Diamond Notes

After a bit of a struggle this time around (pesky holidays got in the way..sorry)  I just posted the new issue of MySQL magazine.  It is available from http://www.mysqlzine.net.

Everyone enjoy.  A special thanks to everyone who contributed!

Hey everyone. I am seriously thinking about changing somewhat the format of the magazine. So far I have been able to pull together enough articles each time to publish but I would like to look at an additional way to get material.

There are many high-quality blog entries written every month about MySQL. I would like to (with permission of the author) edit some of them for grammar and any clarifications needed and publish them as articles. I am already planning on doing this with two of Peter Zaitsev’s blog postings on Innodb tuning. Combining those two posts is going to make for a fantastic article. I have already discussed this with him and he agreed to a trial.

Will I still accept articles written strictly for the magazine? Absolutely!! This just means I don’t have to go around twisting peoples arms :).

Thoughts? Comments?

I am starting on putting together the Winter issue of the MySQL Magazine. This will be our third issue and it is getting better each time!
Here is your opportunity to contribute to the community. I am accepting ideas/outlines/proposals for articles for this issue through November the 9th.   That gives you almost two weeks to get back to me about that great idea you have in your head.  Articles will be due to be completed by December the 1st. If you aren’t sure about an idea send me an email  - bmurphy (at) paragon-cs.com

Previous issues are available at: http://www.mysqlzine.net

Hope to hear from you soon!

Welcome to Log Buffer #64. For those who haven’t come across my little patch of the Internet - I’m Keith Murphy. I am the MySQL DBA at iContact, Inc and the editor of MySQL Magazine. I do my best to contribute to the MySQL community any way I can. Special thanks to the Pythian Group for giving me the honor of writing this week’s buffer. Thanks for stopping by!!

MySQL

The guys over at MySQL Performance Blog - the high performance MySQL gurus - reported that a important bug for was fixed (currently only for 5.1.22 -which isn’t released yet). The bug was an issue with the auto-increment field for an InnoDB table. This causes serious scalability issues with Innodb so is a welcome fix. No known information on if this will be back-ported.

One experienced Oracle DBA who is transitioning to MySQL blogs about his nine tips for new MySQL DBAs. They are quite enlightening. Along with that, the new DBA should take a look at George J. Trujillo Jr.’s blog entry for “Top Ten Things to do Before Installing MySQL”. For the more experienced DBA who is planning for the scaling of their systems — stop by and take a look at thoughts on the capacity planning of a MySQL DBA.

This week was the MySQL Developers conference in Heidelburg, Germany. A number of the developers blogged about it including Colin Charles, Paul McCullagh and Lukas Smith. They discuss upcoming features including my favorite - the coming online backup in MySQL 5.2 (or whatever the version after 5.1.x ends up being called).

Postgres

This week for the world of Postgres brings the introduction of a new tool called Bucardo. It brings asynchronous multi-master replication system for Postgres. Greg is the developer of the tool and blogs about it here. Magnus Hagander’s blog has a good introduction to the integrated security features of Postgres and how it can integrate with both Windows and Unix clients. Take a look here. And finally, for the Postgres fans, is a cool tip from </depesz> about a nice way to access Posgres documentation from Firefox quickly and easily.

Oracle

In Oracle news, Kris Buytaert points out that Oracle still takes a solid hour to install. It is ironic that I also remember when Oracle first started shipping a Linux product and how they distributed CDs (with Linux Magazine?) like AOL “back in the day”. It was either in 1998 or 1999 and I had just started using MySQL for database functions at the dial-up ISP I started.

Want to participate in some Oracle surveys? Doug Burns points to a couple that Oracle DBAs can participate in.

Microsoft SQL Server

The PASS conference in Denver, CO generated quite the buzz in the MS SQL Server blog-o-sphere. And even though the release of SQL Server 2008 is some time off (Q2 2008) the next version of SQL Server is building buzz. The PASS conference was covered in detail at http://www.mssqltips.com and pointed out by Andy Warren’s blog. More “views and opinions PASS” and maybe a prescription for the ailing DBA are available from the SQL Doctor here. One of the speakers at the conference — the Crazy DBA — even posted about their experience speaking. Worth reading by anyone who is looking to be a “first timer” speaking at a conference. More thoughts on the conference from Ken Henderson.

Who says that DBAs don’t have a sense of humor? With a name like “Patron Saint of Lost Yaks” there is at least one DBA with a sense of humor. In addition to the humor, they have a good introduction to horizontal partitioning in SQL Server on his/her blog here. Also, the PSoLY brings us a cool tip about inserting binary data . Wrapping things up for the company from Redmond is a blog entry by SimonS about how the SSIS date package isn’t as accurate as you might think (and a solution to the problem).

DB2

DB2 Magazine has a nice blog entry about effectively indexing DB2 databases. Susan Visser has an interesting blog entry about a new book Understanding DB2 9 Security. In addition she has an interesting statistic I will leave to the gentle reader to find. She also announces the chance for a DB9 DBA to win a free trip to a conference.

According to Daniel Krook there is a fairly substantiated rumor that IBM is porting DB2 to the Intel Mac.

And always remember - the views and opinions expressed here are my views and opinions and not necessarily the views or opinions of my employer.

I just finished uploading the pdf of the second issue of the MySQL Magazine. I realized that I hadn’t talked about it at all on my blog except a very brief mention a couple of posts ago. So, since I hadn’t mentioned it much before, I wanted to take a few minutes to tell what it was all about.

In the first quarter of this year I got the bright idea of doing a small e-zine about MySQL. There are no other magazines that concentrate exclusively on MySQL. So, in late April, I sent an email to the general MySQL mailing list. I laid things out, asked for input, and sat back to see what happened. Three gentlemen stepped up to the plate and offered to write. I threw in an article or two and did the layout. We put together something that I am quite proud of. In the last three months we have had over 1300 downloads of the first issue and the comments have been quite positive.

The first issue was released on June the fourth. The plan is to put a new issue out every three month. The magazine’s current homepage is http://www.paragon-cs.com/mag/mysqlmag.html. Everyone enjoy!!!

Anyone who has interest in contributing can contact me at “bmurphy” @ “paragon-cs.com”. Any material about MySQL administration and development will be considered. In addition, if someone would like to help with some graphical layout and such it would be most appreciated.