Linux

Now that MySQL 5.1 has finally been labeled and released as "GA", we have noticed quite a significant increase in the download numbers for 5.1. I find this quite promising, despite the comments from some people that suggested to stay away from it for now. I performed updates of 5.0 to 5.1 several times already, and did not observe any serious problem so far. But then again, I am by no means a power user, so your mileage may vary...

I assume that many of the users are already using some older versions of MySQL and will have to perform an upgrade from the previous version to the new one. As many things have been changed and improved between 5.0 and 5.1, an upgrade needs to be planned carefully. The MySQL reference manual has an entire chapter devoted to this subject. The best general advice is probably to create a backup of your data first before attempting to upgrade!

I performed an upgrade test on an openSUSE 11.0 system that was running on the MySQL version shipped with the distribution (5.0.51a). I first loaded it with some databases that I copied from other live systems (via SQL dumps). Then I grabbed the Server, Client and shared library RPMs the "Linux x86 generic RPM (dynamically linked)" section of the 5.1 downloads page and installed them with rpm -Uhv MySQL-server-5.1.30-0.glibc23.i386.rpm MySQL-client-5.1.30-0.glibc23.i386.rpm MySQL-shared-5.1.30-0.glibc23.i386.rpm. The packages were installed without a hitch and properly replaced the existing 5.0 packages (even though they use different package names). I then restarted the server and ran mysql_upgrade afterwards.

Success! I was pretty impressed how smooth this upgrade was performed. So far, I did not notice any regression or incompatibility. But I would be interested in hearing stories and comments from other users about their upgrade experiences!

So here are some questions I would like you to answer — I would appreciate your feedback either via this blog or by email to firstname at sun dot com:

• What are your expectations and most important requirements for performing MySQL upgrades?
• Have you upgraded to MySQL 5.1 yet?
• If not, why not?
• If yes, what was your upgrade experience like? Any serious issues or problems? What platform and package format did you use?
• Did you use the documentation in our reference manual to perform the update? Was it helpful? What could be improved?
• Do you have any other comments/suggestions on the topic of upgrading MySQL?

I am looking forward to your comments. Thanks and Happy Holidays!

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

The FOSDEM 2009 organizers have been very kind to us this year: in addition to a Developer Room on Sunday, we now also have a project desk (1 table) on both days! Thank you very much! In summary, this means that there will be the following MySQL-related activities:

• We will have a Project Stand (one table) on both days
• On Sunday, we will have a MySQL Developer Room, allowing us to schedule our own track of talks about MySQL and related projects
• I have been invited to give a talk about "MySQL High Availability Solutions" in the main conference track
• I also submitted two proposals for lightning talks ("What's new in MySQL 5.1" and "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project") (pending approval)

In addition to employees from Sun/MySQL, we would also like to encourage and invite members of the MySQL Community to contribute to making the MySQL project's presence a success. We are looking for your support and contribution! Here is how you can help:

Give a talk about MySQL in the developer room

The MySQL Developer Room will be open on Sunday, 8th of February, from 9:00-17:00. We would like to set up a schedule of talks related to MySQL. As the audience will mostly be developers and DBAs, we are looking for in-depth technical sessions about the MySQL Server and related projects/tools (e.g Cluster, Proxy, Connectors, etc.). Each session will last for 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes of Q&A.

If you would be interested in giving a talk, please submit your proposal via this page now! The deadline for proposing a talk is January 15th, 2009. We look forward to your submission!

After the call for papers has been closed, we will comment and vote on all proposals and will get back to you about further details!

Record/transcribe sessions

For people that could not make it to FOSDEM or some of the sessions, it would be nice to be able to provide video recordings or transcriptions (e.g. live blogging) from these talks. We're looking for volunteers to record the sessions! If you have a video camera or are an expert blogger, we'd like to hear from you.

Help us manning the project stand

We are also looking for MySQL users that are willing and excited to talk about MySQL to other people and would like to assist us with manning our project desk. Your task would be to be present at the project table, talk with other users and developers about all things MySQL, hand out merchandise (in case we get some) and marketing material as well as providing them with additional useful information (e.g. links to further information, contact information).

