What the hell was that ?

"Please put all things you work on or that you've place on the grid today in your inventory"
!!!
I sure hope that message doesn't mean they're doing a rollback and are not saving the current sim state.
I got 5 minutes to put my new garden and house with several hundred of carefully placed prims into my inventory.
There was NO way that was possible, so I just had to grab the most complicated builds and stuff it quickly into the inventory.

Crossing fingers that it'll all be there whem the grid comes back.

I used to think taking into inventory was the safest way to save stuff, but then the asset cluster corruption issues started...

Would be nice if SL implemented something like an archive command. This was real handy back in the MUCK days -- just run @archive #dbref, and you would get a dump of the object referred to by dbref. It would just be a series of commands that could be pasted back in to rebuild the object quite easily.

Problem is (and why LL hasn't done it) that people will sell off high priced items then reload from the archive.

Limitations on how often you can do that have been sugested, but no real firm way of protection was developed.

I'd definately like a backup on my inventory, but can see why it hasn't been done. Maybe they'll figure out a way someday.

~Jessy

I was really more talking about being able to archive items that I have created, not any item I had in my inventory. Or perhaps only for full-permission items.

I wouldn't expect them to enable the ability for me to backup/restore items that other people had given me!

The goal for this system would be more to help content creators -- Like me, who worry that projects that they might have spent the last few weeks on will just go piffle.

Or, to at least export my items in a format that I could potentially use to re-create it elsewhere, as I am supposed to have ownership of distribution rights...

Hmm. Yup. Now that I think about it... It'll never happen.

LL uses MySQL for SL, which is a great open source DB, but not designed for full-blown, high-demand enterprise database work. MySQL is fine if you need a data storage area for a web app, but with SL we are talking about millions of hours of people's time, millions of dollars of inventory and commerce, etc. It's all hanging on a thread. When you start putting 3 million row tables into MySQL and use some kind of half-assed logical partitioning to 'just get by' you deserve to continue not making a profit, even after the time the business plan calls for one to be made.

And no, this isn't Taras the mellow cybermonk, this is his human who is reading about 'put stuff in inventory before you leave' in this thread. What if the next time it's a rollback for a week because the data is corrupted and the corruption has gotten into the backups?

We need to convince LL that this is a business, not a dot.com, and that a business requires due diligence. That means buying things you need, like an enterprise RDBMS, not using a free one to save money at the users' expense.

Taras, I'm not particularly knowledgable about databases, but I would presume that each DB program saves data in it's own proprietary format. How easy is it to convert DB's from one proprietary format to another? The other question is how accurate and/or reliable such DB conversions might be? As you pointed out there's millions of entries as well as all the commerce transactions. It sounds like a daunting task, even if it is the logical step.

I'll criticize them the moment I have to start paying for my account, until then--They deserve my undying love.

The mere fact that SL works at all never ceases to amaze me. I just wish Wednesdays weren't quite so glitchy.

Very good point! The amount of work involved in a conversion makes this all the more important to do sooner rather than later. They have already gone beyond the capacity of MySQL (witness the failures of the login database that crop up). But it's only going to get harder to do the conversion as they add users. Ok, no one is going to be concerned about the great loss in noob griefer watermelon guns if something happens, but unfortunately database crashes are usually not selective.

There are utilities available for moving both ways - proprietary RDBMS to and from MySQL, but consider yourself lucky if you are converting from MySQL. There are a lot of vital features in any of the high-end RDBMS (Oracle, DB2, etc.) that simply don't exist in MySQL.

OK, presuming such a DB conversion can be made, this strikes me as not excatly the sort of thing that could realistically be introduced cold. Is it possible to run such a system in parallel for a fixed period of time to ensure that it's running smoothly? And if so, what sort of timeframe would be realistic?

WTF?

Today's problems were caused by the email handing in LSL scripts. It had nothing to do with the use of MySQL.

And you're completely full of hot air. MySQL happens to be one of the best enterprise-level databases out there. At my company we've had a lot less problems with it than with either Informix or Oracle.

