Robin just wrote a new article, titled A Quick Look at MySQL 6.0’s New Backup, and I thought, that maybe you’d like to also see this in presentation/video format…
At OSCON, Giuseppe actually gave a quick talk at the Sun booth, about our online backup. He also showed how to use it. All examples there, were done with the test-db sample database.
(MySQL Online Backup in Practice, video if the above doesn’t appear)
Malaysian Airlines has impressed me, yet again. Last week, in The Star, they reported that Sharul Isahak, a MAS employee, has helped save the airlines close to RM70 million (about USD$21 million), thanks to his use of open source software.
The software is meant to help airline maintenance, i.e. to keep track of parts and records of maintenance works. The web-based solution, is E-Promis (read the blog entry, its pretty interesting, as he takes you through the planning stages - it also seems like he’s still the only developer).
“This meant looking at open-source solutions. Instead of platforms such as Microsoft or Sun, we chose LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)”
I couldn’t help but grin inside, a little. After all, Sun do own the M in LAMP ;-)
Next up, wonder if they will open source it, ala MyMeeting? After all, MAS services AirAsia and JetStar planes, I wonder who else will benefit from such software.
Excited with the release of the MySQL Connector/C++, I thought I’d get it going on Mac OS X.
You’ll first hit the problem that Mac OS X doesn’t come with CMake. So you’ll have to download it from the site - there’s a warning there that the .dmg installer only works for Tiger, but I ran it on Leopard, and its just fine. Don’t forget to allow it to create links in /usr/bin for ease of use.
After that, you will need to install glib. But to get glib going, you need some dependencies:
Installing them is simple: untar (tar -zxvpf package.tar.gz), ./configure, make, then a sudo make install.
Now, the README file or the instructions on the wiki will just work. I have several MySQL installations, so I preferred to specify what cmake found. I did this by:
cmake -D MYSQL_DIR:PATH=/usr/local/mysql/ -D GLIB_DIR:PATH=/usr/local/lib/glib-2.0/ .
Then a simple make, and you can go on and try the examples, in examples/. Try the connect application to make sure things are working. You will probably run into a snag though:
luna:examples ccharles$ ./connect
Connector/C++ connect basic usage example..
ERR: MySQL_DbcException in /Users/ccharles/code/mysql_connector_cpp_1_0_0_preview/examples/connect.cpp((function n/a)) on line 159
ERR: Cannot connect (MySQL error code: 0 )
Take a look at examples/examples.h, and look at the connection properties. It uses the test database, on localhost (127.0.0.1), standard port 3306, user is root, and the default password set there is root too. This may not be the commonest setting, so don’t hesitate to change the password or leave it blank (ala a default install), and rerun make. The sample applications will now work :)
Congratulations to Andrey, Ulf, and the rest of the connectors team in getting this going!
Michael Widenius, commonly referred to as Monty, gave a very interesting talk on Maria at OSCON 2008. He not only had a talk in the main session, that was well attended, titled Architecture of Maria, the New Transactional Storage Engine for MySQL (slides are available in ODP there), he also gave one at the Sun booth, where we were running our own little “unconference”.
For those reading this in a feed reader, there’s a 23 minute video of Monty telling us more about Maria, a bit about its motivations, architecture, and where the team is at now. If you’re interested in grabbing the code, check out the MySQL + Maria Storage Engine branch on Launchpad.
Whether an online comic, or not, the New Straits Times is one of the three English dailies, that still cost some amount of money in Malaysia. Their Computimes pullout, now better known as Tech&U, featured Raj Kissu, a Summer of Code 2008 participant for MySQL. While the article itself, fails to mention MySQL, he describes what he’s working on:
I’m doing a project on binary large objects in database. Basically, it is aimed at allowing people to file or stream files online. The program is based on open source.
Kudos to Raj, kudos to Google, kudos to phpMyAdmin, and kudos to MySQL. As for the reporter, as usual, old medium journalism tends to be somewhat of a fail….
Brian Aker was at the Sun booth today, in a premier slot, where there must have been about 50-60 people, huddled around, to listen to him talk about Drizzle. The project motivations, what’s behind it, what its not aimed to be, and so much more. Check the video out (21 minutes long)!
The Birds of a Feather (BoF) session in the night, was well attended, and there was lots of large discussion on what’s next. I think the important message to take away is that Drizzle doesn’t aim to be MySQL, and there are no plans to “merge” things back (fixes where the code-base is shared though, might make sense). Its also important that the design is for the future, i.e. multi-core machines. It was great to see Brian say that this really leverages Sun in many ways.
Its worth noting that Sheeri was at the lightning talk, and has a shorter, 8 minute video recording too.
Update: s/nothing/noting
We were at the Sun+Zend party last night, and it was a blast (thank you Jesse Silver!). If you’re a PostgreSQL or MySQL user/developer or just a general database geek, you should’ve been there. Why?
(watch the video if its stripped in your feed reader)
Monty Widenius (MySQL) and Josh Berkus (PostgreSQL), decided to start sumo wrestling! It ended with a 5-0 score, advantage MySQL.
An attendee Tim Moore twittered: “Postgres is totally losing the sumo match. I’m migrating all of my databases to MySQL tomorrow.”
Monty says, this is what we do to people that leave Sun! In fact, if you didn’t already know, Josh Berkus, my esteemed colleague in the Database Group at Sun Microsystems, is leaving his post as the PostgreSQL Team Lead. We met for the first time, face to face at foss.in last year, and all I can say is I’m truly saddened to see him leave. But thanks to the magic of the open source world, we’ll still be interacting, I’m sure. Good luck Josh! (and better sumo practising next time, mmmkay?)
Silona Bonewald, the lady always in a hat (she says that it’s just become an extension of her). Describe her, by her tags: open government, open data, open standards, and databases.
(watch the video if your feed reader strips it out)
Silona’s the founder of The League of Technical Voters, which allows technical people to be more involved in voting process. As part of this, she created the Transparent Federal Budget, with Bill Bradley and Jimmy Wales.
On top of all that, she’s also the open source evangelist for grid.org. The focus there is a social network for grid, cluster, and cloud computing folk - a community of communities. Best of all, this was just launched on Tuesday!
It’s also the home to UniCluster, and they’ve recently struck a deal which Intel to pop UniCluster in BIOSes. UniCluster works with Sun’s Grid Engine, as well.
She’s interested in Drizzle, for the same reason that she likes Drupal. She likes the decorator model, and she thinks its a great way to get the parallel computing solutions fixed.
Needless to say, all of the stuff she works on currently, is powered by MySQL.