Si Chen wrote recently about the growth limits of open-source projects. He points out that as a project becomes larger, it gets harder to maintain. I can only agree. As the MySQL Toolkit project has grown, it's become significantly more work to maintain, document, and enhance.

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.

Some time ago I was looking for a password vault and came across some recommendations for KeePass. KeePass is open source and free. It's a nice password manager and some of the features I like are:

• Strong encryption of the password database
• The ability to use a password, key file, or the combination of the two to secure access to said password database
• A password generator with a multitude of options
• The ability to copy the password to the clipboard (without ever showing it) and have it clear the password after a set amount of time
• Organize password entries by groups and subgroups (think folders)

A new version, 1.09, released in October. There is also a …

For a variety reasons, including personal/family concerns and workload, I've not been able to write as often as I'd like. That doesn't just include the blog, but also writing articles. It's been a long while since I've written an article for SSC. I want to get back to writing at least monthly, if not more often. One of the keys to writing well is to write every day. Therefore, I'm going to provide some structure to the blog in order to make it easier to post every weekday with something that will hopefully be useful. Here's the types of posts that should be present based on the day of the week:

• Monday - Career Development
• Tuesday - Tips, Tricks, and SQL Scripts
• Wednesday - Tools, Tools, and More Tools
• Thursday - Tips, Tricks, and SQL Scripts
…

This tool allow to deploy large number of MySQL replication Slaves (and Master servers)

It is available on Ruby Forge: http://rubyforge.org/projects/vladenvironment/ The tool is based on Vlad the Deployer and is written on Ruby

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.

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 …