AHHH i got lost in the debate of what if's and today's probs...translate to comptuer idiot speech..oh heck I don't care I just agree with orginal poster WTH was THAT??? pick up all your crap in 5 mins..spread across 2 or 3 sims if someone used the downtime earlier productively and uploaded new designs they then put out in new vendor. Bah, not worried though..not so computer idiot as to NOT have the orginals still on the good ole' hard-drive..but I feel sorry for the one who just put out his house/garden. Good luck with that!

You were doing serious build work on the same day that an update was released? You're new here, aren't you?

Again, good point. Since there are several instances involved (inventory, login, etc.) the system can be converted over piecemeal. The real trick is when something goes wrong when you bring up a piece under actual load and the whole thing goes FOO (almost inevitable, unless you do the proper amount of testing in parallel on comparable system, which is too expensive for most people). It takes time to get the system running in a stable manner. So it would probably end up taking several downtimes, but save hundreds of them in the long run.

If LL is in it for the long run, they will move.

Tend to agree with you man, MySQL is as stable and capable as you make it. The problem with the asset cluster is I think they have created a linear cluster rather than say something on more of a san based solution... I could be wrong, but we have an EMC at work that we are using well beyond its capabilities (And have more shit plugged into it than LL could even dream of) and its never had major failures the way their asset cluster has.

Yeah, the cause of the problem was email handling. And do you think the rollback with possible effect on inventory is caused by that? Logically, no. If you rollback and you can't recover inventory transactions in the interim then you've lost the intervening transaction logs or suffered corruption to them, or you are moving to a previous backup and just dropping the transactions, or something on those lines; all DB related problems. The cause and the effect of a given event are not necessarity the same in reality. Let's say the precipitating event is a fire. If you have water damage after that fire it doesn't mean that the fire turned to water to damage something, but that one problem produced another.

As to MySQL being an enterprise level database, I wonder why it is all those foolish multibillion dollar companies and government agencies are wasting all their money on something other than a free RDBMS with a crude feature set. How unimaginative of them. If they only had your capacity for fantasizing that MySQL is the same kind of enterprise RDBMS as its competition!

Tell me all about MySQL's capacity for handling materialized views, partitioning (physical, not logical) and advanced backup and recovery capacity (multinode instance failover, for instance). Hm, none of it available in MySQL, eh? All in the big folder marked: 'Someday'.

MySQL is progressing, and is a major threat to the closed source RDBMS makers, but just saying that it has caught up does not make it so.

Stating that your company is more competant with a simpler and less capable product (MySQL) rather than two complex ones (Informix and Oracle) is like saying that 1 is less than 2. What's your point?

Also, are you using MySQL to manage multimillion row tables interacting with 7000 to 10000 processes at a time? If you are, you are likely to be facing the same problems the harried and heroic souls that are LL's DBAs are facing right now.

Vares check the join date, Raphael is far from new. Not only that but there are actually some of us that have little to no issues on days with updates. I believe that a 5 minute warning to pick up everything you have placed is definitely not sufficient and that was the point of the post.

I just checked my account page.

I seem to be missing about six thousand L$, which I had before the grid went down.

So, if they're doing a roll back, I hope I have the land back which I sold back under my possession.

Erf.. I agree, that was really short notice. But at least some people got notice at all - I was on earlier today and then logged off for awhile while all this was happening. Glad I didn't leave anything out earlier.

I worry though about stuff that I purchased earlier today.. :/

Anyone who has been around for a while should know better than to do serious build work on an update day.

Anyone making a serious business should know to give more than a 5 minute warning before throwing peoples time and $$$'s away.

Please suggest to Linden that they make Wednesday an official non-play day.

I have stopped thinking that SL are a platform (right now) where I can make some realistic long time projects.. I am here to have fun.. meet people and make friends....

Sometimes I do some new furniture/lamps and things I want to try out... but not at a regular planed schedule... and definitly not on Wednesday... or Thursday...

The ones that have huger planes and are investing a lot of money in SL must do there bookeeping, IRL business and such when SL are down...)))

/Tina