One of the enhancements I added to MySQL Archiver in the recent release was listed innocently in the changelog as "Destination plugins can now rewrite the INSERT statement." Not very exciting or informative, huh? Keep reading.

This release fixes some minor bugs. It also adds a few major new features to several of the tools. The command-line option and help functionality, as well as several other pieces of common functionality, has been replaced with common modules that have a test suite. This is the first step towards a gradual rewrite to replace untested 'script' code with tested, maintainable code.

I've used Safari (the O'Reilly version) for a number of years now and it is a resource I often recommend to coworkers. Basically, it's an on-line library of technical books (since expanded to include video) from a group of publishers. O'Reilly, Microsoft Press, Cisco Press, Syngress, and many others have books and resources on-line at Safari. It came into being in 2001 but I remember a predecessor version back in the late 90s from Que Publishing/Macmillan Computer Publishing called Personal Bookshelf, which I also used. Back in those days I was in the Air Force and that provided some of the technical books I couldn't afford on an Air Force salary.

Subscribing to Safari gives one the ability to put a certain number of books onto a "bookshelf" and the books …

A little while ago I offered to take time off work and improve MySQL Table Sync. I've gotten a very positive response to that, with several organizations offering to contribute to the bounty, so I'll go ahead and commit to doing this. Read on for the details.

Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.

In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!

• Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
• Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
• Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
• While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix …

The new release of MySQL Toolkit (version 1051) updates MySQL Parallel Dump in minor ways, but more importantly, it adds MySQL Parallel Restore. Read on for details.

One of MMM users reported that they’re experiencing really weird memory leaks in checker processes used by MMM. After a deep investigation I’ve found out that Perl part of the checker and checker modules does not leak (at least I didn’t found these leaks), so I think it could be caused by some problems in MySQL DBD module (client uses Ubuntu server).

So, I’d like to ask all users to check if their checker processes use more memory than expected and if yes, what OS, MySQL libraries versions and Perl version used on their servers.

Thanks in advance for any help.

I am considering taking some time off work to concentrate deeply on MySQL Table Sync, which has been getting usage in very large companies whose names we all know. There are a lot of bugs and feature requests outstanding for it. It is overly complex, needs a lot of work, and I can't do it in one-hour or even three-hour chunks. I need to focus on it. I'm considering asking for a bounty of $2500 USD for this. Please let me know what you think of this; it seems to be a successful way to sponsor development on some other projects, like Vim.

For the amount of time I think this will take, $2500 is far below my per-hour consulting rate; I considered setting the bounty higher, but I think this will be a fair amount.

I would not begin this project before December at the earliest, so there's some time to raise funds and time for me to continue working on High Performance …

This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. Together you and I found a few bugs in it (table locking, argument quoting, exit status code). The restore utility is in progress.

MySQL Toolkit version numbers are based on Subversion revision number. This release is the first past the 1,000-commit milestone. It also marks several days of being in Sourceforge's top 100 most active projects. It has been in the top 300 for a couple of months, and the top 1000 for, um, a long time. While I would hasten to say I'm not a popularity-contest-focused person, it's rewarding to see that people think this project is important and useful.

This release of MySQL Toolkit updates MySQL Parallel Dump. I had been using it on a relatively small server; yesterday I took a deep breath and started using it to generate backups from a large server with lots of data and lots of queries. Of course I found a couple bugs and decided I needed more functionality and error handling. The major new functionality is for efficiency; it defers locking as late as possible and releases locks as soon as possible, and with the --setperdb option …