By Solomon Chang

There are whispered rumors from the remote corners of MySQL configuration gurus concerning the Dark Art of running more than one instance on MySQL on the same machine. Like a body possessed by a legion host of demons (well, MySQL daemons, actually), a single machine could serve multiple instances of MySQL that each may respond to different names, ports, and... dare I say it...? IP addresses! Oh, the horror! The terror! The memory consumption!
However, just as summoning and binding nether-worldly entities into an unwilling mortal shell has its own nefarious uses, so too does the black magic of invoking two or more instances of mysqld on the same single machine. Slowly and surely, it is a gateway for you to embark upon other unspeakable database experiments, such as Replication and Distributed Clustering, whilst obviating the need for any other machine. Replication with but a single computer, you say? Yea, it is an abomination! But this abomination you can configure for yourself while dangling your sanity between hard drive capacity and memory usage!
Muhahahahaha!
Ph'nglul mglw'nath MySQL Instance Manager R'yleh!
MySQL Fhtagn!

Black robes and candles optional.

When he is not obsessing over the stories of HP Lovecraft, Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in El Segundo, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

By Solomon Chang

There comes a time in the life cycle of a company where everyone has to stop connecting as password-less root to their central database. All the inherent security protocols (such as "We only have 3 users," or "No one here is malicious enough or knowledgeable enough to crack our Production database!") begin to lose relevance as the DB user base starts to grow. This talk aims at the "why" and the "how" of setting user permissions, as well as how users are generally authenticated into the system. This talk also delves into the granularity of permissions for those who require extremely fine-tuned access to database resources.

Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current acting director of LAMPSIG. He works as a professional Database Administrator in Venice Beach, and is a co-author of the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

Adobe Flex is a collection of technologies released by Adobe Systems for the development and deployment of cross platform, rich Internet applications based on the proprietary Adobe Flash platform. The initial release in March 2004 by Macromedia included a software development kit, an IDE, and a J2EE integration application known as Flex Data Services.

Flex is a hot (open source) topic this year and Linux users aren't left out. With the newly announced Adobe AIR for Linux and the upcoming Flex Builder 3 for Linux desktops, everyone can develop cross-browser/platform applications for the Web (SWF) or any popular desktop operating system (Linux, Mac OS X, Windows). Chris Charlton will be covering how to develop in Flex and deploy an RIA with one code-base while not having to worry about platform or browser differences.

So what is Flex and doesn't it cost money? The Flex SDK is free - containing a debugger, compiler, and the entire Flex framework. Adobe's IDE (Flex Builder) costs $250 (Standard Edition) and is free for students and teachers.

What's the difference between Flash and Flex? Why not just use Ajax? Good questions, but you'll want to attend the next LAMPSIG meeting to ask and find out!

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Chris Charlton has tons of community involvement: authorized Adobe Flex Champion, Adobe User Group Manager for LA AIR, helps run LA Drupal, is co-author of the book Advanced Flex Application Development: Building RichMediaX, and teaches at the Rich Media Institute.

The integration of Business intelligence and logic within the database has been a long requested feature for MySQL. With version 5.0, MySQL delivered a stored procedure implementation and here we extend it to provide general support for external language stored procedures.

We detail the philosophy and design of the external language stored procedure framework and its implementation within the server and libraries. We then also detail how an external language plug-in is written using the simple skeleton plug-in which exercises the basic interfaces between the server and external stored procedures.

Demonstrations using the already developed plug-ins, including an overview of the implementation for the simple XML-RPC and the more sophisticated Java plug-ins, writing stored procedures and functions, with ideas for applications and their utility.

This presentation includes a tour of the actual source code, highlighting the big picture. The audience will see the low impact of the main-line server code, the simplicity of writing plug-ins for new languages and the ease of using the language plug-ins already developed. This is an exciting new feature preview for MySQL. All demonstrations are with live running examples which everyone can try for themselves: No mockups, no screen-shots.

ATK is a business framework written in PHP which allows you to build web applications with minimal amounts of code. ATK supports various databases, including: MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL and PostgreSQL.

The only code you write is business logic.

ATK philosophy

* Code minimization
* Don't repeat yourself
* Keep it simple

Usage

The framework is particularly useful for creating business applications; to manipulate data. CRM, HRM, ERP, CMS are all area's where ATK can be used to build custom applications with minimal effort.

