Hello everyone who is attending MySQLConf 2008!

I am finally able to announce when and where the Pythian BoF session has been scheduled! It will be in the Alameda room, 7:30-8:30pm on Tuesday, April 15th.

The session, titled “Ask the Pythian Maestro”, will be attended by myself and our two MySQL team leads, Sheeri K. Cabral and Augusto Bott.

This should be a fun session and hopefully people will show up. Attendees will get to:

• Schmooze with Augusto, Sheeri, and I, ask us your technical questions and find out if we know what we’re talking about
• Meet active Pythian customers - I have just been informed of the schedule and I am hopeful that several can attend
• Find out what it’s like to work at Pythian if that’s what you’re in to
• Find out what it’s like to have Pythian as …

If you can’t attend the MySQL Conference, you can still virtually attend

Simply visit
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast

2-3 pm PDT on Tuesday, April 15th for the “Best Practices for Database Administrators” session,

and

11:55 am -12:40 pm PDT on Thursday, April 17th for the “Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking” session.

You need nothing but your web browser; unlike some other live meetings, audio streams from the website too, so there’s no phone number to call or participant code or anything. There’s also a live chat so you can participate and ask questions while the session is going on.

See you soon, virtually!

mysql-proxy defaults to round-robin load balancing. There are fancy tricks around to get mysql-proxy to balance connections based on how many idle connections there are in a proxy-based connection pool.

But there is no code that I found that would simply load balance based on “always go to one server, go to another server only when the first server is down.”

Well, I spent way too long figuring this out today, again running into the problem where the manual hasn’t been updated. I have indeed made a Forge snippet of this code, but it does not hurt to post it here.

This was in fact taken from …

While doing a standard audit for a new client, I recommended a few changes to get better performance. Because I had several changes, I used the documentation at

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-system-variables.html

and found that innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit is a dynamic variable. I was surprised, because most operations dealing with file sizes and operations are not dynamic. But the client proceeded with:

set global innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2;

and got:

ERROR 1193 (HY000): Unknown system variable 'innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit'

So I searched for others who may have had the same error, and ended up getting an unintentional googlewhack. Well, it’s not a real Googlewhack, because it has more than 2 …

Recently I acquired Sesame Street Volume 1, and on the third DVD in the set I came across one of my favorite Sesame Street songs: “Who are the people in your neighborhood?”

Here’s a sample of one such skit, if you are not familiar with it, or if you want a bit of nostalgia http://youtube.com/watch?v=B9lpUjQvToY (note, play will likely start automatically, so tune your volume appropriately before clicking).

The refrain is “Who are the people in your neighborhood? The people that you meet each day!” I live in a city of 34,000 people just 6 miles northwest of Boston, MA. I know exactly one neighbor, across the street, whom we met because I sent my husband over to get her live band to stop playing loud music at her party at 2 am. I do not know many of the local business owners. I do not know who lives in my neighborhood, yet people live around me. Saying I …

The answers to the last pop quiz are up: http://www.pythian.com/blogs/868/pop-quiz-mysql-cluster

So here’s another pop quiz. Given the following:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 16450949 to server version: 4.1.14-standard-log

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> select count(*),length(password) from mysql.user group by length(password);
+----------+------------------+
| count(*) | length(password) |
+----------+------------------+
|       49 |               16 |
|       31 |               41 |
+----------+------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql> select password('foo');
+-------------------------------------------+
| password('foo')                           |
+-------------------------------------------+
| *F3A2A51A9B0F2BE2468926B4132313728C250DBF | …

Welcome to the 89th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Welcome, welcome everyone.

In writing this week’s Log Buffer, I’ve had a chance to sit down and read some excellent posts on all sorts of platforms. The depth and breadth of what’s available to house and retrieve data is astonishing.

Many of you who have read my posts will know that I’m a fan of vegetables. They are something most of us don’t eat enough of. Come on DBAs! I think we need to make a collective effort to get healthy. We need you to keep all these systems alive. I say this because I have a new found appreciation for the work we do day in and day out.

Six months ago my wife and I said hello to our baby girl for …

In Spotting the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing, Frank Mash writes about a specific person who is spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about MySQL.

Now, this always gets me, especially with MySQL. For how long will MySQL be the bastard stepchild of the database world? Because really, it’s been a full-fledged DBMS for at least 5 years. 10 years ago there were no transactions, but….that was 10 years ago! 10 years ago everyone made $100,000 per year, took 3 hour lunch breaks, played foosball in the office, coveting their IT stock and sat in massage chairs with Apple Cinema displays.

How much have *you* changed in 10 years? Your digital world? 10 years ago we paid for text messages by the character, which is why we came up with rlly abbr …

At this year’s MySQL Conference & Expo, taking place in Santa Clara, California in mid-April, I’m giving two sessions:

• Best Practices for Database Administrators
• Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking

You can see more info about me here, including descriptions of the workshops.

I look forward to seeing many of you there. Make sure you say hello!

We’ve been running into a problem with one client:

SELECT COUNT(*) FROM tbl;

takes 0.25 seconds on one db, and 0.06 seconds on another.

Consistently. That’s a fourfold difference.

There aren’t any significant configuration differences (like query cache, etc.), the software versions are the same, and the table fits into memory. This has been looked at by at least 3 in-house MySQL experts, and the only thing we can determine is that it’s a hardware difference.

The table fits into memory so it’s not a disk issue, and the only other difference among the hardware is that the slower machine has Solaris virtualization in place in the form of “containers” (cpu is the same, etc). Is this something that’s known to cause issues with speed? The “tbl” in question is an InnoDB table, if that means anything. Is there something like the “speed” of RAM?

Note that Sun has already been …