Archive for Октябрь, 2009

MySQL Certified Professionals

Октябрь 31st, 2009
Dave Stokes posted earlier that the official list of MySQL Certified will be going away. There has been a MySQL Certified Professionals LinkedIn group for almost 2 years now. It's community managed by myself and Dave, and is open to all MySQL Certified DBAs & Developers, as well as recruiters & hiring managers.

-- Mark
mark@thetajoin.com
http://www.thetajoin.com - The Drupal Hosting & Performance Company
MySQL DBA & Programming Blog by Mark Schoonover

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Replicating from MySQL to Drizzle and Beyond

Октябрь 31st, 2009
Drizzle is one of the really great pieces of technology to emerge from the MySQL diaspora--a lightweight, scalable, and pluggable database for web applications. I am therefore delighted that Marcus Erikkson has published a patch to Tungsten that allows replication from MySQL to Drizzle. He's also working on implementing Drizzle-to-Drizzle support, which will be very exciting.

Marcus has submitted the patch to us and I have reviewed the code. It's quite supportable, so I plan to integrate it as soon as we are done with our next Tungsten release, which will post around 5 November. You will be able to build and run it using our new community builds.

This brings up a question--what about replicating from MySQL to PostgreSQL? What about other databases? I get the PostgreSQL replication question fairly often but it may be a while before our in-house team can implement plug-in support for it. Anybody want to submit a patch in the meantime? Post in the Tungsten forums if you have ideas and need help to get the work done. Tungsten Replicator code is very modular and it is not hard to add new database support.

Meanwhile, go Marcus!!

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Community Builds for Tungsten Clustering

Октябрь 31st, 2009
It's been almost two months since I have posted anything on the Scale-Out Blog, as our entire team has been heads-down working on Tungsten. We now have a number of accomplishments that are worth writing articles about. Item one on that list is community builds for Tungsten clusters.

Tungsten community builds offer a bone-simple process to check out and build Tungsten clustering software. The result is a fully integrated package that includes replication, management, monitoring, and SQL routing. The community builds work for MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 and also allow you to set up basic replication from MySQL to Oracle.

Community builds do not include much logic for autonomic management, including automated failover and sophisticated rules that keep databases up and running rain or shine. Those and other features like floating IP address support are part of the commercial Tungsten software. PostgreSQL and Oracle-to-Oracle support is also commercial only at least for the time being.

Community builds do include our standard installation process, which allows you to set up a working cluster a few minutes. You can back up and restore datebases, check liveness of cluster members, failover master databases for maintenance and a lot of other handy features. There is also full documentation, located here.

To get started, you need a host running Mac OS X, Linux, or Solaris that meets the following prerequisites. On Linux you can usually satisfy these requirements using Yum or Apt-get if the required software is not already there.
  • Java JDK 1.5 or higher.
  • Ant 1.7.0 or higher for builds
  • Subversion. We use version 1.6.1
  • MySQL 5.0 or 5.1 (only on hosts where cluster is installed)
  • Ruby 1.8.5 or greater (only on hosts where cluster is installed)
Now you can grab the software and do a build. Make a work directory, cd to it, and enter the following commands. (Due to truncation on the blog the SVN URL looks a little funny. Don't be fooled.)
svn checkout \
https://tungsten.svn.sourceforge.net/\
svnroot/tungsten/trunk/community

cd community
./release-community.sh # (Press ENTER when prompted)
The release-community.sh script checks out most of the Tungsten code for you and does a build. IMPORTANT NOTE: The command shown above builds SVN HEAD, which means you may have a life of adventure. You can also build off branches which are more or less stable. Look at the available config files in the community directory.

After the build finishes, you have ready-to-install clustering software. You can scp the resulting tar.gz file out to another host or just cd directly into the build itself as shown below and run the configure script, which sets up Tungsten software on a single host.
cd build/tungsten-community-2009-1.2
./configure
You may need to read the manuals so you get all the answers right. The installation manual is posted here at www.continuent.com. You'll also need to look at the Replication Guide, Chapter 2 to see how to set up MySQL properly. We'll do that automatically in the future, but for now it's help yourself. (Don't worry: the database set-up is easy.)

