Lenz Grimmer's blog

I recently added two new packages to my repository on the openSUSE Build Service:

• Maatkit is a collection of essential command-line utilities for MySQL. Each is completely stand-alone, without dependencies other than core Perl and the DBI drivers needed to connect to MySQL, and doesn't need to be "installed" - you can just execute the scripts. This makes the tools easy to use on systems where you can't install anything extra, such as customer sites or ISPs.
• protobuf - Protocol Buffers - Google's data interchange format. Protocol Buffers are a way of encoding structured data in an efficient yet extensible format. Google uses Protocol Buffers for almost all of its internal RPC protocols and file formats.

The protobuf package is required, if you want to compile drizzle. Packages are available for openSUSE, Fedora and Mandriva Linux. Feedback is welcome!

In a recent article, Matt Asay was musing about the aspects of hosting an Open Source project by yourself vs. using a public project hosting service like SourceForge, GitHub or Launchpad. He concluded that it's important for commercial/sponsored open source projects in particular to do the hosting by themselves, so they can maintain full control and can gain more insight, which hopefully will turn into more revenue at some point.

However, Matt seems to reduce "hosting" to "providing downloads" only:

Control and visibility. Given the importance of customer conversions, it becomes hugely valuable information to know that it takes, say, eight months on average for someone to buy the "Enterprise" version of your code after downloading the software. With Sourceforge et al., you have no way of connecting the dots between download and purchase. But if you host your downloads, you can suddenly link a download to a purchase using marketing automation software like Loopfuse.
[...]
It can tell you many things, but the key is to be able to glean insight from the earliest stage of your interaction with a potential customer, and that means you have to host your own downloads. Otherwise, you have no idea how or when a would-be customer downloads your code, which makes the "why" they download it less interesting, because it becomes less actionable.

I understand and agree to Matt's point in principle - you want to know more about the users that download and use your stuff. Here are some related thoughts about this topic.

Project hosting is not just about downloads

First: project hosting is much more than just providing a download/mirror infrastructure for your product releases. On the one hand, you have the regular users of your product who are primarily interested in having easy and fast access to the latest builds for their platform of choice and a platform to exchange their problems and experiences with other users.

But project hosting facilities also address a completely different audience, with different needs. These are the developers, who want to have easy access to the latest source code, be able to submit bug reports and patches and want a direct communication path to the project's developers.

I think it is important to ensure that you serve both the developer community as well as the user community as best as you can, which could of course mean you should provide the full range of project hosting all by yourself. But by doing so, you also create an island that makes it difficult to benefit from the "cross-pollination effects" between your project and others. This can partially be remedied if you don't only set up a project hosting infrastructure for your own purposes, but also open it for projects related to your project (and which not maintained by your own team), e.g. how SugarForge is doing it. But the cost and effort involved in setting up and maintaining such an infrastructure should not be underestimated.

There is more to distribute than releases

At MySQL, we just recently moved away the MySQL Server source trees from the proprietary BitKeeper revision control system to Bazaar. Along with this migration, we also relocated the public repositories from mysql.bkbits.net to Launchpad.net, to make it easier for external developers to access and work with the code. Currently, MySQL only makes use of the source repository hosting capabilities - downloads, bug reports and most other things like mailing lists or forums are all maintained by ourselves and hosted on mysql.com.

Due to the distributed nature of Bazaar, we could of course also provide the source repos from our own servers (similar to how we do it for several of our projects that are still maintained in Subversion). But I think it makes a lot of sense to use Launchpad for that, as it allows a tighter integration and collaboration with contributors and other related projects, and it gives us more visibility within the developer community.

Drizzle has taken this even further: the project utilizes all of Launchpad's facilities, including Blueprints, Bug reporting, mailing lists. It's going to be an interesting learning experience to see how this affects and improves community interaction/participation. I'd love to see MySQL move more into this direction as well (especially the bug database and worklog would be good candidates), but this probably will take some more time.

I too recently moved the source tree of my own personal project from a Subversion repository on my private server to Launchpad. Several reasons motivated me to do this, one of them being the opportunity to gain more practical experience with Bazaar and getting away from a central source code repository that makes me the bottleneck in making changes and applying patches. A distributed revision control system makes much more sense from a community contribution point of view, which Ian Clatworthy summarizes quite well in his paper "Distributed Version Control Systems - Why and How". In a way I deliberately give away some of the control over my project. And I must say I like how Launchpad integrates the various available subsystems like blueprints, code branches and bug reports - things are much better connected and they provide useful workflows that make the entire system much more productive to use than e.g. SourceForge.

