February is turning out to be a busy month. I’ll be giving a talk about MariaDB at the SkySQL Solutions Day in Hamburg, alongside Sergei Golubchik. This happens February 1 2013.

I’ll also be in Brussels for FOSDEM and presenting at the MySQL & Friends devroom. Here I will talk about MHA and how you can get automated MySQL failover. I’ll also be hanging out at the CentOS booth with Karanbir Singh giving away MariaDB stickers all weekend. If you’re at FOSDEM, don’t forget to sign up for the …

FOSDEM is a free event that offers open source communities a place to meet, 
share ideas and collaborate.
It is renowned for being highly developer-oriented 
and brings together 5000+ geeks from all over the world.

 
This year again, be sure that FOSDEM will be the place to be in February!

Do you have any doubts? Really ? Dude, repeat after me :

1. Free event
2. During a week-end
3. Beer
4. 5000+ open source geeks
5. Beer
6. MySQL and Friends devroom
7. NoSQL devroom
8. No registration needed (open source man!)

Ok, that sounds good?

Well, here are the informations to attend this terrific event :

• How to register? : Are you kidding me?
• When : 2 & 3 February 2013 (Hurry up guys!)
• Where : Brussels (beers!!!)
• Website …

Libdrizzle is getting better and better with every release, and to reflect this we have two announcements to make.

First of all, Libdrizzle 5.1.2 has been released.  This release has several major bug fixes and performance enhancements.  Changes are as follows:

• Non-blocking Windows connections are now more stable
• Improvements to Windows building
• Unix Socket connections are now more stable
• Memory allocation/freeing cleanups (for performance and ease of code)
• Network packet buffer now much more flexible
• Many performance improvements (the bundled drizzle_binlogs tool is now around 10x faster on my i7 laptop)
• Several other minor bug fixes

API chages:

• drizzle_query_str() has been removed, drizzle_query() with a 0 byte length parameter now does the same thing.

As always you can …

Oh yes, 2012 was an incredible year for the MySQL Community!
That’s why I would like to change the rules this year and I would like to offer you a new survey for this [Plus] reader’s choice 2012.

Community users, bloggers and events made the whole community last year, tell us how you used this community?
It will only take 5 minutes of your precious time, votes will be closed Jan. 31.

Vote for what you used! (with your heart, again…)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll. Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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I may not work on many MySQL related things any more but there are some MySQL ecosystem events that I am participating in.

First there is Percona Live London.  This event is on the 3rd and 4th of December at The Millennium Gloucester Conference Centre.  At this event I will be giving a talk on MySQL Compatible Open Source Connectors.  This will cover alternatives to the standard connectors and how to use them, it will be useful if you find the licensing behind the standard connectors prohibiting.  There is also a 40% off discount code you can use when registering, simply enter the promo code "Come2mytalk".

On the 2nd and 3rd of February is FOSDEM.  At …

Frédéric Descamps of Percona.

Percona Toolkit is Maatkit & Aspersa combined. Opensource and the tools are very useful for a DBA.

You need Perl, DBI, DBD::mysql, Term::ReadKey. Most tools are written in Perl, and whatever is in Bash is being re-written in Perl. There is also a tarball or RPM or DEB packages.

Know your environment. The hardware & OS are crucial for you to know. How much memory/CPU do you use? Do you use swap? Is this a physical/virtual machine? Do you have free space? What kind of RAID controller? Volumes? Disk? What about the network interfaces? What IO schedulers are used? Which filesystem is the data stored on? To answer all that, just use pt-summary.

Know your MySQL environment. Version? Build? How many databases? Where is the data …

Sergey Petrunia of the MariaDB project & Monty Program.

MySQL 5.5 GA at the end of 2010. MariaDB 5.3 RC towards the end of 2011 (beta in June 2011).

MySQL 5.5 is merged to Percona Server 5.5 which included semi-sync replication, slave fsync options, atuomatic relay log recovery, RBR slave type conversions (question if this is useful or not), individual log flushing (very useful, but not many using), replication heartbeat, SHOW RELAYLOG EVENTS. About 2/3rds of the audience use MySQL 5.5 in production, with only 2 people using semi-sync replication.

MariaDB 5.3 brings replication features brings group commit in the binary log, which is merged into Percona Server 5.5. Checksums for binlog events which is merged from MySQL 5.6. Sergey goes in-depth about the …

Giuseppe Maxia of Continuent and long time creator of MySQL Sandbox.

Only works on Unix-like servers. Works with MySQL, Percona & MariaDB servers. MySQL server has the data directory, the port and the socket – you can’t share these.

To use it: make_sandbox foo.tar.gz. Then just do ./use.

$SANDBOX_HOME is ~/sandboxes. You can also create ~/opt/mysql/ and if you have MySQL 5.0.91 binary in that directory, you can just do “sb 5.1.91″.

Sandbox has features to start replication systems as well. You can have varying master/slave setups with varying versions as well (good idea to test from MySQL -> MariaDB master->slave for migration).

You can now also play with tungsten-sandbox, which is a great way to start playing with …

Steve Hardy of Zarafa.

Work that has been done to make Zarafa better. Why do you optimise your buffer pool? To decrease your I/O load. How can you do it? Buy more RAM, page compression, less (smaller) data, rearrange data.

MariaDB or Percona Server allows you to inspect your buffer pool (unsure if this is now available in MySQL 5.6). Giuseppe in the audience says this is available in MySQL 5.6, but Steve used this on MariaDB 5.2.

Strategies to fix it: Make records smaller. Remove indexes if you can use others almost as efficiently. Make records that are accessed around the same time have a higher chance of being on the same page. Use page compression. Buy more RAM. Try Batched Key Access (BKA) in MariaDB 5.3+.

Best to view the presentation since …

Stéphane Combaudon of Dailymotion.

Index: separate data structure to speed up SELECTs. Think of index in a book. In MySQL, key=index. Consider that indexes are trees.

InnoDB’s clustered index – data is stored with the Primary Key (PK) so PK lookups are fast. Secondary keys hold the PK values. Designing InnoDB PK’s with care is critical for performance.

An index can filter and/or sort values. An index can contain all the fields needed for the query you don’t need to go to the table (a covering index).

MySQL only uses 1 index per table per query (not 100% true – OR clauses), so think of a composite index when you can. Can’t index TEXT fields (use a prefix). Same for BLOBs and long VARCHARs.

Indexes: speed up queries, increases the size of your dataset, slows down writes. How big is the write slowdown? Simple test by Stephane, for in-memory workloads he says adding 2 keys makes performance 2x …