We have taken over an application which had "pretend" failover. Essentially it had two servers with automatic failover between the two. However they both relied on another server for providing the data storage via NFS all the way down to the MySQL server. Interesting how one can manage to provide no real failover with 3 servers. Obviously we want to fix this and actually a number of servers have already been bought. So now we have moved the MySQL server with a cold standby on separate machines. We also have 3 frontend servers which we want to load balance. We will probably use memcache to manage the sessions, as we are not so worried about a lost session when a crash occurs. But now comes the problem: There are a lot of places where administrators and end users can upload files, which end up in the file system. Now how do we replicate those files across all the nodes?

So I have decided I need a few more babies after putting my first OSS baby aka MDB2 to rest. Speaking of rest .. one of my new babies will be reSTed from the very beginning. The goal is to convert all of the various README type files in cvs.php.net into the reST format. This will enable us to render them to html and docbook while still keeping them plain text readable. For now I have used the Horde Text_reST package, which doesn't do everything one would hope for (I am having some issues with lists and there is also no docbook renderer). Hopefully the folks at eZ will come through with a fancy new parser/renderer one of these days. At least Derick said its on their agenda.

Je suis désolé que mon français est trés mauvais. But I am very eager to change this. So some day the previous sentence will actually be somewhat grammatically correct. I am not really aiming for written perfection, but I want to be able to hold a decent casual conversation in French without forcing the other person to switch to German or English all the time. I decided this a few weeks ago. However now I have been accepted to speak in Montreal at the mostly French speaking PHP Quebec conference!

Sorry for the delay. I still do not have SSL on my blog and I it took me a while to figure out how to properly tunnel my browser through ssh. Now that I have it setup (or all the sniffers can now use my blog) here is the link to the slides. The goal of the talk was to provide some hints on good and bad ideas. More importantly I wanted to illustrate that you can do a lot of stuff in SQL, that most people think can only be done inside their middle tier language.

At first sight it seems MySQL AB has learned the lesson from its 5.0 release and is not rushing as much anymore with their releases as much. It seems that the 5.1 GA release was pushed back from this fall to Q1 2008. MySQL 6.0 will feature the new Falcon storage engine, but without foreign key and full text indexing. That will have to wait for MySQL 6.1. Now 6.1 is supposed to go into beta 2008/2009 which means a GA release is expected in 2009. So when exactly is MySQL 6.0 supposed to be done then? Last I heard was fall 2008, which would mean GA release for 6.0 and the beta release for 6.1 to be pretty close.