Articles by admin

I don’t know how many folks, like me, have had troubles using phpMyAdmin to perform large MySQL database restores, but if you have, then perhaps this little set of pointers will help you out. I know this process has made my life easier.

As most of you probably already know, phpMyAdmin is a wonderful toolset. It makes database management and editting both simple and straightforward. However, one of the major drawbacks to the phpMyAdmin toolset is that it is VERY slow to upload large amounts of SQL or perform Database restores using the Import function. For those of us with large and very large MySQL databases this presents a major issue. So what can be done to get around the problem?

The obvious conclusion is that a tool other than phpMyAdmin is needed. MySQL Administrator is the tool I have discovered that works best for me. The tool is starightforward, secure, and fast. The process I have found to work is as follows:

• Download and install MySQL Administrator (and set it up so that it is able to log directly into your database server). This is easy to do; the only gotcha I encountered is: remember not to use http:// in your url address.
• “Connect” MySQL Administrator to the system where you keep your MySQL DB.
• Using the Backup function, create a backup of the DB and store it somewhere easy to locate.
• When you need to do a restore (or ‘yes’ even a copy) all you need do is log into MySQL Administrator, connect to your database system and access Restore Backup. Interestingly this backup need not have been generated via MySQL Administrator; I have used phpMyAdmin generated files successfully.
• If you are performing a simple restore, all you need to do is point the restore to the target DB and wait. In my expereince, it takes about 5 minutes to restore a 25MB database.

If this were all that we could do the tool, that would be enough, however, there are other useful functions that you can employ with a couple of small ‘tricks’. For example, if you want to create a new DB and freeze an old one, all you need to do is:

• create the new database per your usual process (remember the name you give to this new DB).
• backup the database you want to clone
• open a copy of the ‘backed up’ database in your favorite editor (I use geany)
• do a gloabl search and replace of the old database name with the new one- per the name you created in the first step above
• restore this editted file into your blank database using the functions within MySQL Administrator
• point your application to the database of your choosing– now that you have at least two.

I find this process to be extremely helpful in upgrading and testing systems.

I hope this little tutorial helpful. I wish I had figured this out years ago, myself.

We are pleased to announce that as of today, our website is “Green”. We have just moved to a new host that certifies a net zero carbon footprint. We know this is not a huge contribution, but every little bit helps.

To learn more about this please visit the Ambient Webs LLC We Are Green page.

Because there are times when reliable, affordable (read Free) web conferencing would make everyone’s lives easier, I thought you might appreciate this new and highly regarded Open Source offering- it is called DimDim.  DimDim may be found at: http://dimdim.com.

I am registered as: rabideau on the DimDim site.

We will be exploring utilizing this technology for transitioning ideas etc. to our client base.

For those of you who have been kind enough to spend time on our site, we thank you AND we are pleased to say that we have made a significant breakthrough in our site’s performance.

The long and short of the issue is Plugins. Plugins can act as a significant drag on your site’s performance. We have noticed load times on this site approaching 11+ seconds (wayyyy to slow!). Now the load times are running at about 4.5 seconds (we think that’s much better!). In order to solve this load dilemma we have been using a set of free tools from Pingdom.

Areas of problems we noticed in our debug process included:

• misplaced and missing image directories in the tarski theme (we now have three directories of our little gif images… because of the errant calls within the theme internal calls)
• broken image links (yes we were part of the problem too…)
• numerous poor (read slooowwwwww) plugins; these are all removed

Additionally we have learned to remove any unused (not active) plugin. Inactive plugins can still act as a performance hit. And lastly, I scrubbed our DB. Numerous plugins had left a trail of unused tables and rows in our DB– the worst culprits were a forum plugin and an audit trail plugin.

Again, thank you to everyone for sticking with us. We appreciate your patience and hope you will find our little lessons-learned useful.

TreeMagic-Banyan

We are pleased to announce that this site is now TreeMagic-Banyan enabled.

In order to invoke TreeMagic-Banyan simply select a word or phrase and double-click. A small popup will appear. Select the “portal” option and a secondary window will open highlighting you query results. The Portal popup is a fully operational Banyan portal. You may conduct additional queries and information investigations from within the new page.

We will be adding additional information resources to our portal site in the coming weeks.

For more details on TreeMagic Banyan read here …

If you wish to contact AmbientWebs with questions or issues regarding TreeMagic-Banyan, please use our Contact page.

WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. What a mouthful. WordPress is both free and priceless at the same time.

More simply, WordPress is what you use when you want to work with your blogging software, not fight it.

To get started with WordPress, set it up on a web host for the most flexibility or get a free blog on WordPress.com.

We are a small group of keen WordPress users who are happy and proud to offer something back to the user community.

We spent a long time exploring the merits of java, hoping its scalability and efficient code protocols would lead us into developing a specialized CMS. What we did not realize was that java makes high demands on server side processing and memory. To run an interactive, dynamic site with high traffic requires a dedicated server with heaps of processing power and even more memory. It’s an expensive overhead. Putting all that back end power into a php platform would provide suerb results also and it did not seem to make sense to pursue the java route without taking a closer look at the php alternatives again.

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