Lenz Grimmer's blog

The first Hamburg MySQL User Group meeting was held yesterday evening. It took place at 19:00 in a chinese restaurant named Ni Hao - they had a separate room for us that also provided a video projector. The location was suggested by Jens Bollmann, thanks a lot for the hint! We had a pretty good lineup from the MySQL side: Jens Bollmann (Consulting), Jan Kneschke (MySQL Network Development), Kai Voigt (Training/Consulting), Ulf Wendel (MaxDB) and myself (Community) were present. We had a total of 35 people attending.

I started the meeting with introducing myself and the community relations team and giving a short presentation about MySQL (the company - some facts and figures). I then asked everbody to shortly introduce himself to the others. After the round of introductions dinner was served - the food was excellent. There was a lot of chatter and discussion during this time.

After the food Kai gave a presentation about MySQL Cluster (by popular demand), which also led to some interesting discussions and comments. After the presentation, a few people left while others stuck around for another beer and more talking. We wrapped up at around 23:30. I received a lot of positive comments, people really liked the event and were asking to do it again. We will discuss this over the mailing list in the coming days. I've taken some pictures of the meeting, which are now available from the gallery. The slides of Kai's and my talk are available from here.

All in all, the meeting was very well received and (from my perspective) a great success. Thanks to everybody who participated! I look forward to the next one.

Alfredo announced the availability of version 1.0.5 beta of the MySQL Workbench, the latest product in the MySQL GUI tools family (also check out the Administrator, Query Browser and the Migration Toolkit).

I downloaded the RPM for SUSE Linux 9.3, which installed flawlessly on my SUSE 10.0 system. To test the reverse engineering capabilities, I installed the latest version of the Sakila sample database, which also worked very well. Kudos to our GUI team for the good work!

Some days ago I interviewed Ian Linden, the Director of Operations at Linden Lab (the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life) about Second Life, Linux, MySQL and other OSS usage for their operations. I actually performed the interview inside of Second Life, which was quite fun, especially now that there is a Linux client! You can read the full interview on the MySQL Developer Zone. Have a nice weekend!

Update: The interview is now listed on the Featured Articles page on the MySQL Developer Zone, too. If you would like to know more about Second Life and MySQL, Ian will speak about this topic in more detail at our MySQL Users Conference.

The release of MySQL 5.0 introduced the MySQL Instance Manager (IM), which intends to replace the mysqld_safe wrapper script as well as the mysqld_multi script that keeps track of multiple MySQL instances running on the same machine.

This article will qive you a quick overview about the IM and how to enable and configure a minimal setup that uses the IM to manage the default mysqld instance. I used MySQL 5.1.7-beta for my tests, some of this may work differently on other versions of MySQL.

Continue reading "Enabling and using the MySQL Instance Manager (IM)"

I had an exciting weekend at the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup. Continue reading "FOSDEM writeup"

This is just remind you that the first Hamburg MySQL User Group meeting will take place on Monday, 6th of March, 19:00. For more details please see my initial announcement and join our mailing list!

Currently, we have about 30 people that will attend. I will give a short general presentation about MySQL (the company), later Kai will give a presentation on MySQL Cluster.

If you'd like to join us, please register via meetup.com or OpenBC. Looking forward to meeting you!

I returned home safely from Brussels on Sunday night. FOSDEM was great fun, I am going to write up my impressions in a separate entry. I wanted to do it on Monday already, but I had an appointment with the dentist in the afternoon who pulled my two upper wisdom teeth.

The operation itself was almost pain-free and went very quick. But once the effect of the local anaesthesia faded, the pain was almost unbearable. After a rough night, I decided to take it slow yesterday. I feel better today, but look like a hamster - my cheeks are quite swollen. Time to replace the ice pack.

Later today I will be heading off to the sixth Free and Open source Software Developers' European Meeting in Brussels, Belgium. I look forward to the various sessions and meeting with the members of other Open Source projects, especially the folks from the openSUSE team. I hope this meeting allows me to build closer relations to other OSS projects that use or support MySQL in any way.

