble view is to shoot for these and you'll be better off with what you end up with.

It's uh, long, sorry. This _was_ inspired by another post which I'll not be direct linking. Aside from the list-style, I've not stolen anything else. The Mantras are broken up into major sections:
- The Technical Element
- The Human Element
- The Practice

The Technical Element
Design for change
- The old google mantra is right. Design for change. Change is having to deploy new software, upgrade …

i am listed as one of the ten members of the php group. most of the php source code says it is copyright “the php group” (except for the zend engine stuff). the much-debated contributor license agreement for PDO2 involves the php group.

could i assign whatever rights (and responsibilities) my membership in the php group represents to someone else? how much should i try to get for it? i mean, if mysql was worth $1 billion....

i am still disappointed that a way of evolving the membership of the php group was never established.

A

In the first article on IP to location I described the overall concept. In this edition we'll look at the implementation and how to scale the tracing to a reasonable speed.

With the examples from the last article you can also implement everything to build your own database. Before you jump into it take a minute to look at the implications.

Taking the example from the previous article 217.80.0.0/12 for the German Telekom we have to trace 1mio addresses and scanning them all will take a while:

# time traceroute -w 1 -m 8 -q 1 217.80.0.1
traceroute to 217.80.0.1 (217.80.0.1), 8 hops max, 40 byte packets
 2  217.0.72.230  36.974 ms   
 3  ke-eb1.ke.de.net.dtag.de (62.154.98.82)  54.454 ms
 4  217.0.74.213  54.610 ms
 5  * * *
 6  * * *
 7  * * *
 8  * * *

real    0m3.244s

If we can make the make …

Guess what ? I also will be speaking at MySQL Users Conference 2008, which is always excited.
According to session schedule I'll have one talk about Innodb Scalability Limits and another one together with Andrew Aksenoff about Sphinx.

Looking back at Proposals (+1) I'm surprised only one talk was chosen and also this particular one.

May be I should put more effort into detailing advance session description - I normally tend to provide good choice of topics to conference organizers without too many details, working these out only when we know which sessions are of potential interest. Well perhaps with …

News Summary - Jan 27th to Feb 3rd, 2008