I still provide downloads of released versions from my own site (as does MySQL), but mostly because I actually did not know until recently that Launchpad offered this kind of service - I will look into that for the next release. I am more interested in making sure that my users have easy access to properly packaged versions of my project for their operating system of choice. Therefore I work closely with the packagers from various distributions and make sure they integrate new releases quickly. In addition to that, I make use of hosted services like the OpenSUSE Build Service, which automatically provides package repositories for a number of platforms. I aim for wide distribution on as many channels as possible, instead of trying to be the sole provider of my product. This brings me to another point:

Downloads stats are overrated

Direct downloads from your project's web site usually are only one part of the distribution system. I believe that being included in the various Linux or other Open Source Operating System Distributions (e.g. Free/OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, etc.) plays a much bigger role in gaining popularity and reaching more users. Most users usually go with what they get as part of the package, as the distributor usually has taken care of a tight integration and proper packaging of your project within his own product and also takes care of providing updates and fixes.

Unfortunately it's almost impossible to gather any detailed intelligence about the number of users of a project this way, as distributions usually don't keep track of (or don't disclose) their download figures and which packages on their releases are the most popular. Debian's Popularity Contest is probably the only exception to this, but it's unclear how reliable that information is. Here I must agree with Matt again, if we just look at project hosting services acting as download providers only and include distributions in this equation:

As open source becomes more commercial, someone is going to need to step up to offer such visibility into these hosted services, or we're going to find the hosted services proving useful for ever decreasing amounts of time.

I guess we all would love to know more about the users that don't download a package from our site, but go with the one provided by their distribution of choice instead or download it from somewhere else. But so far, this is a blank spot on our radar screen.

 Another caveat that results from these multiple distribution channels: just looking at your own download stats may actually give you a skewed picture of your user base, particularly if you look at the platforms (which will probably be dominated by Windows or Mac OS X, as these OSes usually don't ship your code as part of their own product).

So instead of trying to force downloads through a single instance only, I think it's much more important to ensure widespread distribution and a top-notch first hand experience. If users like your product, they are much more inclined to consider coming back and purchasing something from you than if you annoy them by making your product hard to download and install or require them to register before they can obtain a copy of your product. It's all about lowering the barriers as much as you can, even if you have to give up some control in exchange.

JFYI: today I migrated the mylvmbackup source tree from my local Subversion repository on http://www.lenzg.net/ to a Bazaar repository on Launchpad.net.

This will hopefully make it easier for contributors to work on the code and share their modifications with others, removing me as the bottleneck for applying and testing patches for new releases. I chose Bazaar primarily because I wanted to get some more hands-on practice with it, now that the MySQL Server source trees have been transferred to it as well (see Kaj's announcement for details).

As mylvmbackup is closely related to the MySQL Server project, it made sense to choose the same platform and enjoy the cross-pollination effects and the infrastructure that Launchpad provides. Additionally, the distributed nature of Bazaar makes it more convenient to work with the code history and commiting changes locally without having to be online and connected to the SVN server.

I am sure that other DSCMSs like Git, Mercurial or darcs would have done the job equally well - nowadays it's very hard to choose

The "trunk" branch is now hosted on Launchpad. I assume that I will soon open up a development branch, that will receive heavier modifications first. I also plan to use the site for bug tracking and keeping track of feature requests (via Blueprints).

To create a local branch of the "trunk" repository, you can use the following command:

bzr branch lp:mylvmbackup

I also maintain a copy of that branch on my home server, just in case: http://www.lenzg.net/bzr/mylvmbackup/

To avoid confusion, I removed the Subversion repository on http://www.lenzg.net. Please use the Bazaar tree on Launchpad from now on. Thanks!

Even though we had been preparing the migration to Bazaar for a while now, today's announcement kind of caught me by surprise. But I am very happy about this move!

While BitKeeper is an excellent tool and served us well the past eight (!) years, I was quite annoyed when BitMover decided to remove the fully functional free BitKeeper client, which effectively put our development back into a Cathedral: even though our source trees remained accessible via bkbits.net, the crippled bk client was only capable of cloning and pulling new revisions from there - it was not possible for an external developer to commit changes locally or to create patches. This turned out to become a severe roadblock for users that wanted to participate in the development of the server. While some of our other internal projects (like the documentation, connectors and GUI tools) moved to Subversion, this was not that easily doable for the MySQL Server source trees. Lots of internal processes and tools had been tightly coupled with the source code management and there never seemed to be the right time to make the switch, which potentially could have disrupted the ongoing development work.