Continuing his first talk on Content Management Systems, Jorge will further explain the details of the Mambo/Joomla CMS.

Content Management systems offer the promise of publishing tools, user authentication, modular structure and support for plugins, and most of the things an average person or business needs to build a professional looking full featured website.

Mambo/Joomla is both a CMS and one of the highest profile open source LAMP projects going, boasting a substantial user community and a number of open source awards.

Jorge will present a brief history of Mambo & Joomla, clarifying the connection and differences. They will include an installation of Joomla, explanation of the basic paradigms and terminology one needs to know to effectively install, administer and configure Mambo or Joomla, and offer some insight into the extensibility of Joomla from a developer's standpoint, by looking at some of the parts of a Joomla component and Joomla module.

Jorge Garifuna is the CEO of Garinet Global Inc. which offers a multitude of Website services for organizations, businesses, entertainers and family members. Jorge joined LAMPsig over two years ago and has added a new spark of enthusiasm to our group. He is quick to answer maillist questions or bring up new topics of interest to LAMP developers.

There will be no meeting for December. Enjoy the Holiday!

Content Management systems offer the promise of publishing tools, user authentication, modular structure and support for plugins, and most of the things an average person or business needs to build a professional looking full featured website.

Mambo/Joomla is both a CMS and one of the highest profile open source LAMP projects going, boasting a substantial user community and a number of open source awards.

Jorge will present a brief history of Mambo & Joomla, clarifying the connection and differences. They will include an installation of Joomla, explanation of the basic paradigms and terminology one needs to know to effectively install, administer and configure Mambo or Joomla, and offer some insight into the extensibility of Joomla from a developer's standpoint, by looking at some of the parts of a Joomla component and Joomla module.

Jorge Garifuna is the CEO of Garinet Global Inc. which offers a multitude of Website services for organizations, businesses, entertainers and family members. Jorge joined LAMPsig over two years ago and has added a new spark of enthusiasm to our group. He is quick to answer maillist questions or bring up new topics of interest to LAMP developers.

By Solomon Chang

NDB (Network Database) is an enterprise-grade, scalable, and highly available clustering storage engine - a share-nothing cluster that has no single point of failure - which is capable of running on inexpensive commodity hardware. NDB allows the construction of cheap, scalable, and exceptionally reliable database clusters, without expensive, specialized or additional hardware or software.

Back in June, Solomon Chang discussed the basic setup of a distributed, fault-tolerant, NDB Cluster for MySQL. The NDB storage engine has had one shortcoming, however: it has been traditionally memory-based.

As of MySQL 5.1, MySQL AB introduced a disk-based NDB solution, although its setup and configuration are significantly more complex than building a simple cluster. A disk-based cluster allows the administrator to spend less money on hardware costs by allowing him to commit larger NDB fragments to a single server. There will be a brief recap on the first Clustering lecture for those who are new to MySQL Distributed Clustering.

This clustering method can be implemented on as few as three computers that have been manufactured within the last decade. Come and hear how to do this and add this skill to your resume.

Solomon Chang is a MySQL certified DBA and the current actingdirector of LAMPSIG. He
works as a professional Database Administrator in Venice Beach, and is aco-author of
the MySQL Cluster Certification Study Guide.

For many developers, testing their code is one of those tasks that they prefer to avoid as much as possible. But one of the easily applied aspects of Extreme Programming is the practice of test-driven development in which the tests are the first part of the development. We will look at the benefits of writing tests before
writing the code which it tests and how to use the PHPUnit testing framework to make the practice of writing tests for your code easy and even fun.

Donald Hosek has been programming for over 25 years and has worked with PHP since the PHP3 days. He is currently employed by cars.com and has done development for a wide variety of companies including Fox Filmed Entertainment, Beckman-Coulter, and the Chicago Stock Exchange among others.

This weekend will be an open Q&A session.

In MySQL, a storage engine is a mechanism or methodology by which data and indexes are archived and managed. Different storage engines have different features, and quite often different requirements. Solomon will provide a brief introduction to the various storage engines supported by MySQL and describe the environments most likely to use them.
This talk will be briefer than usual, and afterwards, there will be also an open Q&A session to see what topics members would like to see covered in the future.