Lenz Grimmer's blog

Linuxtag is likely one of the oldest and largest Linux/OSS events in Germany. I remember having been there to represent SuSE Linux while it still took place at the University of Kaiserslautern, using tables and chairs from the lecture rooms as exhibition stands (this must have been around 1998 or 1999). This year it will take place in Berlin again, and the session schedule looks very promising. I'll be there from Wednesday till Friday and I feel that I will have a hard time deciding which presentations I should attend...

I'll be speaking about What's new in MySQL 5.5 on Friday, 13th of May, at 15:00. If you haven't updated to MySQL 5.5 yet, stop by to hear what new features and improvements have been implemented in this version, which was released in December last year.

In addition to my presentation, there will be two more talks given by Oracle employees:

Wim Coekaerts, SVP of Linux and Virtualization Engineering at Oracle will give the first keynote on Wednesday 11th, 14:00. He'll be talking about Taking Linux into the Clouds — this is a very hot topic and I look forward to this session.

Right afterwards, Dalibor Topic will provide us with an OpenJDK Community Update. If you're a Java developer and you'd like to get the scoop of what's coming, this presentation is one you should not miss!

See you in Berlin!

It was ready for a while already, but now it's part of the official FOSDEM schedule as well: I am very pleased to announce the presentations and speakers of the MySQL & Friends Developer Room, which will take place this coming Saturday (5th of February) in Brussels, Belgium.

This year, our DevRoom will be located in room H.2213 (in the H Building), which has a capacity of up to 100 people and will be available to us from 13:00-19:00 o'clock. We have 12 sessions lined up, each will last 25 minutes (incl. Q&A). Without further ado, here's our schedule:

Time	Speaker	Session Title
13:00-13:25	Lenz Grimmer	Welcome note / What's new in MySQL 5.5
13:30-13:55	Oli Sennhauser	HandlerSocket and similar technologies - NoSQL for MySQL
14:00-14:25	Steve Hardy	Boosting Enterprise MySQL performance: implementing I/O prefetch for InnoDB
14:30-14:55	Istvan Podor	Over 20,000QPS, XtraDB performance show
15:00-15:25	Istvan Podor	Data Recovery for MySQL
15:30-15:55	Kenny Gryp	Taking Backups With XtraBackup
16:00-16:25	Sergey Petrunya	New query optimizer features in MariaDB
16:30-16:55	Lenz Grimmer	MySQL 5.5 Replication Enhancements: an overview
17:00-17:25	Giuseppe Maxia	Seamless MySQL replication failover with Tungsten
17:30-17:55	Petya Kohts	Multimaster MySQL failover
18:00-18:25	Seppo Jaakola	Multi-Master Replication Approaches
18:30-18:55	Stéphane Combaudon	A practical overview of Maatkit

I would like to thank all speakers for their submissions and for the efforts they are willing to go through in order to make it to this event! If you happen to be at FOSDEM this year, please stop by and join us.

We also plan to head out for a meetup over dinner after the event. If you would like to attend, please register, so we can take you into account! (Thanks a lot for Kenny Gryp for organizing this meetup)

Congratulations to the Drupal community for getting version 7.0 released! This is a major mile stone and an excellent reason to celebrate!

If you want to give Drupal 7 a try without having to install anything, I've now updated my Drupal 7 appliances on SuSE Studio to the latest release. The appliance is based on openSUSE Linux 11.3 and is available in two variants:

• A text-mode only appliance to which you connect using your local web browser via the network.
• A GUI version that starts up the Firefox browser in a minimalistic GNOME desktop to perform the installation locally. Remote network access is available, too.

The database backend is MySQL 5.1, with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled. phpMyAdmin has been added to support web-based administration of the MySQL server. You can access it via http://localhost/phpMyAdmin/. I also added drush, the Drupal command line shell and scripting interface and some additional packages (yast2-http-server, bind-utils, php5-ctype, patch). I also bumped up the appliance's version number to 7.0.0, to match the version number of Drupal included.

The appliance is available in various formats:

• A live raw disk image, ready to be written to an USB stick or flash drive
• A live ISO image, to be burned on a CD or used in a virtual machine
• A hard disk image, to be dumped on a hard disk drive
• Various virtual disk formats, e.g. OVF, VMWare/VirtualBox/KVM and Xen

Please see the installation instructions provided on the download pages for details on how to use the various image formats.

So congratulations to the Drupal developer community for reaching this goal and thanks to SuSE/Novell/Attachmate for providing the infrastructure for creating such appliances. I also would like to especially thank Richard Bos for the testing and many suggestions for improvement of these appliances!

Just as a friendly reminder about what I wrote a month ago: we've already received a number of great talk submissions for the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, thanks to everyone who contributed so far! However, we still are looking for some more!

You can submit your proposal via this form. The deadline for turning in your talk is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010.

Just to recapitulate, the DevRoom (H.2213) will be available to us on Saturday 5th 2011, from 13:00 till 19:00. Each session will last 20 minutes plus 5 minutes of Q&A. See this year's schedule for inspiration — I think we had a great lineup of talks that addressed a good mixture of MySQL-related topics. I am looking forward to your ideas and suggestions! Thanks in advance for your support.

