This will be a multi-part series covering various areas of failover for MySQL.  This first installment will primarily look at some design considerations, which you can then apply to your own environment in your own way.  The concepts presented here are merely suggestions and not out-right “how-to”.   Every company has specific technologies or skill-sets in… Read More »

I really like Amazon.com and I have been a Prime member for several years. Along with millions of different items for sale, Amazon has an affiliate program, where you can earn money advertising products on your web site. When a visitor to your site clicks on a link and orders a product from Amazon, you earn a small commission on the total sale. As an affiliate, you have access to Amazon’s Product Advertising API for obtaining product information. But, you can use this information for many other purposes.

The Amazon API is like most other API’s, and their API web site provides you with code examples and explains how it all works. I am going to show you how a Perl program which you can use to access the API data and store it in a …

Adding good content to Twitter can be a pain. I can’t do it during working hours, and I don’t have much time at night. But, the more content you have, the more followers you can gain, and the more your original tweets can be seen (hopefully). I have written several posts about using the latest Perl-Twitter API – Net::Twitter::Lite::WithAPIv1_1, so you might want to check these out as well.

– Use MySQL and Perl to automatically find, follow and unfollow twitter users

– Using Perl to retrieve direct messages from Twitter, insert messages into a MySQL database and then …

A friend of mine asked me how they could automatically follow and unfollow people on Twitter. But they didn’t want to follow just anyone and everyone. He had a Twitter account which they used for recruiting in a very narrow construction industry. He wanted to find people in the same industry and follow them – hoping they would follow him back and learn about his open jobs. When I joined Twitter back in 2008, I wrote a similar program to automatically follow/unfollow users, but the Twitter API has changed quite a bit since then. So I decided to re-write the program with the latest Perl-Twitter API – Net::Twitter::Lite::WithAPIv1_1.

Before you attempt to use these scripts, you will need to register your application with twitter via apps.twitter.com, and obtain the following:

consumer_key
consumer_secret
access_token …

In two earlier posts, I gave some examples on how to use Perl to send tweets stored in a MySQL database to Twitter, and then how to automatically reply to your retweets with a “thanks”. In this post, I will show you how to automatically download your direct messages from Twitter, store the messages in a MySQL database, and then delete them.

I don’t like the way Twitter makes me read my direct messages. Granted, the majority of them are not real messages. The message is usually thanking me for following the sender, and then there is a personal website link or a link to a product they are selling. But if I want to delete a direct message, I have to …

In an earlier post titled Using Perl to send tweets stored in a MySQL database to twitter, I showed you a way to use MySQL to store tweets, and then use Perl to automatically send your tweets to twitter.

In this post, we will look at automatically sending a “thank you” to people who retweet your tweets – and we will be using Perl and MySQL again.

Just like in the first post, you will need to register your application with twitter via apps.twitter.com, and obtain the following:

consumer_key
consumer_secret
access_token
access_token_secret

One caveat: twitter has a rate limit on how often you may connect with your application – depending upon what you are trying to do. See …

In the MySQL Labs version of MySQL version 5.7, there is a new HTTP plugin. The HTTP plugin documentation from the labs site provides this information (from MySQL Labs):

The HTTP Plugin for MySQL adds HTTP(S) interfaces to MySQL. Clients can use the HTTP respectively HTTPS (SSL) protocol to query data stored in MySQL. The query language is SQL but other, simpler interfaces exist. All data is serialized as JSON. This version of MySQL Server HTTP Plugin is a Labs release, which means it’s at an early development stage. It contains several known bugs and limitation, and is meant primarily to give you a rough idea how this plugin will look some day. Likewise, the user API is anything but finalized. Be aware it will change in many respects.

In …

Twitter is not my favorite social media site. Using twitter is like driving downtown, screaming what you want to say out the window, and hoping someone hears you. There might be tens of thousands of people downtown, but your message will only be heard by a few. Your best bet is to repeat your message as often as possible.

However, twitter is free and if you want to reach as many people (theoretically) as possible, you might as well use it. But sending tweets on a scheduled basis can be a pain. There are client programs available which allow you to schedule your tweets (Hootsuite is one I have used in the past). You can load your tweets in the morning, and have the application tweet for you all day long. But you still have to load the application with your tweets – one by one.

A friend of mine asked me if there was a way to send the same 200 tweets over and over again, spaced out every 20 minutes or so. He has a consulting …

There are several ways to upgrade MySQL. In this post, we will use a combination of shell scripts and the mysqldump application to export our MySQL data, and then re-import it back into the upgraded version of MySQL.

In this example, we will be doing a minor version upgrade. We will be going from 5.6.17 to 5.6.19. This method may not work if you are upgrading from one major release to another – from 5.1 to 5.5, or 5.5 to 5.6. You will want to check each version and review the new features/functions and also what features/functions have been deprecated. We are also assuming that no one will be using the database during the time it takes for us to do the upgrade.

If you want to upgrade from a …

MySQL is a great relational database, but at some point someone (management) in your company is probably going to say that they need to use NoSQL to store their data. After all, NoSQL is one of the latest buzzwords, so it must be good (correct?). Basically, NoSQL allows you to store data without all of the characteristics of a relational database. A very simple explanation is that you are storing all of a data set with just one primary key, and the primary key is how you also retrieve the data. While NoSQL may be good in some cases, it is hard to beat “old-fashioned” SQL relational databases – especially if that is what you know. But, with MySQL and InnoDB, you can have the best of both worlds.

With MySQL version 5.6 (and above), you have the ability to store and retrieve NoSQL data, …