Xaprb

It’s a new year, and Free Software is more ubiquitous and important than ever. At the same time, the work is far from over. Here’s something inspiring you can read to stimulate some deep thoughts about the nature of Free Software: an essay from 1958, “I, Pencil.”

I first read this essay at my father’s suggestion, long before I was involved with computers. He told me it was the best defense of free enterprise and free markets that he’d ever read.

Here’s a quote I think is particularly interesting to think about in the context of software:

The above is what I meant when writing, “If you can become aware of the miraculousness which I symbolize, you can help save the freedom mankind is so unhappily losing.” For, if one is aware that these know-hows will naturally, yes, automatically, arrange themselves into creative and productive patterns in response to human necessity and demand—that is, in the absence of governmental or any other coercive masterminding—then one will possess an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.

Among all the ancestors the pencil lists, it would today be obliged to list an incredible diversity of Free Software programmers and the software they write, which controls everything from the ship navigation systems to the telephone switches to the fuel injection systems in the diesel engines. And even more interesting, any given piece of Free Software should list a simple pencil amongst its ancestors. I know I used a lot of pencils in my studies.

Happy New Year! Long live Free Software!

This post is for people who are trying to roll back unwanted modifications to their MySQL database.

You cannot use the binary logs to undo unwanted changes to your data. The binary logs are for redoing statements, not undoing them. If you have a backup, you may be able to restore the backup and then replay binary logs to roll forward to the desired state. But you cannot roll backwards with the binary logs.

I say “may be able to” because depending on how you take the backup, even your backups and binary logs may not be enough to fully recover your data. If you don’t know how to do backups right, my advice is to hire someone who knows. It’s not something you should leave to chance.

I wrote this post because of all the people familiar with other databases, who do not know that their chosen backup strategy leads to a situation where it’s impossible to recover their data. Hopefully Google will lead them to it.

Sun has invited me to showcase Maatkit at the dot-org pavilion at the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. At this time it’s really hard to say what I’ll be demoing! Development on Maatkit is accelerating and I don’t look for that to change, so who knows what we’ll have done by then. I’ll see you there.