As previously mentioned, Darren Cassar has been working on a new automated installer for the DBbenchmark program. It’s now available for download: click here. All you need to do is save it to the directory that you want to install to and then make sure it’s executable: “chmod 700 installer.sh”, then run it “./installer.sh”.

So far the benchmarking script supports Linux, FreeBSD, and OSX. I’m installing virtual machines today to get ready for development on the next OS that the community wants to have supported. Vote today for your choice. Development will begin Friday 2010-09-03.

At yesterdays Eigenbase Developer Meetup at SQLstream’s offices in San Francisco we arrived at a new logo for LucidDB.  DynamoBI is thrilled to have supported and funded the design contest to arrive at our new mascot.  Over the coming months you’ll see the logo make it’s way out to the existing luciddb.org sites, wiki sites, etc.  I’m really happy to have a logo that matches the nature of our database - BAD ASS!

(English version) Herhalde bildiğiniz gibi, biz tamamen sanal şirketiz, yani ana merkez gib bir şeyimiz yok. Hepimiz evinden çalışıyor ve biz sadece bir ya da iki kez yılda gerçek hayatta buluşuyorus. Bu sene kararımız İstanbul‘a düştü.  Firmadaki tek Türk ben olduğumdan dolayı toplantının organizesi bana düştü.

İlk adım olarak böyle bir toplantının

Sphinx search is a full text search engine, commonly used with MySQL.

There are some misconceptions about Sphinx and its usage. Following is a list of some of Sphinx’ properties, hoping to answer some common questions.

• Sphinx is not part of MySQL/Oracle.
• It is a standalone server; an external application to MySQL.
• Actually, it is not MySQL specific. It can work with other RDBMS: PostgreSQL, MS SQL Server.
• And, although described as “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”, it is not SQL-specific: Sphinx can read documents from XML.
• It is often described as “full text search for InnoDB”. This description is misleading. Sphinx indexes text; be it from any storage engine or external source. It solves, in a way, the issue of “FULLTEXT is

In database modeling, a m:n relationship is usually resolved by an additional table. But what if this relation is used only for archiving and the number of links in the resulting table is not too high? In that context, I got the idea to store all referring ID's as CSV string directly into a TEXT column of one of the referring tables. I came to this idea, because otherwise I would have to build complicated foreign keys and this way I also save one additional table. Certainly, this only makes sense if the data is not frequently accessed as foreign key. Nevertheless, I would like to tackle the problem, even if the implementation is very MySQL-oriented.

Read the rest »

“Hey DBA!  Remember that change you made for my group  four or five months ago? Well, we were waiting for things to get better but they have not. Can you change it back ASAP?!?”

I know several of you  DBAs after reading the above are reaching for their antacids.  OR something stronger.

Keeping track of what changes were made to which systems in your head is bound to bite a hard working DBA sooner or later.

This is one of those oh-so-obvious tips that will be ignored by many but it will come back to haunt like a cheap RAID array.   Get a notebook, a pen, and keep it by you when you work.  Now anytime you make a material change or perform a maintenance function on one of your systems, note what EXACTLY the change you made, the reason for the change,  plus the day and date.  It will take some effort to do this the first two

There was a lot of talk about this being the next menace after email spam. I’m not actually sure what it’s called for VoIP systems, but my Asterisk setup has started to be attacked over the last few days. Lots of entries like:

[Aug 27 19:20:30] NOTICE[18826] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"742"<sip:742@a.b.c.d>' failed for '208.109.86.187' - No matching peer found
...
[Aug 31 10:13:10] NOTICE[18826] chan_sip.c: Registration from '"1002" <sip:1002@a.b.c.d>' failed for '41.191.224.2' - Wrong password

Lots of messages get logged a second and I noticed this as suddenly CPU load on my PC jumped up quite a bit.

For the moment I’ve routed these addresses via the interface lo0 so they won’t bother me any more, but I need to come up with a better solution.

First I’m curious if applications like Asterisk or FreeSwitch

The development cycle is moving right along for the community’s newest MySQL benchmarking script. I’m pleased to announce that we now officially support FreeBSD (version 8.1 tested) so go ahead and download now and test your FreeBSD, Linux, or OSX MySQL server! Click here for the download.

Courtesy of Darren Cassar and some generous coding this weekend, we’re going to be releasing a auto-installer / updater for the application which you can use to automate that part of the process. Stay tuned for information on that release.

Scenario: Master-Master replication
Description: Master A is the active db server whilst Master B is a read only swappable db server hence both are creating binary logs. During backup I run “FLUSH LOGS” in order to have a simpler point in time recovery procedure if that case arises.
Problem: Flush logs is mean mean command :) …. it rotates not only my binary logs but my error log too (since I user error-log=blahblahblah in my my.cnf). Well given I flush logs every night my error log is cycled through every night, but unlike binary logs which have an incrimental number attached to the fine, error logs only have a `-log` attached to the filename and a second “FLUSH LOG” would just clear all error logs permanently. That is really not fun believe me!

So what is the solution?

To get information from a database it is necessary to execute a query to get this data.

Usually an ordinary SQL editor is used to create queries. To use such editor, one should remember the syntax of the SELECT operator and the names of tables and columns.

Let’s use a visual instrument developed specially to design queries, and see that it’s much easier to create queries visually instead of typing them in an editor.

Task:

It’s necessary to show the salaries of the employees of departments situated in different cities for the 2008 year in descending order.

We will do this on a MySQL server database. The process of creating this database was described in the How to: Create MySQL Database in One Shot article. You

Quick solution to an issue that the affected Debian Lenny release: the process used to collect the MEMORY_ACTIVE_BYTES variable has been modified to correct a situation where some systems report an array of memory information instead of the expected single integer value. The bug has been fixed in revision 21 and the current download (revision 22) is available for download or svn update. As usual, you can download the MySQL dbbenchmark script here: [downloads].

Thanks goes to Brian Vowell at Evernote.com for bringing this bug to my attention. The original bug report can be found here: [link]

There are many times when writing an application that single threaded database operations are simply too slow. In these cases it’s a matter of course that you’ll use multi-threading or forking to spawn secondary processes to handle the database actions. In this simple example for Python multi-threading you’ll see the how simple it is to improve the performance of your python app.

#!/usr/bin/python
## DATE: 2010-08-30
## AUTHOR: Matt Reid
## WEBSITE: http://themattreid.com
## LICENSE: BSD http://www.opensource.org/licenses/bsd-license.php
## Copyright 2010-present Matt Reid

from __future__ import division
from socket import gethostname;
import threading
import sys
import os
import MySQLdb

class threader(threading.Thread):
    def __init__(self,method):
        threading.Thread.__init__(self)
        self.tx =
        self.method = method
    def run(self):

We had a very successful weekend of Planet.mysql users submitting their database statistics so I’ve pushed some code into a new release today so that everyone can benefit from some new features. The biggest change is to the threading logic. Previously the benchmarking script was serializing MySQL operations and only making use of a secondary thread (not the invoking thread) to query the database. Now you have the option of running with “–threads=x” to make use of your multi-core server. A good example of this improvement was on my Macbook Pro; before the threading change it was inserting ~700/sec, after the code change I tried –threads=4 and saw an improvement to ~900/sec. Rather significant.

Download the new script now and see how your server compares to the ones in the central database!