Lenz Grimmer's blog

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!

While VirtualBox is available as a downloadable OpenSolaris package from the download page at virtualbox.org, I find it much more convenient to use the Package Manager GUI or pkg on the command line to install and update packages.

Sun provides a VirtualBox IPS package (and some others like Flash Player) from a separate "extras" repository. However, you need to obtain a key and SSL certificate before you can access this repository, which are available for free from https://pkg.sun.com/register/ after logging in with your Sun Online Account.

Once you obtained and installed these files in /var/pkg/ssl (detailed instructions are provided on the download page), you can add this repository as another "authority" and start looking at what packages are provided:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority \
            -k /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.key.pem \
            -c /var/pkg/ssl/OpenSolaris_extras.certificate.pem \
            -O https://pkg.sun.com/opensolaris/extra extra
$ pkg list -a 'pkg://extra/*'
NAME (AUTHORITY)                              VERSION         STATE      UFIX
SUNWadmj (extra)                              0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWjsnmp (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbapi (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbcou (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
SUNWwbdev (extra)                             0.5.11-0.101    known      ----
virtualbox (extra)                            2.0.6-0.101     known      ----
virtualbox/kernel (extra)                     2.0.6-0.101     known      ----
web/firefox/plugin/flash (extra)              9.0.125-0.101   known      ----

So there is not that much to download by now - some additional Java packages and the Flash plugin for Firefox. There is no package for VirtualBox 2.1.0 yet, but I hope this will be updated soon...

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!

It has not hit the MySQL DevZone Frontpage yet, but I just finished an interview with Adam Donnison, one of our web gurus behind the mysql.com web site.

Adam talks about what his work environment looks like, his experiences with MySQL 5.1 on the MySQL web sites and why he enjoys working for a virtual organization like ours. Enjoy!

As noted in my previous blog posting, I manged to revive my old Logitech TrackMan Marble FX on Linux (openSuSE 11.1b4), using a Serial-to-USB dongle with a Prolific PL2303 chip. But I also use OpenSolaris on my Laptop quite frequently (currently testing the upcoming 2008.11 release), so I investigated if it would be possible to enable the trackball there as well.

Luckily, the Driver Manager listed the plugged in adapter and the correct driver (usbsprl) was loaded already. Now the real challenge was finding out which device node to use. Some research revealed that the driver actually comes with a manual page , which indicated that /dev/term/0 was the correct device name.

Lo and behold, I copied the InputDevice section from my Linux xorg.conf file into the OpenSolaris one, replaced the Device parameter with the appropriate one and restarted the X server. Immediate success! Now I can enjoy using my most favourite input device on OpenSolaris as well.

I am probably different than most users, but I am a a fan of unusual input devices. I prefer Laptops with trackpoints - I immediately disabled the touchpads on my Lenovo laptops (a T61 and T42) in the BIOS when I received them. My first Laptop (a Toshiba Portege 3440CT) didn't even have a touchpad to begin with. It's a pity that trackpoints seem to a dying breed.

And I don't like using regular mice on my desktop, either! Actually, my most favourite input device is a trackball - I purchased a Logitech TrackMan Marble FX a long time ago, and used it for years. Then computers stopped having serial or PS/2 connectors, and I replaced the trackball with an USB mouse. I never really got the hang of using mice, but Logitech (or other vendors) somehow never came up with a suitable replacement model for the Marble FX with a USB port. I recently looked at the Logitech Trackman Optical, but was not convinced by the reviews I read, and the fact that it requires batteries (a trackball is a stationary device, so a cable does not really interfere here!). The Microsoft Trackball Explorer might have been an option, but it seems to be impossible to get nowadays.

After experimenting with several mouse models (Cherry, Microsoft), I decided to revive the TrackMan Marble again. It comes with a PS/2-connector by default, so I first tried to connect it to my PC using a PS/2-to-USB converter dongle. This actually worked without any tweaking, but had two limitations: the fourth mouse button was not detected anymore (I could have lived with that) and the Trackball stopped responding after it had been idle for a while, requiring me to restart the X server to get it working again.

So using the PS/2-to-USB dongle was ruled out and I tried an Serial-to-USB dongle instead:

lenz@thebe:~> lsusb|grep Serial
Bus 002 Device 006: ID 067b:2303 Prolific Technology, Inc. PL2303 Serial Port

When plugged in, udev creates a new serial device /dev/ttyUSB0 which I needed to inform the X server about. Fortunately it's possible to define multiple input devices in the xorg.conf configuration file. Using the serial port actually had another advantage - I was able to add some trackball-specific tweaks that would have collided with the settings of the "regular" PS/2 mouse section that I needed for the builtin trackpoint of my Thinkpad. It required some tweaking and testing, but this is what I added to xorg.conf to be able to use the TrackMan Marble FX in addition to the builtin pointing device:

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Trackball" "SendCoreEvents"
    Option         "Clone" "off"
    Option         "Xinerama" "off"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Driver       "mouse"
    Identifier   "Trackball"
    Option       "Device" "/dev/ttyUSB0"
    Option       "Name" "TrackMan Marble FX"
    Option       "Protocol" "Intellimouse"
    Option       "Vendor" "Logitech"
    Option       "AngleOffset" "10"
    Option       "Buttons" "8"
    Option       "Emulate3Buttons" "off"
    Option       "EmulateWheel" "true"
    Option       "EmulateWheelButton" "8"
    Option       "YAxisMapping" "4 5"
    Option       "EmulateWheelInertia" "8"
EndSection

You may wonder about the 8 mouse buttons, as the device only has four physical buttons. Interestingly, the fourth button on the TrackMan reported itself as "button 8" when I probed it with "xev", so I needed to make sure the server is aware of it. When pressed, the trackball now acts like a mouse wheel and allows me to quickly scroll across long documents - very handy! Now I just hope that the button switches in the TrackMan last for another while - until some vendor eventually comes up with a suitable replacement...

