The Drupal community just recently released another alpha test release of their upcoming Drupal 7 version, to shake out the remaining bugs and to encourage more users to test it.

If you would like to give it a try, but you don't have a free server handy, how about using a virtual machine instead? Using the fabolous SuSE Studio, I've created an appliance based on openSUSE 11.3, Drupal 7.0-alpha7 and MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB plugin and strict mode enabled (both for the …

Lately I worked quite a bit with Python and Linux, writing monitoring and automation utilities. I am in a transition period, so I thought I ought to write some Python stuff interfacing with MySQL for fun, and start positioning myself for expanded career horizon, I hope.

To get started, I thought it would be fun to rewrite a Perl utility I wrote before with Python. That script converts MySQL character sets to utf8, a very common task for wikis and blogs during an upgrade. This time, I did everything from scratch: firing up an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, hand install and configuring MySQL 5.1.50 (creating mysql user, group, wget tarball, setting directory ownership and permissions, creating symbolic to MySQL binaries, editing my.cnf, /etc/init.d/ and chkconfig automatic startup, environmental variables, the works), compiled and …

We continue to see more evidence of the themes we discuss in our latest CAOS special report, Seeding the Clouds, which examines the open source software used in cloud computing, the vendors backing open source, the cloud providers using it and the impact on the industry.

First, as usual, we are seeing consistencies between our own research — which indicates open source is a huge part of today’s cloud computing offerings from major providers like Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark and VMware — and that of code analysis and management vendor Black Duck. In its analysis of code that runs the cloud, Black Duck also found a preponderance of open source pieces, in many cases the same projects we profile in our report.

Indeed, open source software is an important part of the infrastructure, …

In this latest release I’ve added a basic MySQL connection pool to the benchmarking script which improves the method in which connections to MySQL are handled and reused. In addition, there have been some optimizations made to the thread handler functions for better debug reporting. Download the latest release now and see how your MySQL server performs against the rest of the community! Download here: download page.

As previously mentioned, Darren Cassar has been working on a new automated installer for the DBbenchmark program. It’s now available for download: click here. All you need to do is save it to the directory that you want to install to and then make sure it’s executable: “chmod 700 installer.sh”, then run it “./installer.sh”.

So far the benchmarking script supports Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX. I’m installing virtual machines today to get ready for development on the next OS that the community wants to have supported. Vote today for your choice. Development will begin Friday 2010-09-03.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

We’re proud to announce the next release of MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.27. This is the second maintenance release for 5.2 GA (Generally Available). This maintenance release does not introduce any new features, but focuses on general product improvement and usability.  We hope you will make MySQL Workbench your preferred tool for Design, Development, and Administration of your MySQL database applications.

As always, we want to thank everyone for the great feedback we have received. This helps us to continuously improve and extend the functionality and stability of MySQL Workbench – please keep up on approaching us with any ideas to develop our product even further.

MySQL Workbench 5.2 GA

• Data Modeling
• Query (replaces the old MySQL Query Browser)
• Administration (replaces the old MySQL Administrator)

Please get your copy from our Download site. Sources and binary …

The development cycle is moving right along for the community’s newest MySQL benchmarking script. I’m pleased to announce that we now officially support FreeBSD (version 8.1 tested) so go ahead and download now and test your FreeBSD, Linux, or OSX MySQL server! Click here for the download.

Courtesy of Darren Cassar and some generous coding this weekend, we’re going to be releasing a auto-installer / updater for the application which you can use to automate that part of the process. Stay tuned for information on that release.

Last week I followed an very interesting ORACLE webinar delivered by Chris Mason : The State of Btrfs File System for Linux
BTRFS was initiated by Chris Mason who used to be responsible for Reiserfs at Suse and now works for Oracle. The first release started in 2007. BTRFS has been merged into Linux kernel in 2009. Now there are developers from REDHAT, INTEL SUSE, IBM, HP ... storage vendors. The project is very active. Ubuntu is considering to use it soon as its default filesystem. BTRFS is licensed under the GPL license. An interesting to read short summary of the life of BTRFS : A short history of BTRFS
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Quick solution to an issue that the affected Debian Lenny release: the process used to collect the MEMORY_ACTIVE_BYTES variable has been modified to correct a situation where some systems report an array of memory information instead of the expected single integer value. The bug has been fixed in revision 21 and the current download (revision 22) is available for download or svn update. As usual, you can download the MySQL dbbenchmark script here: [downloads].

Thanks goes to Brian Vowell at Evernote.com for bringing this bug to my attention. The original bug report can be found here: [link]