See you there! After having checked into my hotel tonight, I'll try to find my way to Le Roy d'Espagne to meet with others that arrived today.

Despite the quite scary-looking list of known bugs in this version, I decided to give 10.1b4 a try and downloaded the 5 CD ISO images.

Unfortunately my installation attempt fizzled out quite quickly after the the first reboot - the bootup procedure aborted while trying to initialize the LVM, which I run on top of a Software-RAID. Some research on the Novell Bugzilla revealed that this had been reported already (BUG#152237) - I hope it will be resolved for the next beta version.

I've added this one to the Most Annoying Bugs list now and hope to find a workaround so I can continue the installation. Otherwise I will have to wait for the next beta, as I can't change the disk layout on this system...

As the development of my previous blog software had been discontinued some time ago, I finally bit the bullet and moved to Serendipity now.

The move was actually quite painless and I was even able to import the most recent posts from the old blog (without the comments, unfortunately).

I have created rewrite rules that should redirect to the new RSS feeds, but I'd like to encourage you to subscribe to the new feeds advertised from the blog's front page soon (you could even subscribe to categories then). Thanks!

I've kept the old blog for archiving purposes, but it's no longer possible to post comments there.

Today I sent out the invitations for the first MySQL User Group Meeting in Hamburg on Monday, the 6th of March at 19:00 o'clock. It will take place in the Chinese Restaurant Ni-Hao in Hamburg-Wandsbek. If you would like to attend, please join our mailing list and stay tuned for further info!

I just stumbled over this little helper (written by Christopher Brown-Floyd), which allows you to search the MySQL manual by entering a search term in the web search bar. Neat!

This is too funny. I decided to do some housekeeping on my Thinkpad T42 Laptop and checked the installed driver and firmware versions against the latest updates available from the Thinkpad web pages.

Currently, my Laptop's BIOS version is 3.12 (latest version available: 3.19), the Embedded Controller is at version 3.03 (latest version available: 3.04).

The BIOS README tells me:

- This BIOS version will only work with Embedded Controller Program
  Version 3.04 (or higher). Please obtain the additional package,
  Embedded Controller Program Version 3.04 (or higher),
  and update Embedded Controller Program in the system with it.
- If you need to update Embedded Controller Program as well as the BIOS,
  update the BIOS first.

OK, so I guess I need to update the Embedded Controller Firmware first. However, the README for the Controller Update tells me:

- This version of Embedded Controller Program will only work with BIOS
  Version 3.13 (or higher). Please obtain the additional package, BIOS
  Version 3.13 (or higher), and update the BIOS in the system with it.
- If you need to update the BIOS as well as the Embedded Controller
  Program, update Embedded Controller Program first.

I think it's time to make use of my extended service contract and call their hotline. Or do I really have to update the BIOS from 3.12 to 3.13 first, then update the embedded controller to 3.04 before I can apply the latest BIOS update to 3.19? This is insane.

Congratulations to Justin and Roger for getting the book out and published! I helped tech editing a few chapters (which looked very promising) and I am looking forward to the complete works. Good job, guys!

Arjen already mentioned this in December, but let me remind you anway: we would like to showcase some Open Source projects that use or support MySQL in the MySQL Community Pavilion at our MySQL User Conference 2006 in Santa Clara, California.

So if you are a member of a project that utilizes MySQL in a cool way, here is your chance to show off!

Repeating Arjen's words here: Primarily, we would like to hear from projects which are not backed/run by a company, because companies of course already have the opportunity to become a sponsor/exhibitor.

Also, note that the conference is in Santa Clara, California - while we can provide space, we are unable to fund everybody's travel/accomodation costs. So if you are overseas and unable to make it, perhaps someone else more local who also works on the project can come...

Anyway, send message to community at our main domain name, subject "MySQL UC2006 Community Pavilion" telling us the name of your project, a description of the project, website URL, other relevant details, who is involved, and which people would actually be coming to the conference (and their email addresses). Someone from the community department (probably Colin) will collect all the info so we can plan from there.