By moving to a truly open, distributed revision control system, it will become much easier for external contributors to work on patches and maintain modifications or enhancements outside of the main MySQL Server source trees. In fact, work has already begun! When I look at the various repositories hosted on Launchpad.net, I already notice several source trees that are not maintained by MySQL Engineers, e.g. Marc Callaghan's Google patches, Percona's work on microsecond resolution or a branch of MySQL 5.0 that is maintained and used by the folks from Wikimedia. I too helped publishing a source tree today - Holyfoot's work on improving the GIS functionality is now also available from there! In addition to the MySQL Server, many other MySQL-related projects are hosted on LaunchPad. And by utilizing services like the fabolous OpenSUSE Build Service, it's actually quite easy to provide readily installable packages of these as well!

I hope this change will significantly lower the barriers for external contributors and make it easier for our own developers to merge and accept changes that have been created by others and received sufficient community testing. This is much more convenient than having to apply a patch that was posted a long time ago and may have already been abandoned by the contributor or suffered from bit-rot. Being able to maintain a patch within a live tree that can be kept in sync with the main repository is one of the great features of distributed revision control (and which I think is one of the technical reasons why the Linux Kernel development model works so well).

Kudos to everybody involved in making this happen!

I am happy to announce the release of mylvmbackup version 0.8. mylvmbackup is a tool for quickly creating backups of a MySQL server's data files. To perform a backup, mylvmbackup obtains a read lock on all tables and flushes all server caches to disk, makes an LVM snapshot of the volume containing the MySQL data directory, and unlocks the tables again. The snapshot process takes only a small amount of time. When it is done, the server can continue normal operations, while the actual file backup proceeds.

Below is the list of changes since version 0.6. You may wonder what happened to version 0.7 - it had a rather short life cycle as I was informed about a bug that I fixed quickly before I made a wider release announcement of 0.7.

• Fixed a bug in the InnoDB recovery function: the second mysqld process clobbered the socket file of the primary MySQL instance (thanks to Alain Hoang for reporting this)
• Updated the man page, noted some other limitations of the InnoDB recovery function
• Bug fix: use the correct mysqld parameter to provide an alternative PID file (--pid-file instead of --pidfile) - thanks to Guillaume Boddaert and Jim Wilson for reporting this!
• Added option "--skip_mycnf" to skip including a copy of the MySQL configuration file in the backup, added a safety check that the file actually exists prior to backing it up.

Updated package are available from the home page and via the openSUSE Build Service as usual. Updated packages for Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo Linux should also be available shortly. Enjoy!

Speaking of LVM snapshot backups: I will be giving a talk about this subject at our MySQL Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, CA next week. If you are curious about how MySQL can be backed up using this technology, please consider to stop by!

A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:

PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.

We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:

• Voting on articles/blog postings: it must be possible for logged in users to cast a vote on articles, similar to the Perlmonks.org voting system. This would allow providing different RSS feeds, e.g. only articles that have a certain rating and rankings for articles and authors. Positive votes accumulate and increase the "karma" value of the individual author as well as identifying the quality of a particular posting.
• Archiving/Tagging/Searching: it must be possible to add tags to the aggregated blog postings, to ease the searching of older articles and to facilitate the creation up of a searchable "Community Knowledgebase"
• Authentication: User logins must use the same username/password pair as MySQLForge and the rest of the mysql.com web site (to reduce duplication and allow better integration with other parts of MySQL Forge, e.g. the user profile page)
• Optionally, it should be possible to comment/discuss on the aggregated articles directly on the new PlanetMySQL site. These comments should be sent back to the original blog via Trackbacks (if applicable)
• It should be possible to group feeds from multiple, different authors as a "Team Feed", to allow rankings by Team/Group in addition to the ranking of individuals
• The site must provide Unicode support to allow the handling of postings in multiple languages (e.g. Japanese, Chinese)
• New feed submissions should not be subscribed automatically, but rather should be reviewed by a moderation team first (to avoid spam and off-topic feeds)

The implementor should first make an assessment if these new functions should be developed on top of the existing code base, or if it would make sense to rebuild the existing functionality plus the new features on top of an existing PHP Framework (e.g. Drupal, Silverstripe, Symfony or similar). Making use of Web2.0 techniques (AJAX) is encouraged, if it makes the site easier to use and visually appealing.