I recently installed the last  release candidate version of OpenSolaris 2008.11 (ISO image available from here) and I am happy to note that the audiohd driver now supports the Intel soundchip (82891H) in my Lenovo Thinkpad T61 out of the box! This was one of the glitches I observed with 2008.05. In general, I am very impressed by the OpenSolaris driver support for this particular laptop - everything except for bluetooth is supported now. On the downside, suspending to RAM still fails for me, but I have not looked into this very deeply yet.

But what good is a working sound driver, if you don't have apps that produce sounds? Be default, the media players included in the distribution lack support for most codecs, e.g. MP3 or video formats. This is not much different from most Linux distributions, as these codecs are usually protected by patents or proprietary licenses which require the user to install these separately. Here are some hints on how to enable better multimedia support on OpenSolaris.

The Observatory has a detailed article on how to add the free MP3 gstreamer codec from Fluendo, so all applications that use the gstreamer API (e.g. Songbird) will be able to play back MP3 files.

If you want full multimedia support and an choice of video players/codecs, you should add the Life With Solaris (LWS) package repository to the package manager:

$ pfexec pkg set-authority -O http://pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp:10000/ pkg.lifewithsolaris.jp
$ pfexec packagemanager

You will now be able to choose a new package repository from the dropdown list, which allows you to select players and codecs for download/installation. The packages will be installed in /opt/LWS, so you need to add /opt/LWS/bin to your $PATH, if you want to start the applications from the command line. But the packages will create menu entries for the GNOME desktop as well.

Enjoy!

I am happy to announce that there now is a MySQL User Group in Los Angeles, California! Their first meetup will take place on Nov. 19th at 7:30pm, Carl Gelbart will give a presentation about "Infobright, an Open Source Data Warehouse". The location has not been finalized yet, it seems: Sun offered them to choose between one of their locations in Universal City, El Segundo or Irvine. Thanks a lot to Joe Devon for stepping up and volunteering to organize this group, it's appreciated!

And if you are not able to join the LA MySQL User Group because you live somewhere else - take a look at http://mysql.meetup.com/ for a local MySQL User Group in your area! If there isn't one yet, have you considered organizing one by yourself? It's easy and fun and we will actually sponsor the Meetup.com fees for you! Also take a look at the MySQL Forge Wiki for some hints on how to create and run a user group (and make sure to add your own findings and experiences to these pages).

This year's Systems trade fair will take place from October 21st-24th in Munich, Germany. Sun will be present there with a stand in the exhibition area (Hall B2, Stand 329) and we also sponsor a conference themed "Perspective Open Source" that will provide half-day sessions (in German) about opensource-related topics throughout the week.

Some highlights of what we'll present on our stand:

• MySQL
• Sun Fire Servers (with Intel Xeon Processors)
• Open Storage
• VirtualBox
• StarOffice/OpenOffice
• Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) for SMBs

By the way, we have a limited contingent of free day passes for the fair - see this page if you're interested to get one!

I will be there to help manning the MySQL demo pod on all days. See you there!

I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.10 has been released.

You can download the updated package from the project home page or via the openSUSE Build Service.

This version fixes some bugs and includes new functionality:

• Applied patch from Marc Haber: added option --keep_snapshot that will skip the removal of the backup snapshot before terminating the script. Providing the option --backuptype=none will now skip creating a backup using the builtin backup modules. Both options provide more flexibility when using hooks for performing the actual backup tasks or when the snapshot is considered to be the actual backup.
• Added two new hooks: "backupsuccess" and "backupfailure" which are called respectively upon success of failure of the backup operation (Bug #264089)
• Make sure that binaries are being found ($PATH may not include /sbin when called from cron), added missing entry for "lvs" to mylvmbackup.conf (Bug #255703)
• Updated documentation

Greetings from the University of Latvia in Riga, where the local activities related to Software Freedom Day 2008 are in full swing! We've just finished the introductionary talk "Software freedom in Latvia"  by Evijs Taube (LATA) and Leo Trukšāns (Linux Centre). Currently, Mark Callaghan from Google Inc. is talking about "Running a database when your business depends on it". We've more talks scheduled for the rest of the day and there also is an ongoing workshop about MySQL Performance tuning by Jay Pipes, which takes place in the University's Linux Lab. The full agenda is published on the MySQL Forge Wiki and I just published a first batch of pictures on my gallery. Enjoy!

This is more of an "behind the scenes" update and I hope that you won't see any (negative) changes on the PlanetMySQL front page or the RSS feeds: I just finished and commited the conversion of the backend script that performs the parsing and aggregation of feeds from requiring MagpieRSS to SimplePie.

This will provide better support for a wider range of feed types and should also fix a few quirks, e.g. that some postings (for example the one from Kevin Burton) only showed up as an "A" in the Planet's RSS feed. It hopefully also fixes a weirdness with time zones that some people were reporting, but this requires further investigation.

The size and complexity of the script was reduced significantly because of this change - SimplePie is a breeze to use in comparison to MagpieRSS and it's very well-documented. The developers provide some more reasons and a comparison on why you should also make this switch!

And in case you notice anything broken or weird on PlanetMySQL that might be related to the change, please let me know! This change was an important step for future improvements of the site.