Monday, April 28. 2008
 This article describes how to install the Drupal 6.2 CMS on MySQL 6.0, using the Falcon Storage Engine. The operating system is a default Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" (x86) installation.
I will make a few assumptions here, in order to keep the instructions simple: a fresh OS install, no other MySQL databases or web services are running or have already been installed. Both MySQL and the web server are installed on the same host. You should be able to become root to install packages and to have access to the local file system and the system configuration.
This article will explain how to install and configure Apache/PHP, MySQL 6.0 and Drupal 6.2.
Continue reading "Running Drupal 6 on MySQL 6 using the Falcon Storage Engine"
Friday, April 25. 2008
While being subscribed to the full blogs.sun.com feed certainly feels like drinking water from a firehose, every once in a while I stumble over very well-written and useful articles about MySQL. Below is a collection of helpful posts, especially if you run MySQL on Solaris (surprise!). And while I still am an avid Linux user, I must admit that Solaris has a few neat features - particularly DTrace and ZFS are quite intriguing. If only userland would not feel so weird for someone coming from a GNU/Linux background!
From Jenny Chen's blog:
From Ritu Kamboj's blog:
From Krish Shankar's Blog:
More to come in the near future!
KAs during last year's MySQL Conference, we invited Julian Cash to take pictures of some attendees. I managed to get my picture taken in last second - the hotel staff was already complaining that they need to redecorate the room for the next event...
The results of this foto session are now on Julian's photo stream on Flickr - I am really impressed by the results! This puts a whole new meaning to the term "MySQL Luminaries" 
Kaj's pictures are pretty funny, too - is this an interpretation of "MySQL Community" vs. "MySQL Enterprise"?
 
Thursday, April 24. 2008
JFYI, I now placed a PDF of my MySQL Conference talk slides about "Performing MySQL backups using Linux LVM Snapshots" on my MySQL talks page. Enjoy!
Wednesday, April 16. 2008
While reading Colin's post about LugRadio Live, I stumbled over the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Going through the project home page and their HOWTO got me curious - could this eventually become an alternative to using DRBD (for replicating data) and LVM snapshots (for performing backups)?
Zumastor is Free software that adds enterprise storage features (primarily improved snapshots and remote replication) to Linux.
Snapshots
LVM already lets administrators create snapshots, but its design has the surprising property that every block you change on the original volume consumes one block for each snapshot. The resulting speed and space penalty usually makes the use of more than one or two snapshots at a time impractical.
Zumastor keeps all snapshots for a particular volume in a common snapshot store, and shares blocks the way one would expect. Thus making a change to one block of a file in the original volume only uses one block in the snapshot store no matter how many snapshots you have.
Replication
Andrew Tridgell's rsync is a wonderful tool for replicating files remotely. However, when doing periodic replication of large numbers of infrequently changing files, the overhead for figuring out what files need to be sent can be extreme.
Zumastor keeps track of which block change between one snapshot and the next, and can easily send just the changed blocks. Thus Zumastor can do frequent replication of large filesystems much more efficiently than rsync can.
I assume it's not ready for production use yet, but it would sure be interesting to investigate on how to utilize it for the purpose of running MySQL on top of it...
I will keep an eye on this project, I wonder if I will have to add support for Zumastor snapshots to mylvmbackup at some point?
FYI, I changed two parameters on Planet MySQL to accomodate the current flood of postings coming from the MySQL Conference attendees: we now display the last 25 posts (instead of 10) on the front page, the RSS feed now includes the latest 100 posts (instead of 50). This should make sure that posts actually make it to the front page for at least some time, before they fall off again.
Please keep up the good blogging!
Monday, April 14. 2008
I made it to the US safely, even though I almost missed my connecting flight in Heathrow (even my luggage made it, hooray!). I reached the Hotel just in time to directly head off to the traditional pre-conference party at Mårten's house. However, we just stayed there shortly (barely long enough to say hi to everybody) and then headed to the MySQL pre-conference dinner (organized by Arjen). It was nice meeting such a large number of the key MySQL community people in one place! I was especially surprised about the presence of Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green - this added a nice touch!
Today I am attending Stewart's tutorial session about MySQL Cluster. So far it has been quite entertaining and informative! We'll continue with hands-on excercises on setting up a cluster configuration on the attendees' laptops after the lunch break.
I have uploaded pictures from yesterday and this morning to my foto set on flickr (which I will also post to the MySQL Conference 08 Flickr group) and will try to continue doing so for the rest of the conference. Enjoy!
Friday, April 11. 2008
I am happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.8. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.