Please contact me directly (firstname at MySQL.com) or the mailing list, if you are interested in working on this task. Thanks!

Last week at CeBit I once again had a conversation with an application developer that was not aware that it's possible to embed the MySQL Server inside an application instead of running it as a separate process. I experienced something similar at FOSDEM recently, while talking with the Amarok developers - how come that this feature is so little known? In fact, there are two possibilities for embedding MySQL (and both of them are licensed under the GPL): the first one is using the libmysqld embedded library, which is suitable if you are developing C/C++ applications:

The embedded MySQL server library makes it possible to run a full-featured MySQL server inside a client application. The main benefits are increased speed and more simple management for embedded applications.

The embedded server library is based on the client/server version of MySQL, which is written in C/C++. Consequently, the embedded server also is written in C/C++.

The API is identical for the embedded MySQL version and the client/server version.

Especially consider the last sentence - it's actually fairly easy to create an application that supports connecting to both an embedded or a standalone server instance! Here are some related links to get you going:

• libmysqld, the Embedded MySQL Server Library
• MySQL C API functions
• Embedding the MySQL Server Library in a C Program by Russell Dyer
• Embedded MySQL Discussion Forum

If you're a Java developer, you should consider taking a look at our Connector/MXJ product - this allows you to embed a MySQL server in your Java application:

MySQL Connector/MXJ is a Java Utility package for deploying and managing a MySQL database. Deploying and using MySQL can be as easy as adding an additional parameter to the JDBC connection url, which will result in the database being started when the first connection is made. This makes it easy for Java developers to deploy applications which require a database by reducing installation barriers for their end-users.

MySQL Connector/MXJ makes the MySQL database appear to be a java-based component. It does this by determining what platform the system is running on, selecting the appropriate binary, and launching the executable. It will also optionally deploy an initial database, with any specified parameters.

Included are instructions for use with a JDBC driver and deploying as a JMX MBean to JBoss.

Some related links to further information/help:

• MySQL Connector/MXJ documentation
• MySQL Connector/MXJ Downloads
• JDBC and Java discussion forum
• MySQL and Java Mailing list

Does your application make use of an embedded MySQL Server already? Please let me know! I'd love to learn more about the use cases and experiences you have made.

Back when I still worked at SuSE, I was in charge of maintaining a number or packages of the distribution (actually, you should still be able to find traces of my work in the RPM changelogs). Nowadays, I maintain a number of packages for openSUSE and other distributions on the openSUSE Build Service, which is just brilliant for this purpose.

If you happen to live in northern Germany and are interested to learn more about the RPM package manager and how to build packages, consider coming to the TU Harburg this coming Thursday (March 13th). At 19:00, I will give a presentation about this topic in building, D, room D1023 (in cooperation with the Hamburg branch of the German Unix User Group). More information (in German) can be obtained from here.

See you there!

Since almost a year now, we host a weekly training session for our engineers on Thursday (14:00 UTC winter time), coined the "MySQL University". While it's primary purpose is to share and distribute knowledge about a wide variety of topics relevant to our own developers, many of the sessions are of general interest for developers on other projects as well.

Therefore we hold this sessions in the public and everybody is welcome to attend! You can listen to the presentation via an OGG Audio stream, questions can be posted via IRC on the #mysql-university channel on freenode.net. The audio file and IRC log will be saved, so you can also listen to past university sessions at a later point in time again.

Tomorrow's session will be about using the Valgrind memory checker, held by Stewart Smith, a colleague from Australia who is a member of the MySQL Cluster development team.

The next upcoming sessions include topics more closely related to MySQL Server development:

• February 28: New Optimizer Features in MySQL 6.0 (Sergey Petrunia)
• March 6: How to Add a Collation (Alexander Barkov)
• March 13: Checking Threading and Locking With Helgrind (Stewart Smith)
• March 20: Building MySQL Client Applications (Hartmut Holzgraefe)

See the MySQL University page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and follow the instructions for attendees to get connected.

Yesterday, Drupal 6.0 was officially released - check out this screencast to get a 29-minute tour on the new features in this release.

We'd like to congratulate the Drupal Developer Team and Community for reaching this milestone and are happy that the MySQL Server continues to serve well as the database backend for this awesome content management platform!

