Student questions are always interesting! They get me to think and to write. The question this time is: “How do I write a Bash Shell script to process multiple MySQL script files?” This post builds the following model (courtesy of MySQL Workbench) by using a bash shell script and MySQL script files, but there’s a disclaimer on this post. It shows both insecure and secure approaches and you should avoid the insecure ones.

It seems a quick refresher on how to use arrays in bash shell may be helpful. While it’s essential in a Linux environment, it’s seems not everyone masters the bash shell.

Especially, since I checked my …

Fedora comes with vim and gedit installed but the gedit installation is bare bones. You can update gedit to include supplemental Plug-ins with the following yum command as the root user:

yum install -y gedit-plugins

It generates the following log file:

Loaded plugins: langpacks, refresh-packagekit
mysql-connectors-community                                  | 2.5 kB  00:00     
mysql-tools-community                                       | 2.5 kB  00:00     
mysql56-community                                           | 2.5 kB  00:00     
pgdg93                                                      | 3.6 kB  00:00     
updates/20/x86_64/metalink                                  |  14 kB  00:00     
updates                                                     | 4.9 kB  00:00 …

The fsfreeze command, is used to suspend and resume access to a file system. This allows consistent snapshots to be taken of the filesystem. fsfreeze supports Ext3/4, ReiserFS, JFS and XFS.

A filesystem can be frozen using following command:

# /sbin/fsfreeze -f /data

Now if you are writing to this filesystem, the process/command will be stuck. For example, following command will be stuck in D (UNINTERUPTEBLE_SLEEP) state:

# echo “testing” > /data/file

Only after the filesystem is unfreezed using the following command, can it continue:

# /sbin/fsfreeze -u /data

As per the fsfreeze main page, “fsfreeze is unnecessary for device-mapper devices. The device-mapper (and LVM) automatically freezes filesystem on the device when a snapshot creation is requested.”

fsfreeze is provided by the util-linux package in RHEL systems. Along with userspace support, fsfreeze also …

While I previously blogged about installing Netbeans 8, some of my students would prefer to use the Eclipse IDE. This post shows how to install and configure Eclipse IDE, include the mysql-connector-java.jar, and write Java to access the MySQL.

You can download Eclipse IDE and then open it in Fedora’s Archive Manager. You can use the Archive Manager to Extract the Eclipse IDE to a directory of your choice. I opted to extract it into my student user’s home directory, which is /home/student.

After extracting the Eclipse IDE, you can check the contents of the eclipse directory with the following command:

ls -al eclipse

You should see the following:

There are tools like pt-kill from the percona tool kit that may print/kill the long running transactions at MariaDB, MySQL or at Percona data instances, but a lot of backup scripts are just some simple bash lines.
So checking for long running transactions before the backup to be executed seems to be a step that is missed a lot.

Here is one line that might be just added in every bash script before the backup to be executed
Variant 1. Just log all the processlist entries and calculate which ones were running longer than TIMELIMIT:

$ export TIMELIMIT=70 && echo "$(date) : check for long runnig queries start:" >> /tmp/processlist.list.to.kill && mysql -BN -e 'show processlist;' | tee -a /tmp/processlist.list.to.kill | awk -vlongtime=${TIMELIMIT} '($6>longtime){print "kill "$1";"}' | tee -a /tmp/processlist.list.to.kill

Variant 2: Log all the processlist, calculate the calculate which processes …

Some of my students want to use the Fedora image that I built for my database classes in my Java software development life cycle course. As a result, they wanted a Java development environment installed. I examined JDeveloper 11g (11.1.1.7.0) and 12c (12.1.3) but resolved on the more generic Netbeans 8 (8.0.2) IDE.

JDK 7 with Netbeans 8 Download

You can download the generic Netbeans 8 IDE, the JDK 7 with Netbeans, or the JDK 8 with Netbeans for the Linux installation. After you download the executable program, you should follow these instructions to install the Netbeans 8 IDE on Fedora.

As the …

Introduction

Systemd is a management and configuration platform available in all major Linux distributions. It provides infrastructure for service start, stop, restart and several other novel functionalities to manage services. Systemd replaces SysV and upstart initialization systems and is the default init system in most modern Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Linux, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, SLES and openSUSE.

Preliminary support for systemd was introduced in earlier versions of MySQL. However, it had the following limitations and disadvantages:

1. Use of ping tricks to check whether mysqld is ready to serve client connections.
2. Though systemd had superior process control for automatic restarts, mysqld_safe was still used to identify abnormal mysqld termination and do automatic restarts.
…

One of my students requested an option to the bash shell. It was interesting to hear that he wanted me to instal the zsh in my Fedora image. There’s only one book that I’m aware of that’s been published on the Z Shell, and it is From Bash to Z Shell.

This post shows how to add the zsh to my Fedora image because I already release a new one for the term without the zsh shell. You use the yum utility as the root user to install the zsh library:

yum …

Somebody suggested that I try out thin, “A fast and very simple Ruby web server.” So, I thought it might be interesting to test, and a simplification over Rails to demonstrate an small Ruby MVC pattern.

Installing thin seemed straight forward as a gem installation, like

gem install thin

The initial install didn’t work out of the box because I’d neglected to install the gcc-c++ library. It raised the following errors:

Fetching: eventmachine-1.0.7.gem (100%)
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
ERROR:  Error installing thin:
        ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.
 
    /usr/bin/ruby extconf.rb
checking for main() in -lssl... no
checking for rb_trap_immediate in ruby.h,rubysig.h... no
checking for rb_thread_blocking_region()... yes
checking for …

Last week I posted how to configure and test Ruby and MySQL. Somebody asked me how to handle a dynamic list of columns. So, here’s a quick little program to show you how to read the dynamic list of column:

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require 'rubygems'
require 'mysql'
 
# Begin block.
begin
  # Create a new connection resource.
  db = Mysql.new('localhost','student','student','studentdb')
 
  # Create a result set.
  rs = db.query('SELECT item_title, item_rating FROM item')
  # Read through the result set hash.
  rs.each do | row |
    out = ""
    i = 0
    while i < db.field_count
      # Check if not last column.
      if i < db.field_count - 1
        out += "#{row[i]}, "
      else
        out += "#{row[i]}" …