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!

Shortly after I posted my last summary of MySQL releases, our son Mats was born and I went on a 2.5-week vacation. Our developers did not rest in the meanwhile and I'd like to give you a quick update of what's new since then:

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.0

• Visual Studio 2010 RC support
• Nested transaction scope support

MySQL Workbench 5.2.16 Beta 6

• Fixed 67 bugs
• Saving your profile/connection passwords in OSX keychain, gnome-keyring or in an encrypted password-vault-file.
• New rapid development features for generating complete SQL Select/DML statements or names for selected objects in Query Editor to either the query area or clipboard.
• The ability to set a preference for the placement  (left or right side) of the sidebar in the Query Editor (Currently on Windows only, coming to Mac and Linux soon).
• Further optimization and stabilization of the administrator components

MySQL Server 5.1.44

• This release now includes InnoDB Plugin version 1.0.6, wich is considered to be of Release Candidate (RC) quality.
• Lots of bug fixes - see the ChangeLog for details.

MySQL Server 5.5.2 Milestone 2

• Also includes the updated InnoDB Plugin 1.0.6 and several fixes - see the ChangeLog for details. For an overview of new features in the 5.5 code base, check out the "What's new in 5.5" page in the reference manual.

Please note that the MySQL downloads section has been split into two parts. As usual, you will find downloads of both GA and development versions of all MySQL products and releases on the MySQL DevZone. In addition to that, we've now added a pointer to the downloads of officially released (GA) versions to the main web site on http://www.mysql.com/downloads/.

I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.13 has now been released. This release includes a fix for a nasty bug in on of the recently added Perl hooks (precleanup.pm) and some added functionality (better support for remote rsync backups).

From the ChangeLog: 

• Deleted sample precleanup.pm hook as it has potential to cause harm and is too specialized on a particular use case (BUG#394668)
• Added support for rsync via SSH (BUG#392462)
• Fixed InnoDB recovery in case a relative path to the MySQL data directory is defined (BUG#38337), improved the documentation of relpath in the man page.

Some time ago I posted a compilation of applications and programming languages that provide an API to connect to the MySQL Server. As it turned out, I forgot a few that I would like to mention here:

• Apache DBD API: a MySQL driver for mod_apr_dbd is not included in the official distribution, but can be obtained seperately from here. Some distributions (e.g. openSUSE) actually provide installable packages of this driver module.
• GRASS MySQL driver: The MySQL database driver in GRASS enables GRASS applications to store vector attributes in a MySQL server. Alternatively, data can be stored in an embedded version of the MySQL Server.
• HDBC: HDBC provides an abstraction layer between Haskell programs and SQL relational databases. This lets you write database code once, in Haskell, and have it work with any number of backend SQL databases.
• libdrizzle: This is the client and protocol library for Drizzle and MySQL that provides both client and server interfaces. A number of APIs (e.g. Java, Lua, Perl and Ruby as well as Python) have been built on top of it, but I'm not quite sure if they all support the MySQL client/server protocol as well.
• MySQL Connector/Python: MySQL Connector/Python is implementing the MySQL Client/Server protocol completely in Python. This means you don't have to compile anything - the MySQL client library doesn't even have to be installed on your system.

Do you know of any other MySQL Connectors/APIs? Let me know!

We've now published a new set of binary packages including the extended GIS functionality from the mysql-5.1-wl1326 source tree.

This release is based on the MySQL 5.1.35 code base and fixes the bugs mentioned below. It includes some improvements to the GIS functionality as well, so please use these packages for future testing of the MySQL GIS functionality.

The following GIS-related bugs were fixed in this version:

• Bug#31753: Buffer/area functions only return first row of set
• Bug#32032: Contains() does not work on MultiPolygons, may force a disconnect and/or result in extremely long query times.
• Bug#32100: contains, intersects functions never return. Query disconnects or times out.
• Bug#33035: Intersection function returns 'Function doesn't exist' error
• Bug#40874: Buffer function doesn't work with LINESTRING
• Bug#41481: Buffer function never returns, cpu 100%, system locks up
• Bug#43493: union function returns polygon not multipolygon for non-intersecting polygons
• Bug#44753: nan error in union function

I'd like to explicitly thank John Powell for his extensive testing and bug reporting so far, he helped us quite a lot to improve the quality of the GIS code.

Please help us by by testing this new release and reporting bugs at our public bug database. For convenience, please tag your Bug reports with "gis" and make sure to put them in the "Server: GIS" category!