Below is the list of changes since version 0.6. You may wonder what happened to version 0.7 - it had a rather short life cycle as I was informed about a bug that I fixed quickly before I made a wider release announcement of 0.7.
- Fixed a bug in the InnoDB recovery function: the second mysqld process clobbered the socket file of the primary MySQL instance (thanks to Alain Hoang for reporting this)
- Updated the man page, noted some other limitations of the InnoDB recovery function
- Bug fix: use the correct mysqld parameter to provide an alternative PID file (--pid-file instead of --pidfile) - thanks to Guillaume Boddaert and Jim Wilson for reporting this!
- Added option "--skip_mycnf" to skip including a copy of the MySQL configuration file in the backup, added a safety check that the file actually exists prior to backing it up.
Updated package are available from the home page and via the openSUSE Build Service as usual. Updated packages for Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux should also be available shortly. Enjoy!
Speaking of LVM snapshot backups: I will be giving a talk about this subject at our MySQL Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, CA next week. If you are curious about how MySQL can be backed up using this technology, please consider to stop by!
Friday, April 4. 2008
 I recently was interviewed by Packt Publishing for their Impackt '08 web pages:
Ever since the formal adoption of the term in 1998, Open Source has experienced growth and adoption rates that defy pressures and suggestions that it’s a viable option for enthusiasts and geeks only. Governments, corporations as well as small businesses have begun to choose Open Source over proprietary software. However, with the global economy facing an uncertain future, how will open source be impacted? Can it continue to grow despite this?
With these questions in mind and more, Packt approached some people at the heart of this movement to understand their take on the future of open source.
The interview has now been published. Enjoy!
A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:
PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.
We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:
- Voting on articles/blog postings: it must be possible for logged in users to cast a vote on articles, similar to the Perlmonks.org voting system. This would allow providing different RSS feeds, e.g. only articles that have a certain rating and rankings for articles and authors. Positive votes accumulate and increase the "karma" value of the individual author as well as identifying the quality of a particular posting.
- Archiving/Tagging/Searching: it must be possible to add tags to the aggregated blog postings, to ease the searching of older articles and to facilitate the creation up of a searchable "Community Knowledgebase"
- Authentication: User logins must use the same username/password pair as MySQLForge and the rest of the mysql.com web site (to reduce duplication and allow better integration with other parts of MySQL Forge, e.g. the user profile page)
- Optionally, it should be possible to comment/discuss on the aggregated articles directly on the new PlanetMySQL site. These comments should be sent back to the original blog via Trackbacks (if applicable)
- It should be possible to group feeds from multiple, different authors as a "Team Feed", to allow rankings by Team/Group in addition to the ranking of individuals
- The site must provide Unicode support to allow the handling of postings in multiple languages (e.g. Japanese, Chinese)
- New feed submissions should not be subscribed automatically, but rather should be reviewed by a moderation team first (to avoid spam and off-topic feeds)
The implementor should first make an assessment if these new functions should be developed on top of the existing code base, or if it would make sense to rebuild the existing functionality plus the new features on top of an existing PHP Framework (e.g. Drupal, Silverstripe, Symfony or similar). Making use of Web2.0 techniques (AJAX) is encouraged, if it makes the site easier to use and visually appealing.
Please contact me directly (firstname at MySQL.com) or the mailing list, if you are interested in working on this task. Thanks!
Wednesday, April 2. 2008
A gentle reminder: next week, there will be two more stops of the MySQL Meetup Mashup Tour:
- Monday, April 7th, 19:00: Hamburg, Germany. We will meet in the meeting rooms of the local Sun Microsystems offices ( Nagelsweg 55, 22097 Hamburg). There will be two technical sessions: Giuseppe will talk about the MySQL Sandbox, Kay Koll will give a presentation about how to combine MySQL with OpenOffice.org. He will also describe the new report generator and give an overview over the future of OpenOffice. You can register for this event via meetup.com or Xing.com.
- Tuesday, April 8th, 17:00: Berlin, Germany. This event will take place in the rooms of the Berlin offices of Sun Microsystems (Komturstrasse 18a, 12099 Berlin). This time, Giuseppe will talk about MySQL as an open platform, Kristian Köhntopp will share a few hints he gathered while doing consulting work at customer sites. Please use Xing.com to register for this event.
At both events, colleagues from Sun and MySQL will be present to answer questions and discuss the acquisition of MySQL by Sun and all things Open Source. There will be free drinks and food as well!
We look forward to welcome users from the various related Sun products/projects, e.g. OpenOffice, Java, OpenSolaris, Glassfish or Netbeans. There is so much opportunity for collaboration and exchange of experience - I am very excited to be at both meetings to meet and talk with people from these communities. See you there!
|
