Colin Charles Agenda

If you’re in Kyoto, Japan on the 20-21 July 2007, consider visiting the Open Source Conference 2007 Kansai (page is in Japanese, with no English translation, but never worry, Google Translate Japanese to English Beta means that you and I, now read Japanese – read the English translation).

There are a lot of participating parties, there is no cost to attend the conference (I understand this is very commonplace in Japan), and if you’re a MySQL person, you’ll find Yoshinori Matsunobu giving a couple of interesting talks:

• On the 20 (Friday), his talk is titled “MySQL High Availability, and Scale-out solutions” and will focus largely on replication, and the use of heartbeat and DRBD.
• On the 21 (Saturday), his talk is on the ever popular MySQL Cluster.

Its nearby the Kyoto station. Its a 3-hour trip from Tokyo. Consider it a weekend getaway, where you’ll be pumped with knowledge :-)

Technorati Tags: mysql, conference, kyoto, japan, open source conference

Came across ask a SQL guru today. Service is run by the Microsoft DB MVP’s. You call them (via Skype), and they answer your query, via a video cast. Its quite new, hasn’t proven itself (I mean, why not just ask a forum?), and also offers itself as a video podcast. I’m thinking it can be useful for newer folk, especially if you like step-by-step instructions.

Going by how useful the Guru Bar at the MySQL Expo 2007 was, and how easy it is to make screencasts these days, I wonder if this would be something some guilds members would consider in addition to the wonderful podcast by Sheeri?

Technorati Tags: ask a sql guru, sql, sql guru

I don’t claim to be a security expert, but I’d like opinions from people in the field, as well as database experts that view security highly. Here are some opinions from a discussion with Chad and Lenz a while ago. What do you consider a security hole, that warrants immediate action or a release of a server within a sensible timeframe?

• Remotely exploiting MySQL without login credentials
• Remotely crashing MySQL without login credentials

The above two are definite problems. What about:

• denial of service attacks
• data loss
• data changes
• data insertion

Chad tells us, “security is policy enforcement.” And the policy should state: “the service should always be available to authorized people, never to unauthrized people”.

Opinions, please. Tell me what are on the “definite list” that should be fixed within 24-hours, whats on the possibly annoying list, that should be released within 72-hours, and whats on the its an annoying bug, but its not a “high”/”large” security violation (like, Chad finds “a function SUBSTR that always returns one too few characters” a problem in his definition) which can be fixed during the next release cycle.

Also, if anyone has pointers to how other OSS projects or major release software deals with security. Say, like Mark Cox’s security information (he’s Mr. Security at Red Hat, and they’ve got some amazing turnaround times).

Technorati Tags: mysql, security

In an effort to reduce the number of open tabs I have in Firefox, I have some rather interesting MySQL-related resources that I think the rest of Planet MySQL will quite enjoy.

• Linbit (the makers of DRBD) and MySQL are in a partnership now, and Irwan Jamaluddin, a systems adminstrator at one of the only Linux support companies in Malaysia, has recently blogged about his journey with DRBD and MySQL. The operating system base is RHEL 5, and there is a step-by-step guide on how he got it working. From what I gather, its a cut-n-paste tutorial, not something I’ve verified, but I’m sure I’ll refer to it when I want to play with DRBD.
• MySQL Basics in Pictures. Granted they’ve used an odd version of Linux for the basis of the tutorial, but that doesn’t affect the quality of the tutorial. Covers all the basics, from getting started, simple administration, queries, table manipulations, very basic security, and web access. Incidentally, they also offer some PHP Basics, that MySQL beginners might find useful.
• The official announcement for the MySQL Users Conference Japan is out. September 11, and 12 2007, at the National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation, registrations open up in July, its free to attend if you pre-register, but costs 5,000 yen if you walk-in (~AUD50).
• The MySQL Database Server rPath appliance is out. Single installation CD, QEMU/VMWare/Xen images. The version of MySQL shipped with it is rather dated (5.0.24), 5.0.33 is available in the rPath repositories already (still, somewhat dated!). But this is a one-stop solution to running MySQL (i.e. its dead easy), so give it a twirl.

Technorati Tags: mysql, drbd, rhel, basics in pictures, uc-j, mysql users conference, japan, rpath, mysql appliance

Even though the conference is long over, I still have unpublished notes sitting on my ~/Desktop, and it only makes sense that I clean it out. These are notes from Ed Presz’s session, titled For Ticketmaster, MySQL Replication is the Ticket! They are as always, pretty raw.

We were all given a handout, which was some corporate spiel, which contained a lot of information about hiring. Their mission is to “sell more tickets better than anyone in the event business, worldwide”.

I found it impressive to note that Ticketmaster managed last year’s Melbourne Commonwealth ticket sales. I guess, even more impressive is that for next year’s Beijing Olympics, Ticketmaster ran a ticket lottery, and 17,843 seat tickets were sold in 75 seconds!

MySQL 4.0.18 is currently used, and they plan to upgrade to MySQL 5.0.27 in 2007 – difference in the join syntax between 4 & 5 was a blocker. Reference was made to mysql#13551.

They use InnoDB, for its row-level locking, referential integrity, transaction support. The average size of the “event” database is ~20GB, with around ~230 tables. Rely heavily on MySQL replication. At any one time there are between 100,000 – 130,000 visible events!

MyISAM tables for full-text searching (InnoDB doesn’t do this yet) and LiveDaily. Using vBulletin, MyISAM performs better too.

One-way replication is very fast. No/minimal performance hit on MySQL master. Its real easy to add slaves. Dual masters, a farm of slaves (4) [cluster], then 4 more slaves of those slaves. Then they send all traffic to the lower level slaves.

Think through your architecture, since there is no multi-master replication. A slave can only have one master. Setup two instances of MySQL on MySQL_Server_1 listening on different ports (but this is not what they use). They use Bi-Directional replication (multi-master, circular, dual-master). Replicating from the UK to the US. They use UTF-8 and UTC time on the servers.

innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=0 – resulted in huge performance improvement with MySQL replication. However its not writing to disk at each commit, so you can lose 1 second of insert/update/delete values in the event of a crash. Mitigated the risk because there are so many slaves.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqlconf, mysqlconf07, ticketmaster, replication

You know you want to go. Its going to be in Tokyo, Japan. Having passed by the Narita airport quite some number of times, I’ve always wondered what was beyond those walls.

MySQL UC-J: September 11-12 2007

I would sincerely encourage all folk in the Asia-Pacific region, using or dabbling in MySQL to attempt to be there. Thats right, I’m calling on you folk from Singapore, Malaysia, China, Korea, Thailand, and how can we forget our beloved Australia & New Zealand (though I’m not sure if flying to Tokyo is any less harrowing an experience than flying to San Francisco).

Flights are going to be shorter, they are going to be cheaper, and you’re going to get to see Tokyo. More importantly, if you pre-register, rumor has it, you will not be paying an attendance fee. Seats will be snapped up fast. Session lineups are amazing. What more can I say besides its going to be a great & fun experience for all.

Technorati Tags: mysql, users conference japan, uc-j, save the date