We quite often say, that benchmark performance is usually different from real world performance – so performance engineering usually has to cover both – benchmarks allow to understand sustained performance bottlenecks, and real world analysis usually concentrates on something what would be considered ‘exceptional’ and not important in benchmarks – stalls of various kind. They are extremely important, as the state when our performance is lowest is the state of performance we provide to our platform users.

On a machine that is doing 5000qps, stalling for 100ms means that 500 queries were not served as fast as they could, or even hit application timeouts or exceptional MySQL conditions (like 1023 transaction limit). Of course, stalling for a second means 5000 queries were not served in time…

We have

Learned a few things during my trip to the Philippines this time. Another country that amazes me. For the first time in history, Philippines attracted more foreign direct investments (FDI) than Malaysia, in 2010 (see: Malaysia’s FDI plunge).

Mobiles

There are a lot of people here using prepaid phones as opposed to postpaid phones. This is because the requirements of getting a postpaid account is quite tough (you need bank documents, etc. before they give you an account).

Many people carry more than one phone (or have more than one SIM). Smartphones face an uphill battle – they cost too much and there is generally no operator subsidy because everyone prefers prepaid accounts. It makes economic sense to have more than one SIM,

Apparently, Digg performed a big migration from MySQL to Cassandra and a big migration to their new Digg v4 architecture and now their VP of Engineering has been shown the door:

Ever since Digg launched its new site design, it’s been plagued with all kinds of trouble, not least of which is that it keeps going down. The problems with the new architecture are so bad that VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, we’ve confirmed with sources close to Digg.

In a Diggnation video today, CEO Kevin Rose explained some of the technical issues the site is dealing with and why it can’t simply roll back to the previous architecture. The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called

Sometimes we may need to collect facebook user’s basic data for our website or application. Then we’ve to call graph api or legacy api or fql query to collect some specific data. This is a basic requirements for most of the fbconnect base website or facebook application. To simplify this task here I published some code so that you could easily use this code and can integrate in your site. Read Full Article

Few years ago I was looking at crash recovery code, and realized that InnoDB has removed all the comments from the code [this assumption is debunked by Heikki in comments section], related to replay of transaction log. Judging by high quality of comments in the remaining codebase, I realized that it was all done to obscure any efforts to build another InnoDB hot backup solution – competitor to first Innobase standalone offering.

I was enjoying the moment when Percona launched their own implementation of the tool. Since the inception, it became more and more robust and feature rich.

We have used xtrabackup in our environment a lot – just… not for backup – the major use case right now is for cloning server instances – either

Been asked a few times in the last few days about where my slides are from my MySQL keynote from *last* year.

Ooops.

Um, yeah.  Sorry about that.  Here’s a link to ‘The SmugMug Tale’ slides, and you can watch the video below:

Sorry for the extreme lag.  I suck.

The important highlights go something like this:

• Use transactional replication.  Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have no idea where a

“… when you get the money, you get the power. Then when you get the power, then you get the women.” –Tony “Scarface” Montana

In the world of computing, first you get the users, then you get the applications, then you get the power. What do I mean by power? In a word “platform”. If the only way for users to get applications is through you, and the only way for application developers to get to users is through you, then you are a platform. If you continue to nurture and grow your platform, your company is immortal, it is a goose that will continue to lay golden eggs…as long as you continue to nurture it.

To get the users, you need to deliver immediate value. Once you achieve critical mass of users, the developers will start showing up, whether you want them or not. A good example of this was

We’ve had MySQL meetup’s organised thanks to mysql.meetup.com for years now, and its sad to see the relationship end in about a fortnight. Never fret, because it seems that Facebook can do all that, and more.

Migration

If you’re the meetup organiser, and you checked the Members list, or even attempted to download it, you’ll be disappointed. You get a CSV file, with the name of the person, some other metadata, if they’re on the mailing list (chances is yes to all), and the URL of the member profile. What’s missing? An email address.

So while its nice to have a CSV copy of the member list, it will not assist you in any migration, whatsoever. Totally data lock in :-(

Mailing list/message board

Keep in mind that you’ve got mailing lists and message boards on meetup.com.

Having written about what I think is cool about the upcoming MySQL Conference and the MySQL Camp, now I want to finish up with what I’d like to see at the Percona Performance Conference. Just to recap, this is a conference we created to serve those who want to learn about performance — not “learn about MySQL,” not “learn about database performance,” just learn about performance, period.

I want to see everything. I think this is going to be the single best conference I’ve ever been to. Even the way the conference is organized is exciting. For example, it’s running from early morning till late at night, nonstop. The sessions are also (mostly) only 25 minutes. This means if you decide a session isn’t all that interesting, you

A rotten little apple by Ashley Harding

Apple has had a nasty Safari bug since December which breaks SmugMug, Facebook, Gmail, and lots of US banks.

3 months later, it’s still not fixed. Your only option is to use Firefox if you’re affected.

Apple’s known about the problem since December, and has lots of internal bugs on the issue (30+ I last heard). (For my