We have dealt with several services in the past including the network monitoring software Open Monitor or the online service Livewatch.

The database monitoring software dv2rss is different from these solutions. The main difference is that it can – as the title implies – monitor databases but also because it can only be run from the command line or a script. That’s not as bad as it sounds and it could be welcome in certain situations where no graphical user interface is needed or wanted.

Db2rss supports MySQL, Interbase and Blackfish SQL databases at the moment and can monitor them in a computer network or on the Internet. It comes with several command line parameters that define important information such as the database’s host name, the username and password. There are quite a few additional parameter that include running an SQL command on the database, comparing the results to a local copy and defining templates and title of the resulting RSS feed. The RSS feed is another aspect of this database monitoring software that is usually not found in other monitoring software programs.

It is then possible to subscribe to the RSS feed to receive the database monitoring information after the script’s execution. The software developer suggests to use the Windows task scheduler to run the database monitoring software regularly.

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We start by creating the bash script first and continue with the cron job after the bash script has been tested to work as intended. All commands in the following paragraphs are executed from the command line.

vi backup.sh

This will create an empty text file in the vi editor. This will be the script that will be executed by the cron job on a daily basis.

bin/sh
/usr/bin/mysqldump -A -u [Username] -p[Password] | gzip > /backups/mysqldump`date +%m_%d_%y`.gz


Press i to enter insert mode and copy and paste the two lines above in the editor. What the script does is to use the mysqldump function to create a mysql backup and store it gzipped in the backups directory using mysqldumpDate.gz as the name with data being the day the backup was created.

The two variables [Username] and [Password] have to be edited and the username and password of a user with sufficient rights entered. It might also be necessary to change the location of the backup folder.

Press ESC to enter command mode and :x to save the file.

./backup.sh

Execute the script to see if it is working correctly. It should create the dump of the MySQL database in the defined directory. It might be necessary to change the permission level of the backup.sh file if you get a permission error during execution.

chmod 755 backup.sh

If the script is working as intended it can be added as a cron job. The following command will open the user crontab list.

crontab -e

If you are in the vi editor you press i to enter insert mode again and add the following line

0 7 * * * /path/to/backup.sh

Please refer to the tutorial for a detailed instruction on how to set the cron job up to suite your needs. This one will execute the script every day on 7am.

It is a good idea to check back after the next execution to verify that everything is working as intended.

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Convert is a data conversion software that can convert the data formats dBase, csv and sdf. One of the more interesting features for webmasters is the option to create MySQL database import information on top of csv or sdf output files which make it possible to convert one of the data formats into a file that can be imported into a MySQL database.

The software displays all options in the main interface which might be a bit intimidating for inexperienced users. Most of the settings however do not need to be edited to work with the application. The minimum is to select the input file format and load it into the data conversion software.

The second step is to select the output format and click on the write output file button in the lower left corner. It might be necessary to change the character set, decimal separator, csv separator or csv field frame if these do not match.

This is however easy to check as the data sets are displayed in the main interface once the input file has been loaded.

Interesting are the hierarchical sorting conditions which are completely optional as well as the record filter. The data conversion software convert can also concatenate files.

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