To make the cluster interesting you should install on at least a couple of hosts. Here's what an installed cluster looks like using the Tungsten cluster control (cctrl) program.
[tungsten@centos5a tungsten-community-2009-1.2]$ tungsten-manager/bin/cctrl
[LOGICAL] /cluster/comm/> ls

COORDINATOR[centos5a:MANUAL]

ROUTERS:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|NONE |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

DATASOURCES:
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|centos5a(master:ONLINE, progress=3) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| REPLICATOR(role=master, state=ONLINE) |
| DATASERVER(state=ONLINE) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
|centos5b(slave:ONLINE, progress=3, latency=0.0) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
| REPLICATOR(role=slave, master=centos5a, state=ONLINE) |
| DATASERVER(state=ONLINE) |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
Starting from scratch and pulling code from SourceForge, it takes me about 30 minutes to get to an installed cluster with two nodes. At this point you have access to a very powerful set of tools to protect data, keep your databases available, and scale performance. Look at the manuals. Try it out. If you have questions or feedback, post them in the Tungsten forums. In the meantime, have fun with your database cluster.

p.s., We will post binary builds next week. The current build is in final release checks, so you may notice a few problems--I hit a Ruby warning on configuration that will be fixed shortly.

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Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010

Октябрь 31st, 2009
Gartner has released a few days ago the Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2010 list. Here you can see the wordle cloud:




While I don't want to spend time talking about  the usual suspects (Cloud, Green, Mobile and Virtualization) I wish to share my thoughts on two topics: Advanced Analytics and Reshaping the Data Center.

Advanced Analytics  
I'm not surprised that a branch of Business Intelligence is still in the list after years of top priority amongst CIOs. Business Intelligence is one of the fields that I love and it's promise is to transform in gold everything it touches, like King Midas. Why is this still on the list? Has something changed in these years?
There are good news. Open Source Software is changing the competitive landscape allowing CIOs, BI Managers and End Users to gather deep insight into business data at a fraction of the cost. I'd like to mention some of the most interesting technologies in the Open Source ecosystem:
  • MySQL - This is my favourite! ;) 
  • Infobright - A leading columnar storage engine for MySQL;
  • Pentaho - End to End Business Intelligence Suite;
  • Jaspersoft - Open Source Business Intelligence Suite;
  • Talend - Open Source ETL/Data Integration Suite;
This list is partial, but it witness the vitality of Open Source into this particular field. And with this I'll move to the next topic.

Reshaping the Data Center
Gartners is clearly saying: "Dear CIOs, IT Architects and CTOs: your datacenter has been designed twenty years ago... it's time to change."
As MySQL we've promoted a scale-out approach and reading through the lines of Gartner's research it seems that this has proved to be a sound strategy to reduce costs in time of economical crisis.

In conclusion I think that nowadays we cannot avoid to include an Open Source strategy in our plans for the future, whilst not excluding a mix of all the emerging technologies, like Cloud and Virtualization.

Regards,
Luca





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MariaDB 5.1 packages for Debian/Ubuntu

Октябрь 31st, 2009

See the OurDelta blog for details of this release. RHEL/CentOS packages also coming.


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MariaDB 5.1 packages for Debian and Ubuntu

Октябрь 31st, 2009

You can now apt-get your way to MariaDB 5.1, courtesy of OurDelta and in close cooperation with Monty Program Ab. To get started, simple follow the info on the Debian and Ubuntu pages.

