Colin Charles Agenda

Its no secret that all the MySQL Sun Database Group developers are here in Riga, Latvia for the developer’s meeting. I have my video camera on hand, and plan to conduct bite-sized interviews.

But that’s not why I’m writing this. This is for you. Since you can’t be here, is there something you’d like to ask a MySQL developer with regards to a bug you filed? A new feature request? A worklog item?

Write a comment, or drop me email at colin[at]mysql[dot]com. Be quick though, as the Q&A sessions I imagine, will be fairly impromptu.

Sun is a huge company. So it comes as no surprise that I’m finding out about Project Kenai via Tim Bray, instead of some internal mailing list (believe me, there must be thousands).

Tim’s got a Q&A with Nick Sieger, who’s one of the chieftains behind Kenai. I find it amusing that the comparison is made against Google Code and GitHub – has SourceForge hit irrelevancy? I’m surprised Launchpad isn’t mentioned.

Very Cover Flow like UI, with slider, etc. That’s Elliot Murphy, ex-Dolphin, current Ubuntero in the pic above

Nick goes on to say “We need a place to nurture and grow our open source communities that we ourselves can control” – can control. Control is a loaded word, no? Especially in the land of open source.

The architecture is such that they’re on Sun servers (SPARC based), using GlassFish, Apache, Memcache and a single MySQL 5.0.45 database server (I’m guessing there’s a maximum storage of 146GB because they’re using SAS disks – they will implement replication soon). It seems they’re currently on 32-bit MySQL – they’re getting less than 10% CPU usage, and the query cache is working well for them (98% hit ratio). If graphs, et al turn you on, look at the slides from Fernando Castano, Achieving High Throughput and Scalability with JRuby on Rails.

Its interesting to see the mix of software offered – Mercurial and Subversion (for project hosting – there be choice, unlike the other services out there), Sympa (as opposed to common Mailman), and Bugzilla as the bug tracker. Oh, its built on Rails, so it will be an interesting experiment nonetheless, to see how Rails scales.

Why does Kenai interest me? Because for every project, you have a forum, a separate wiki, access to source code, mailing lists, and a bug tracker. Why should Kenai interest the MySQL community? Because maybe down the line, there will be integration with the Forge. Today, the Forge does not offer hosting (we have got the bits built-in, technically, but Launchpad seemed like a better bet for us, in the long run – the Forge is not in the storage business, its more a catalogue of information), mailing lists, forums, or a bug tracker.

After all, the tagline is “We’re More Than Just a Forge”. There look like there are some social networking aspects to Kenai as well – maybe some ohloh like features will make its way in due time? Maybe a Facebook application, created using Zembly will mash things up even. Who’s to say what the future of Kenai can bring.

Old Town White Coffee is a place we’ve been hanging out a lot at. Its got wifi, power sockets, couches, good food and drink, great eye candy (bonus!), and is open till late.

Today, we found out that all their PCs that hold the orders (order{1,2,3,4}) have Samba shares. Open to all, naturally.

They use Crystal Reports. Have a custom front-end, with appropriate touch screen drivers, but the back-end is pretty stock. They use MySQL, Connector/ODBC 3.51.12 and also use SQLyog 5.30. I know the system is designed and deployed by NIT, it looks like their F&B POS.

Their use of MySQL (schema wise), includes using VIEWs, stored procedures and triggers (on UPDATE and DELETE).

I wonder how many point of sales systems are powered by open source software. This one runs Windows, but at least within the stack, there’s open source MySQL!

P/S: if you’re from NIT or Old Town, secure your order systems.

Calling all students!

Here’s an easy way to make USD$500 (grand prize), or USD$250 (five runners up). All you have to do is use the MySQL database (5.1) and the GlassFish application server (v2 Update Release 2) to develop a cool web application and write a review of your experience using these products.

The deadline for this is October 22, 2008. Remember to read the contest details, as it lists eligibility criteria, and how we’re judging the entries.

As a judge, here’s my advice:

• Make me go “wow!”
• Use some of the new features in MySQL 5.1 – think XML, event scheduler, table logging, etc.
• Make it ridiculously easy for me to judge the application – good documentation is going to help, but if the application itself is intuitive, it’d rock harder
• There’s no time limit you need to spend… 5 hours for ace coders, 20 hours for average coders… its up to you. Extra effort, usually means you’ll get a high rank

If you want to get started quickly, there’s a NetBeans IDE 6.1 with GlassFish and MySQL bundle. It only comes with MySQL 5.0, so you’ll still have to get MySQL 5.1, but that should be a piece of cake. NetBeans is after all, a seriously good IDE.

At a university? Got a notice board? Go ahead, and print the flyer. Spread the love.

Good luck!

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)

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:

• gettext
• pkgconfig
• and then glib

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!