tl;dr: The MySQL community rocks. Percona, XtraDB, Drizzle, SSD storage, InnoDB IO scalability challenges.

For anyone who lives and dies by MySQL and InnoDB, things are finally starting to heat up and get interesting. I’ve been banging the “MySQL/InnoDB scales poorly” drums for years now, and despite having paid Enterprise licenses, I haven’t been able to get anywhere. I was pretty excited when Sun …

From a performance standpoint, sometimes even tightly tuned queries can cause a performance drag. The common problem here is not one of actual query performance, rather it is a function of:

- the velocity and frequency that a query is submiited for execution
- the total execution time of the aggregated executions

This could be symptomatic of an application not properly configured for caching (see Darren Oldag's blog on this!), or just overall poor design. Regardless of why, when or how we all know it happens. The trouble with this particular problem is that when a query is tuned, or very simple, it is usually not suspect for being a resource hog. Pulling aggregates for number of execs and total exec time for specific queries is a little tricky and labor intensive with the Slow Query Log, and not really a good …

Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times.

Inside the PBXT Storage Engine

This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques. I had been looking forward to this session for a while, and Paul McCullagh’s nice explanations with clear diagrams were a welcome aid to understanding how PBXT works. Unlike some of the other storage engines, PBXT is being developed in full daylight, with an emphasis on community involvement and input. (Indeed, I may be contributing to it myself, in order to make its monitoring and tuning capabilities second to none).

PBXT has not only a unique design, but a …

My posts lately have been mostly progress reports and release notices. That's because we're in the home stretch on the book, and I don't have much spare time. However, a lot has also been changing with Maatkit, and I wanted to take some time to write about it properly.