So if you are a MySQL enthusiast and plan to attend FOSDEM, consider sparing at least two hours and join us to man the table! I've set up a quick registration form in which you can leave your name, contact information and times you would be available. We will then get back to you about further details. Thank you!

Contact / Mailing list

To facilitate the organization and for further discussion, please join our public Community mailing list! I've also set up a Wiki page on the MySQL Forge to track and document our FOSDEM 2009 activities. I am looking forward to your feedback and suggestions!

Some days ago, I released version 0.11 of mylvmbackup a Perl script that performs consistent backups of a MySQL server by using LVM filesystem snapshots. The source archive as well as a generic RPM can be found on the project home page, packages for many Linux distributions are available on the openSUSE Build service.

This release includes some new functionality as well as numerous bug fixes and improvements, most notably:

• Added support for using rsnap as a backup backend (Matt Lohier)
• The documentation is now maintained in POD style instead of asciidoc (Matthew Boehm)
• Support using non-GNU tar and additional compression methods (e.g. bzip2, lzma) (Alexander Skwar)
• Code cleanups, improved error handling and logging

I would like to thank all the contributors for their support! More details about the changes in this release, directly from the ChangeLog:

• Added new option "--quiet" that suppresses informal logging output (warnings and errors will still be printed/logged)
• Applied patch from "kjetilho" that makes mylvmbackup more robust and paranoid when it comes to handling errors/failures (Bug #298175) Now the script aborts cleanly in case of any error.
• Fixed error handling in case of a failed DB connection (patch submitted by Matthew Boehm, Bug #280989)
• Merged changes from Alexander Skwar: Fix for Bug #278478 and implemented Blueprint "Improve the tar backup backend of mylvmbackup"
• Fixed Bug #271671: "overloading parameters does not work" by removing the default values for host and port from the configuration file and removing the unnecessary check for passing both host and socket at the same time. Updated documentation and configuration file comments accordingly.
• Applied patch suggested by "Jonas" to fix Bug #267944: "backup returns successfully when snapshot creation fails"
• Code cleanup: moved flushing of tables in a separate subroutine flush_tables()
• Code cleanup: moved log messages into the respective subroutines
• Code cleanup: use return values of subroutines instead of updating global variables
• Improved some log messages to explain what was DONE or FAILED
• Code cleanup: build up long command strings in a $command variable before passing it to system()
• Renamed subroutine create_snapshot() to create_lvm_snapshot()
• Merged patch from Matthew Boehm: Removed old asciidoc documentation in favor of POD style. This removes the dependency on the external program a2x for creating documentation and uses the 'built-in' pod2html and pod2man instead. Updated the Makefile to accommodate the change.
• Applied patch from Matthew Boehm to make the backup file name suffix configurable via a "--suffix" option. Updated the man page accordingly.
• Applied patch from Matt Lohier to support rsnap as a backup backend 
• Moved the list of contributors from the man page into a separate CREDITS file, added missing names

Enjoy!

FOSDEM 2009, one of the biggest European Open Source conferences, will take place on February 7-8 in Brussels, Belgium. Today I received a confirmation from the organizers: MySQL will have a developer room on Sunday, the 8th! This is very cool.

My idea was to organize some kind of MySQL mini-conference, with a focus on developers and DBAs. I am going to send out a more formal CfP soon, but if you have any ideas or suggestions for a talks/sessions already, please get in touch with me!

In addition to the devroom, I have also been invited to give a talk about MySQL High Availability solutions in the conference main track. In this talk I plan to cover some commonly used HA setups for MySQL, including the OSS components/tools (for Linux and OpenSolaris) involved. I will mention MySQL Cluster as well, explaining the relationship and architecture of MySQL Server and NDB Cluster. I hope this will be of interest to the audience.

I also submitted two lightning talk proposals: "New features in MySQL 5.1" and one about "Why you should use Bazaar for maintaining your OSS project", but I won't know if these were accepted until the end of December...

See you there!