I've been going through our bugs database to compile a list of some noteworthy patch contributions that have been included in the MySQL 5.5 release. Of course any contribution is appreciated, no matter how small! And the list is probably not complete — please let me know if I'm missing any. I omitted a number of smaller patches that fixed compile issues and I only considered contributions that were tracked in our bug database and were tagged as "Contribution".

Note that these are new patches that have not been part of any other MySQL release — of course, all contributions from previous releases are included in 5.5 as well. We also received a few patches for InnoDB (particularly by Mark Callaghan and his team mates at Google/Facebook), which were incorporated in the InnoDB plugin in MySQL 5.1 (and hence got included in the InnoDB version of MySQL 5.5, too).

Here they are, in no particular order:

• BUG#13175: SHA2 function (Patch contributed by Bill Karwin)
• BUG#14104: FLUSH LOGS now takes an optional log_type value so that FLUSH log_type LOGS can be used to flush only a specified log type. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)
• BUG#27249: Aliases for wildcards (as in SELECT t.* AS 'alias' FROM t) are no longer accepted and result in an error. Previously, such aliases were ignored silently. (Patch contributed by Martin Friebe)
• BUG#40368: mysqld_safe did not honor underscores in the same way as dashes for server options (Patch contributed by Erik Ljungstrom)
• BUG#45767: Removal of Field::pack_key, Field::unpack_key, Field::pack_cmp storage engine functions (Patch contributed by Zardosht Kasheff)
• BUG#50057: SHOW PROFILE CPU port for Windows (Patch contributed by Alex Budkovski)
• BUG#5724: "mysqladmin password" prompts for a password when none is provided on the command line (Patch contributed by Harrison Fisk)
• BUG#26780: A new mysql client option "--auto-vertical-output", which causes the client to test whether a result table is too wide for the current window (where available) and emit vertical results in that case. (Patch contributed by Eric Bergen)

A big "Thank you" to all the contributors!

Am 5.+6. Februar 2011 findet in Brüssel die "Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting" (FOSDEM) - Konferenz statt. Auch im nächsten Jahr wird es wieder einen "Developer Room" zum Thema MySQL geben. Unter dem Motto "MySQL & Friends" möchten wir ein umfangreiches Programm an Vorträgen rund um den MySQL Server zusammenstellen, mit dem wir Entwickler und MySQL-Administratoren gleichermaßen ansprechen wollen.

Jeder Vortrag wird 20 Minuten dauern (plus 5 Minuten Q&A). Es sind insgesamt 12 Slots zu vergeben. Der Call for Papers ist bereits eröffnet - Vorschläge für Vorträge (in englischer Sprache) können bis Sonntag, 26. Dezember hier eingereicht werden.

Weitere Informationen gibt es auf dem MySQL Forge Wiki und dem englischen Call for Papers.

Ich freue mich auf Eure Themenvorschläge!

It's that time of the year again — the nice folks at FOSDEM have granted us a developer room at their upcoming conference (February 5+6 2011 in Brussels, Belgium)!

As usual there were more applications than they were able to accommodate, so we are very grateful for this opportunity for collaboration. Titled "MySQL and Friends", our room next year will be H.2213 with a capacity of 100 seats. It will be at our disposal on Saturday 5th, from 13:00 till 19:00. Like last year, we would like to set up a schedule of talks related to the MySQL server and the various projects that surround it. Each talk will last 20 minutes, plus 5 minutes of Q&A and a 5 minute break for switching speakers, giving us 12 slots in total to fill with excellent tech talks. Take a look at this year's schedule for some examples! I hope we can assemble an even more exciting and interesting schedule for next year.

Quoting from my last year's call for papers:

We are looking for covering a wide range of topics that attract both MySQL DBAs as well as application developers that work with MySQL as their database of choice. Are you developing a new storage engine or other plugin? Do you want to share your experiences and best practices in administering or deploying MySQL servers? Did you develop a new method to scale a MySQL setup? Let us and the audience know about it! You can submit your talk proposal via this submission form.

The deadline for turning in your proposal is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010, after which there will be a voting and rating period to identify the most interesting and attractive topics.

Please check the FOSDEM 2011 information page on the MySQL Forge Wiki for more details and don't hesitate to contact me directly, if you have any questions or suggestions. I look forward to your proposals!

Over the weekend I updated my Drupal 7 test appliance in SUSE Studio to the Drupal 7.0-beta2 release, which was released on Oct. 23rd. I also added phpMyAdmin upon a user request, to provide a web-based method to work with the MySQL instance, if needed.

In addition to the lightweight "headless" appliance (which can only be accessed and configured via a remote network connection), I've now also created a GUI-based version. This appliance starts a minimal GNOME desktop and a Mozilla Firefox browser, which in turn opens the Drupal installation page by default. I hope you will find this useful if you want to toy around and test Drupal 7 without having to go through the entire OS and LAMP stack configuration yourself. In fact, you can even test this appliance via the recently added test drive option from right out of your web browser!