I admit it — I'm a fan of simulation software, particularly flight simulators. Probably the best Open Source Flight Simulator out there is FlightGear — it provides an impressive level of reality and you can download and install many additional plane models and terrains. There are packages of FlightGear 1.0.0 in the games repository of the openSUSE Build Service, which works quite well and I have been enjoying it a lot. However, the FlightGear project released version 1.9.x quite a while ago (1.9.1 was published in January 2009) and I was itching on giving the new version a try (just take a look at the screenshots and you know what I mean). However, building FlighGear on Linux is quite a complex task with many dependencies, and so held off from doing it myself, waiting for someone else to perform the update...

Well, this weekend I finally bit the bullet and did it myself - FlightGear 1.9.1 has now been added to my home:LenzGr build repository. I based my packages on the ones included in the games repository, but I plan on cleaning them up a bit and splitting them into separate packages (currently the FlightGear source RPM contains SimGear and fgrun as well). I also "borrowed" the OpenSceneGraph sources and spec file from the PackMan repository, in order to have a functional build. Unfortunately FlightGear currently only builds on a very limited list of distributions so far (namely OpenSUSE 11.0, just what I needed) — I haven't had time to adapt the spec files for FlightGear and OpenSceneGraph to match the appropriate build dependencies for the other distributions yet and "02-check-gcc-output" gives me some grief on platforms where it actually builds but generates compiler warnings (but patches are welcome!)...

Shortly after I created the initial packages of embedded InnoDB on the OpenSUSE Build Service, Oracle/Innobase released an updated version (1.0.3.5325). In addition to many improvements and bug fixes, they slightly changed the versioning scheme to better indicate what version of the InnodDB plugin their code is based on (see Vasil's posting on the InnoDB Forums for more information).

I've now updated my InnoDB packages on the Build Service to this version as well - please note that the naming scheme of the shared library package has been changed from "embedded_innodb1" to "libinnodb2" — RPM will take care of replacing the old package during update, even though the name has changed.

After a long hiatus, I am happy to announce that mylvmbackup version 0.12 has now been released. This release includes a large number of improvements, minor code cleanups, as well as some new functionality. In particular, I would like to thank Matthew Boehm, Tim Stoop, Baron Schwartz, Ville Skyttä and Ronald Bradford for their contributions.

Some notable highlights from the ChangeLog:

• Removed the absolute path names to external tools (make sure $PATH is correct)
• Added --log-err to the startup options of the recovery instance to avoid cluttering the server's error log
• Added support for hooks written as Perl Modules. (Matthew Boehm)
• Added support for date/time-formatted path names for backupdir and mountdir (Matthew Boehm)
• Backupdir and mountdir are now created automatically (Matthew Boehm)
• Added new hook "logerr" when an error is logged. (Matthew Boehm)
• Added Option --keep-mount... (Tim Stoop)
• Removed the bind mount, now requires LVMv2
• Support reading login/password from ~/.my.cnf (Baron Schwartz)
• Documentation fixes and improvements (Ville Skyttä) (Bug #302144)

XtraBackup is an Open Source online (non-blockable) backup solution for the InnoDB and XtraDB storage engines. It works with both MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 (and possibly 5.4 as well) and is distributed under the GPLv2.

Some weeks ago Vadim announced the availability of xtrabackup-0.7, stating that they consider it stable enough now to label this version a "Release Candidate". I've been maintaining RPM packages of xtrabackup on the fine openSUSE Build Service for quite some time now, RPMs of 0.7 for a number of distributions are now available for download. Please report any bug reports via the bug tracker on Launchpad.

As you may have heard, we're switching to a new release model with the upcoming MySQL 5.4 release.

If you are curious to learn more about what will change in the way in which future versions MySQL will be developed and released, make sure to attend our next MySQL University session about The New MySQL Release Model on Thursday, 11th of June, 14:00 UTC. Tomas Ulin, our director of MySQL server development will go through the planned changes and would also like to get your input and feedback on these changes.

We're using DimDim for broadcasting this session, which allows you to listen to the audio while watching the slides with your web browser. You can comment and discuss via a chat function, too! We're looking forward to your input. To attend, point your browser to this address (Adobe flash player required).

The session will be recorded and posted on the MySQL Forge Wiki, so you can watch the presentation later as well. You can also provide your feedback on the release model by posting on the MySQL Internals mailinglist.

Version 1.0.3-alpha of the MySQL Connector/C++ has just been announced by Lawrin Novitsky and is now available for download. This driver is licensed under the GPL and is a new implementation of the MySQL Client/Server protocol. Instead of wrapping the C API calls in C++ methods, the implementation mimics the JDBC API, which hopefully feels much more "native" to a seasoned C++ developer.

The driver has been ported to a wide range of platforms and is about to hit the beta test phase. So if you're writing a C++ application that needs to connect to a MySQL Server, give it a try! The developers are always looking for feedback.

More information and examples on how to use it can be found on this detailed Wiki page on the MySQL Forge.

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!

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.

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!

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