FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on February, 24th & 25th. I went there last year and really had a great time. This year, I submitted a proposal for a lightning talk, which has been accepted! I've just been informed that the lightning talk schedule is now published. My talk "What's new at MySQL AB" will be on Saturday, at 17:00. I look forward to being there!
MySQL++ is a C++ wrapper for MySQL's C API. It is built around STL principles, to make dealing with the database as easy as dealing with an STL container. MySQL++ relieves the programmer of dealing with cumbersome C data structures, generation of repetitive SQL statements, and manual creation of C++ data structures to mirror the database schema
For this release I'd like to especially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project, who contributed another batch of useful changes and informed me that mylvmbackup is now in productive use to perform backups of the MySQL databases that power the project's Bugzilla bug tracking system. I am always glad to read about such use cases - how do you utilize mylvmbackup in your environment?
After a longer pause I finally had a moment to work on my packages in the openSUSE Build Service. I now added RPMs for the Google Performance Tools and enabled building on openSUSE 10.2. From the perftools project page:
Perf Tools is a collection of a high-performance multi-threaded malloc() implementation, plus some pretty nifty performance analysis tools.
I hope you will find them useful. It would be interesting to see, if a KDE desktop linked against tcmalloc() is significantly faster than using the default glibc malloc()...
I am happy to announce version 0.3 of mylvmbackup, a tool that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.
Special thanks go to Fred Blaise, who contributed the majority of the new features that have been added to this new release:
tar zxvf lt_hotswap-0.3.6.tar.gz
cd lt_hotswap-0.3.6
make
sudo make install
sudo rcacpid restart
modprobe lt_hotswap
You need to have the kernel-source package installed, as well as the gcc compiler, of course. Now when I eject the little lever that allows me to pull out the CD-ROM drive from the UltraBay, the following message appears in /var/log/messages:
lt_hotswap: Requesting IDE eject!
lt_hotswap: Attempting to eject
Now the CD-ROM drive can be safely pulled from the UltraBay and e.g. exchanged with an additional battery. Inserting the battery yields the following kernel message:
kernel: ACPI: Battery Slot [BAT1] (battery present)
The battery info also appears in /proc/acpi/battery and is fully operational. Unfortunately battery monitoring tools like KPowersave or gkrellm don't display the second battery, but at least the kernel is happily using it. I can remove the battery again, but this event does not seem to get registered properly - the second battery remains visible in /proc/acpi/battery, but shows zero capacity and the "present" state does not change. But at least replacing the CD-ROM drive with the battery now workes fine, which was my major concern. And it is still possible to re-insert the CD-ROM drive again:
kernel: ide1: BM-DMA at 0x1868-0x186f, BIOS settings: hdc:pio, hdd:pio
kernel: Probing IDE interface ide1...
kernel: hdc: HL-DT-STCD-RW/DVD DRIVE GCC-4242N, ATAPI CD/DVD-ROM drive
kernel: ide1 at 0x170-0x177,0x376 on irq 15
kernel: hdc: ATAPI 24X DVD-ROM CD-R/RW drive, 2048kB Cache, UDMA(33)
If you want to enable the lt_hotswap module at bootup, you need to add its name to the MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT variable in the /etc/sysconfig/kernel configuration file.
If your Laptop uses an external docking station to host a CD-ROM drive, there are some good news for you: according to Andreas Jaeger's blog, the upcoming openSUSE 10.2 will actually provide a generic Dockutils framework that will support docking/undocking functionality for different laptops and vendors. It will be interesting to find out if this covers UltraBay devices as well.
I am happy to announce that version 0.2 of the mylvmbackup tool is now available!
mylvmbackup is a Perl script for quickly performing backups of a MySQL server's databases using the Linux Logical Volume Manager (LVM). It creates a consistent LVM snapshot of the server's data directory which is then backed up without further blocking the server's operation.
After version 0.1 was published in May this year, I did not really get much feedback about it. I had some ideas for improvements (see the TODO file included in the package), but never got around to actually start working on them.
Thanks to Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing a number of new options and features as well as some code cleanups. His changes motivated me to make a few more modifications and improvements by myself, which have now been rolled into a new release.
The new options provide some more flexibility in the way the script handles the logical volumes and how the backup files are being created. I also overhauled the building and packaging and added a Makefile to automate these procedures. For details, please refer to the ChangeLog and check the manual page and the README for additional info.
A tarball and RPM of version 0.2 can now be downloaded from the project page.
The SVN repository can now be browsed using WebSVN as well.
Please give it a try! Your feedback is very welcome.
In other words, the license exception allows the distribution of a derived work including the MySQL Client Libraries under a number of OSI-approved Open Source Licenses. This allows a broader range of (non-GPL) Open Source applications to link against the MySQL Client libraries. In essence, it makes the GPL less restrictive.We want specified Free/Libre and Open Source Software ("FLOSS") applications to be able to use specified GPL-licensed MySQL client libraries (the "Program") despite the fact that not all FLOSS licenses are compatible with version 2 of the GNU General Public License (the "GPL").
To make it easier for external developers in getting familiar with the code base of the respective project, we now installed the FishEye SVN repository browser, which provides a very nice interface to the hosted repositories and boasts an impressive number of additional features like searching, diffing and RSS feeds.
This will hopefully encourage more developers to participate and contribute to these projects. FishEye will also make it more convenient for our own developers to work with their SVN repositories and should soon become a valuable tool for us.
The session grid contains a number of talks related to MySQL:
After the presentation we walked over to a local turkish restaurant to have some dinner and chitchat. There I met with Lars, who moved to Hamburg recently. We had a good time and discussed a wide variety of subjects. Thanks to Dirk for arranging this meeting! I look forward to the next one, which will take place on September 14th and will cover the "Service Management Facility" from Sun Solaris 10.
I hope none of these are already maintained somewhere else, this is something I still haven't figured out - how can I search the existing projects for certain packages?
The Build Service totally rocks, especially since it can be conveniently used from the command line as well. I submitted my first two packages via the web frontend, but have now switched to using the osc command line tool exclusively. Kudos to the openSUSE Build Service Team, building packages on other platforms has never been that easy!