I had the pleasure of evaluating and reviewing a previous release of Drupal for the Open Source Content Management System Award from Packt Publishing and it has been one of my favourites.

Keep up the good work!
 

Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.

In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!

• Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
• Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
• Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
• While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix at the end of the tar backup file name (or the rsync target directory name) now indicates that it is incomplete. (Robin)
• The my.cnf configuration file is now included in the backup. (Robin)
• Added the ability to run an extra FLUSH TABLES on busy databases where lvcreate might take a long time (and may overrun the interactivity timeout on the connection, losing the lock). (Robin)
• Added option "--pidfile" to provide an alternative PID file location for the second server instance that is started to perform the InnoDB recovery on the snapshot prior to backing it up (Otherwise it may default to using the same pid file location that the running server uses and safe_mysqld will abort) - thanks to Kristian Köhntopp for making me aware of this problem.
• Before discarding the snapshot LV, the output of "lvs <snapshot>" is now printed out for diagnostics. It contains useful information like "how much percent of the backing store was used", which helps tuning the size of the snapshot LV.
• Added option "--skip-flush-tables" that performs the snapshot without flushing the tables to disk beforehand (which is not supported by InnoDB tables anyway) - this would save time, as the flushing can take a while, depending on the buffer sizes. (Thanks to Peter Zaitsev for the suggestion)

Version 0.6 is now available for download from http://www.lenzg.net/mylvmbackup/ (source tarball and RPM). I also provide RPM packagages for a number of additional platforms via my home:LenzGr repository on the fabolous openSUSE Build Service.

Enjoy! Feedback, patches and suggestions are welcome - please consider joining the mylvmbackup mailing list to discuss your experiences with this tool.

There is a lot of exciting stuff happening inside of MySQL AB. But due to the distributed nature of our company it's hardly possible to get a good overview about what the various teams of our development department are currently working on and what they have achieved since the last time we met.

So one cool new idea for our currently ongoing MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg was to let developers show off their work to each other. They were encouraged to prepare demos, either in the form of slide shows or by running live demonstrations from their laptops. Last Thursday and Saturday we allocated time for these team exhibitions and the exhibitors set up tables in the meeting rooms for others to sit next to them, see the new and cool stuff and chat about it. The non-exhibiting attendees received a sheet of paper where they could collect signatures for each demo point they visited, the one that managed to see the most demos was eligible for winning a price. I managed to visit ~8 of them on Thursday - there was way more stuff to look at than what one could actually get done in the given time frame. Therefore we decided to repeat some of Thursday's exhibitions and included some new ones on Saturday.

Here is a recap of the exhibitions I saw on Thursday:

• Alexey 'Holyfoot' Botchkov demoed the new and improved GIS (geospacial information) functionality that I already blogged about some time ago. It provides a number of new GIS functions and most of the already existing ones no longer use MBRs. Holyfoot actually prepared a visual demo application that displayed a map of the earth by getting the polygons to draw out of the database. It was then highlighting the current country under the mouse cursor, displaying some additional information about it. Moving the mouse across country borders immediately switched the highlighting to the respective state. When using the old, MBR-based functions this would only happen when you crossed the borders of the bounding rectangle.
• My fellow colleague Giuseppe Maxia performed some MySQL Proxy Magic, misusing the MySQL Proxy for some fun stuff and also demonstrating some useful use cases (e.g. crosstabs). See his blog entry for some examples of what he was showing.
• Jay Pipes demoed his work on MySQL Forge 2.0, now with more Ajax magic, rating and commenting on projects and snippets as well as the obligatory rounded corners! There's still some work to be done, but I look forward to seeing it go live soon.
• Monty Tailor explained his work on NDB/Connectors, which provides bindings to many programming languages like Ruby, Perl, Lua, PHP and others. They make it possible to connect to a MySQL Cluster without having to go through the MySQL API, if you don't need to use SQL and just want to use MySQL Cluster as a highly available datastore (similar to memcached). It was interesting to compare the various test scripts for each language with each other - the Perl version looked quite ugly in comparison to the Ruby code...
• An alpha version of the MySQL Workbench was demoed by Johannes Taxacher from the GUI team. He demonstrated how one can visually create tables and set up the relations between them. The GUI is quite nice, but they support Windows only for now - Mac OS X and Linux are also planned, however.
• Kent Boortz from the build team showed off his work on creating a self-contained ODBC build environment. I was quite impressed by the complexity and steps involved in creating the binary packages of the ODBC driver we provide. As we support quite a number of platforms, Kent had to come up with all kinds of interesting tweaks for exotic architectures and strange compilers.
• Jess Balint from the Connectors team demoed the ODBC 5.1 driver by connecting to a MySQL Server using MS Access or with a MS Visual C++ application. It was nice to observe the functional UTF-8 support.
• Paul DuBois, long time member of our documentation team explained the build system they created in order to cope with the massive amount of build targets that are being created from the DocBook sources of the reference manual. In addition to various formats of the manual itself (e.g. PDF, HTML, Windows Help), they also build the manual pages that are included in our *nix distributions as well as some README files and the Changelogs. It is written in Ruby and is capable of distributing the build jobs to several machines.

