Lenz Grimmer's blog

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of great submissions, now we would like to ask our community about your favourites!

Basically it's "one vote per person per session" and you can cast your votes in two ways, either by twittering @opensqlcamp or via the opensqlcamp mailing list. The procedure is outlined in more detail on this wiki page.

As we need to finalize the schedule and inform the speakers, the voting period will close this coming Sunday, 18th of July. So don't hesitate, cast your votes now! Based on your feedback we will compile the session schedule for this year's camp. Thanks for your help!

So you're a small startup company, ready to go live with your product, which you intend to distribute under an Open Source License. Congratulations, you made a wise decision! Your developers have been hacking away frantically, getting the code in good shape for the initial launch. Now it's time to look into what else needs to be built and setup, so you're ready to welcome the first members of your new community and to ensure they are coming back!

Keep the following saying in mind, which especially holds true in the Open Source world: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression!". While the most important thing is of course to have a compelling and useful product, this blog post is an attempt to highlight some other aspects about community building and providing the adequate infrastructure. This insight is based on my own experiences and my observations from talking with many people involved in OSS startups and projects.

Just spotted the following posting from Paul DuBois on the internals mailing list:

I'm engaged in a project (WL#3403) to compile information that will provide better information about our errors and error messages:

• What an error means
• Likely causes of the error
• How to rectify or work around the error

The general idea is to provide our users something more than a list of error codes and the messages from errmsg.txt, such as the manual currently includes here:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/error-messages-server.html
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/error-messages-client.html

To that end, and to give lucky YOU a chance to participate in this exciting (!!) project, I'd like to solicit your knowledge on a case by base basis. To that end, I'll post individual messages for different errors, indicating what I know about them and asking for additional comments. I hope in this way to take advantage of the knowledge that different developers have about errors that pertain to their particular areas of expertise.

I think this an excellent initiative, as some of the error messages are quite confusing/misleading!

And without further ado, Paul already started with his first post: Error of the day: ER_HASHCHK - which according to Kostja is not actually used...

I'd like to bring two announcements to your attention, that I posted to our internals Mailing list a few days ago - both refer to ongoing activities at MySQL AB to further open up our development processes and to establish an Architecture of Participation around the MySQL Server and related applications.

I am excited to be able to talk about this topic at the upcoming FrOSCon, which will take place on August, 25th-26th in Sankt Augustin, Germany. The title of my presentation will be "Opening the doors of the Cathedral - Enabling an architecture of participation around the MySQL Server". Here's the abstract:

Even though the MySQL Server is released and distributed as Open Source Software (OSS) under the GPL, the development itself so far has mostly been performed in a very closed-source fashion, as most of the developers are employed by MySQL AB. This talk covers some of the ongoing efforts to establish an architecture of participation around MySQL that attempts to move the MySQL server development process into the public, making it more accessible to other developers interested in contributing.

I submitted two additional talks about "HA Solutions for MySQL" and "Working in a virtual company: benefits, challenges and tools" - unfortunately both were rejected. However, there are two additional talks related to MySQL: "Logging and monitoring a database server" provided by Giuseppe Maxia and "PostgreSQL vs. MySQL: Venus vs. Mars" provided by Susanne Ebrecht.

I personally enjoyed last year's FrOSCon very much and I look forward to this year's edition! Make sure to mark the date in your calendar and come over to meet with us and other OSS people!

Without further ado, here's a repost of the two announcements I sent out:

Eric Bergen from Proven Scaling (which I had the pleasure to meet in person during the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara last month) was kind enough to send me a patch for the mylmbackup tool, which justifies a new release:

Attached is a patch file for mylvmbackup that adds the ability to use
lvm version 2 and perform innodb recovery on the snapshot prior to
creating a tar ball. The option is named --innodb-recover.

I've also fixed a bug with default value handling for command line
options. In version 0.4 if a config file was specified default values
in the script were all changed to blank. This means that the config
file had to supply values for every variable instead of just the
values that need to be changed from default.

This is a very useful addition, as it significantly reduces the time required to recover a MySQL server from a snapshot backup. Thank you, Eric! Note that you need to use LVM2, as LVM1 does not support the required writing to snapshot volumes.

Version 0.5 is now available for download from the mylvmbackup project page.

I also would like to announce that I have set up a dedicated mailing list for this tool: if you want to discuss the usage/future of mylvmbackup, propose patches or ask for help, there now is a mailinglist, hosted on FreeLists.org. To subscribe, either enter your email address on the mylvmbackup list information page or send an email with the subject "subscribe" to mylvmbackup-request@freelists.org. The list is archived here. See you there!