The appliance is now also available in OVF format. SuSE Studio now also builds Amazon EC2 images, which don't seem to be available for download from the SUSE Gallery yet. I assume this is a recent addition to the continuously improving SUSE Studio functionality, hopefully these images will be made available soon.

Heute hat mir der Postbote Post aus Österreich gebracht: Michael Prokop vom GRML-Projekt war so freundlich, mit ein Exemplar seines Buches "Open Source Projektmanagement" (Open Source Press) zu schicken, das im September dieses Jahres auf den Markt kam. Sogar mit Widmung - vielen Dank dafür!

Ich zitiere einfach mal aus der Beschreibung des Verlags:

Die Unterschiede bei der Entwicklung von Open-Source- und Closed-Source-Software gehen weit über Fragen der Lizenzierung hinaus. Wer ein freies Projekt startet, sollte die ganz eigenen Regeln kennen, um nicht Motivation und Arbeit aller Beteiligten zu gefährden. Das heißt zugleich: Wer die besondere Dynamik bei der Entwicklung freier Software zu nutzen weiß, wird von den technischen Ergebnissen und der besonderen Atmosphäre gemeinschaftlicher Arbeit immer begeistert.

Michael Prokop, Initiator und Leiter des erfolgreichen "Grml"-Projekts, schöpft aus der Erfahrung, wenn er die vielfältigen Aspekte freier und zugleich professioneller Entwicklungsarbeit beschreibt: soziale Belange der Teambildung und Motivation, technische Hilfsmittel der Kommunikation und Code-Entwicklung, aber auch ganz praktische Fragen der Finanzierung, des Marketings und der Dokumentation.

Wer neue Impulse für seine Mitarbeit bei freien Projekten sucht oder als Entwickler kommerzieller Produkte Einblick in den Open-Source-Kosmos nehmen möchte, findet in diesem Buch eine wertvolle Quelle.

Unter der Adresse http://release-it.org/ findet sich die Website zum Buch. Das Inhaltsverzeichnis liest sich vielversprechend – ich hoffe ich habe bald Gelegenheit dazu, mir das Buch zu Gemüte zu führen.

Die Kapitel sind mit Berichten aus der Praxis und Exkursen externer Autoren angereichert und ich konnte einige bekannte Namen unter den Beteiligten ausmachen. Es war mir eine Freude und Ehre, zum Kapitel 4.1 "Team - Arbeitsformen in der Softwareentwicklung" einen Exkurs über das Arbeiten in einer virtuellen Firma am Beispiel von MySQL beisteuern zu dürfen. Zum Thema "Community Management" hat Alexandra Leisse von Nokia/Qt einen interessanten Exkurs geschrieben, dem ich voll und ganz zustimme

The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the SQL mode and InnoDB mode. Using this configuration helps to ensure that Drupal works well with the current version of MySQL/InnoDB and does not use any "questionable" SQL statements. This might be especially interesting for additional modules - Drupal core did not reveal any problems using strict mode so far.

You can download disk images for VMware/Virtualbox/KVM or XEN from the SUSE Gallery (free login required). Just boot the appliance in your virtualization application of choice, choose your keyboard layout and step through the network configuration and Time Zone selection. Once the appliance has booted up and the login: prompt appeared, point your web browser to the appliance's IP address to start the Drupal installation/configuration. MySQL has been pre-configured, there is an empty database named "drupal" and a user "drupal" with the same password to access it. You just need to enter this information in the Drupal Database configuration dialogue during the installation. Anything else can be configured to your liking.

After you have finished the installation, you can toy around with a fresh Drupal 7 installation! Install additional modules, change the themes, add content. And make sure to report all bugs that you run into while doing so! Have fun.

Auf der amoocon 2010 in Rostock wurde ich von Ralf Spenneberg angesprochen, ob ich nicht Lust hätte, auf seiner OpenSource-Konferenz einen Vortrag zum Thema MySQL zu halten.

Die habe ich – am 23. September um 14:30 werde ich dort etwas zum Thema "MySQL Hochverfügbarkeit" erzählen. Der Vortrag soll einen Überblick darüber geben, mit welchen Mitteln und Methoden man einen MySQL-Server ausfallsicher machen kann und welche Aspekte dabei zu berücksichtigen sind.

Die OpenSource Trends Days erstrecken sich über zwei Tage; am ersten Tag gibt es Tutorien zu den Themen "Check-MK - Das Nagios-Über-Plugin" und "Kolab - Der Exchange-Killer". Am zweiten Tag gibt es neben meinem Vortrag noch Beiträge zu Postfix, Kolab, Fehlertoleranz mit KVM und XEN, OpenVPN und Nagios – ein vielversprechendes Programm von namhaften Experten auf diesen Gebieten.

Für Spenneberg-Bestandskunden ist die Teilnahme kostenlos, die reguläre Teilnahmegebühr ist mit 99 EUR pro Tag durchaus erschwinglich. Ich freue mich darauf!