That's all I was able to see on Thursday. I just wish I had some more time to see all of the other demos. On Saturday I saw the following demos:

• Marc Alff was demoing LTP-GCOV, a tool that visualizes the output of gcov as HTML pages and allows one to find out which code has been covered during the test suite run. It would be great if we could combine it with our internal pushbuild system, which automatically rebuilds the MySQL Server and runs the test suite on a number of platforms for every ChangeSet that is being pushed into a source tree. We already perform gcov build runs to make sure that new code is properly covered by the tests, but this tool would be a very helpful addition, allowing us to find code with low coverage much easier.
• Kristian Nielsen showed an early implementation of a multi-threaded ndbd, the process that runs on a MySQL Cluster data node. This should boost performance on multi-core systems (the current implementation is single-threaded). However, it's still in an early prototype phase, but looks interesting!
• Chad Miller demonstrated an alternative revision control system: bzr. Similar to BitKeeper, it is a fully distributed system which does not require a central server. Creating a local branch of an existing MySQL code tree was quite easy and it seems to be very similar in using it. What impressed me in particular was its capability of connecting to remote SVN repositories - it is actually possible to use bzr locally to work against a remote Subversion server! This should give us a good opportunity to start testing it against our existing SVN trees and gather some more practical experience with it.

All in all I was very impressed and excited to learn about all the cool things that are going on inside of the development team. Even though there is always a lot of work to be done and they're busy getting the MySQL 5.1 release out the door, they still find time to experiment and come up with great ideas and improvements in other areas as well. I got the impression that everybody really enjoyed being able to show off his work and also receiving good feedback from the others that were passing by. I hope we will repeat these team exhibitions at our next meeting!

After getting very annoyed about the behaviour of pinepg in combination with gpg2 on my openSUSE 10.3 beta test system, I have now scratched my itch and switched to an alternative tool: pine-gpg-filter:

The distinguishing characteristic of this package (when compared against similar pine and gpg wrappers) is its ability to handle multiple roles or identities (i.e. different keys for different email addresses). Unlike some of the other pine and gpg wrappers, this one performs no passphrase caching (consider using gpg-agent in gnupg2).

They provide a "noarch" RPM directly from that site, but I've now also added it to my home:LenzGr repository in the openSUSE build service. Enjoy! 

Just came off today's MySQL University session about How to Build MySQL on Windows - Reggie did a great job on explaining how to build the MySQL Server from Source on Windows using the Microsoft development toolchain and some additional required tools. I am glad to hear that we're making progress on making it easier for Windows developers to work with the source code and Reggie and the other members of our Windows Task Force (what a nice acronym this one makes!) have plenty of other ideas for improving that experience.

If you missed his session, the audio file and IRC log will be published from the MySQL University pages shortly.

And in case you haven't heard about MySQL University before, check out the pages on the MySQL Forge and take a look at the upcoming schedule! Next week, Jan is going to give an introduction to the MySQL Proxy, which will to be an interesting session for sure. Did I mention that attending MySQL University is free and everybody is welcome to join? All you need is an IRC client to post questions and discuss the topic and an application capable of playing OGG audio streams for listening to the presenter. The MySQL Forge Wiki has detailed instructions on how to get going. See you next week!

In addition to the binary downloads that we provide from our site, Linux RPM builds of the MySQL Proxy (both the latest stable version as well as SVN snapshot releases, named mysql-proxy-snapshot) are now available for download from the server:/database repository of the openSUSE build service. It provides packages for a number of Linux distributions, e.g. Fedora 5/6, SLES 9/10 SuSE/openSUSE 10.x. By the way, this repository also contains RPMs of the current 5.0.45 MySQL Community Server for the distributions mentioned above. Thanks a lot to Darix for the initial checkin of the proxy package!