Quick overview

  • For MariaDB we use different repository directories to ensure that you can’t accidentally upgrade or revert major versions without you explicitly choosing to do so.
  • At this point we have Ubuntu Hardy, Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic for you, as well as Debian 4 (Lenny). Etch (Debian 4) is waiting on a small fix (thanks to Antony Curtis for helping with that).
  • The package names start with mariadb*, except for mysql-common which has a hard dependency elsewhere in the Debian/Ubuntu environment.
  • The binaries and directories are generally called mysql* although there are some Maria engine command line tools as well.
  • Apart from possible build glitches and bugs, this is a drop-in replacement for stock MySQL 5.1
  • If you are upgrading from 5.0, please review the upgrade information first before diving in.
  • The packages take care of backward compatibility with the older .so.15 client library (5.1 has .so.16)
  • MariaDB includes these new/replacement storage engines: XtraDB (the enhanced InnoDB plugin, by Percona) and PBXT (by Primebase Technologies).
  • Monty has merged/rewritten the microslow patch, so (most of) the detail/filtering you’ve become used to from the 5.0 OurDelta builds are there. All the Percona InnoDB patches are of course in the XtraDB plugin.
  • For Debian/Ubuntu, you will find a nice baseline my.cnf that, among other sane settings, defaults to InnoDB and strict mode by default - just like the Windows config wizard has done for a few years already.
  • The GRAPH computation engine didn’t quite make this build, but if you’d like us to build the plugin library for you for any of these distros/architectures, just ask. For DIY, you can just grab the exact source tarball we used to build the MariaDB packages, compile the plugin against it from the launchpad repo and copy the .so library to the plugin directory. Instructions are in the docs and the engine/INSTALL file.

Lots more to tell, but that would make it not be a quick overview ;-)

Please enjoy, and if you encounter any problems, file bugs with OurDelta or MariaDB. Don’t worry about picking the right project, if you get it wrong Launchpad lets us toss it across, and some bugs actually require fixes on both ends so they get attached to both!


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Kontrollbase feature add timeline for 2.0.2 release – vote now!

Октябрь 31st, 2009
So we have gone through over 200 revisions for Kontrollbase version 2.0.1 and the team is internally discussing which new features and current open tickets should be added and/or addressed for the 2.0.2 milestone release. Here is your chance to push your ideas and wants into the next major release. So, before shooting off [...]
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Data type confusion: what is an int(11)?

Октябрь 31st, 2009
Over and over I see customers that don't understand what int(11) really means. Their confusion is understandable. Many know what defining a char(10) means (a fixed-sized character string that allows up to 10 characters). However, ints are different.

First of all, there are 5 types of integer. They are all fixed size.
Type # of bytes
tinyint 1
smallint 2
mediumint 3
int 4
bigint 8

As you can see from the chart, an int is always 4 bytes. That can store signed numbers from -2 billion to +2 billion (and unsigned numbers 0 to 4B). So, what does it mean if you declare an int(5)? It does not restrict the number of digits to 5... It may actually do nothing! The (5) part is a display width. It's only used if you use UNSIGNED and ZEROFILL with an integer type. Then the display of those numbers will be zero-padded on the left to 5 digits if they contain less than 5 digits. Example:


CREATE TABLE `foo` (
`bar` int(5) unsigned zerofill DEFAULT NULL
)

 SELECT * FROM foo;
+---------+
| bar |
+---------+
| 00042 |
| 00101 |
| 9876543 |
+---------+

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Kontrollbase 2.0.1 revision-206 available in all formats

Октябрь 31st, 2009
End of the week notice to let everyone know that Kontrollbase 2.0.1 revision 206 is now available for download. Effectively the same issues have been addressed as in the previous post about rev-205 but now you don’t have to use subversion as the tar.gz file is available. As usual you can find the download here: [...]
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CAOS Theory Podcast 2009.10.30

Октябрь 31st, 2009

Topics for this podcast:

*-DoD memo and official use and consideration of open source
*EnterpriseDB updates its Postgres Plus Server, gets Red Hat investment
*Latest in Linux from Canonical’s Ubuntu and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Deltacloud
*Roundup of Oracle-Sun-MySQL developments and perspectives

iTunes or direct download (25:30, 5.8 MB)


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