At Twitter, MySQL is an important part of our storage story. We can have a typical database node with thousands of open connections. It works mostly fine because generally only a few of these connections actively working inside the server. Given the scale at which we have to operate spikes happen – mostly at unexpected times and with unexpected ferocity. The challenge is how to control concurrency within MySQL server during spikes.

Historically we have been using innodb_thread_concurrency to control number of active threads within the server. In Twitter MySQL-5.5 we introduced the idea of Query Throttling where incoming requests are throttled if the number of active threads goes beyond a configurable threshold. These solutions focus on maintaining the health of the system. However, they don’t help us to scale to the workload spikes. With …

MariaDB 10.1.0 was recently released, and is available for download here:

https://downloads.mariadb.org/mariadb/10.1.0/

This is the first alpha release of MariaDB 10.1, so there are a lot of new changes and functionalities added, which cover a wide variety of areas such as: Performance, InnoDB/XtraDB, WebScaleSQL, Optimizer, Security, Storage Engine functionality, & Administration Improvements.

These are 9 of the most notable changes in MariaDB 10.1.0 (but do check out the release notes and changelogs below for the full list of changes):

1. InnoDB: Allow > 16K pages on InnoDB – InnoDB now allows page size to be configured as 16K, 32K and 64K. Note that single row size must be < 16K. This feature will allow …

The recent WebScaleSQL announcement has made quite a splash in the MySQL community over the last few weeks, and with a good reason. The collaboration between the major MySQL-at-scale users to develop a single code branch that addresses the needs of, well, web scale, is going to benefit the whole community. But I feel that the majority of community opinions and comments to date have been based on the announcement itself and the organizational matters only. What we have been missing is an actual look at the code. What actual new features and bug-fixes are there? Let’s take a look.

At the same time, as Percona is also a developer of an enhanced MySQL replacement database server, it’s natural to …

Recently there was a discussion on the webscalesql mailing list started by Chip Turner on a proposed change to the MAX_STATEMENT_TIME patch. This feature has been known as per query variable settings (WL#681) and even shipping in Percona Server 5.6 as per-query variable statement.

This feature has piqued my interest since 2009, when the MySQL project (then owned by Sun Microsystems) participated in Google Summer of Code 2009, and we got code from …

There are many MySQL related IRC discussion channels as the ecosystem itself grows. I join the following. Are there any that I’m missing?

Freenode (irc.freenode.net):

• #mysql – main channel for all kinds of end user MySQL related discussions (the noisiest of the lot, naturally)
• #maria – main channel for all kinds of MariaDB related discussions
• #webscalesql – for all kinds of WebScaleSQL discussions
• #percona – main channel for all kinds of Percona related discussions
• #tokutek – main channel for Tokutek discussions (TokuDB or TokuMX)
• SkySQL-specific channels: #maxscale and #mariadb-mgr

OFTC (irc.oftc.net):

• #debian-mysql – for all kinds of Debian MySQL related bits (packaging, bugs, etc.)

Related posts:

1. …

Madrid MySQL Users Group will have its next meeting on the 24th of April. Details can be found on the group’s Meetup page. We plan to talk about WebScaleSQL and I will give a short presentation on how to build WebScaleSQL RPMs on CentOS 6.  The meeting will be in Spanish. We’ve changed the place that … Continue reading MMUG7: Madrid MySQL Users Group meeting to take place on 24th April 2014

For fun, I tried building WebScaleSQL on Windows, even though it’s not [yet?] a support platform.

Using the following (as I would to build MySQL/MariaDB):

cd c:\mysql\webscalesql-5.6.16
mkdir bld
cd bld
cmake ..
cmake --build . --config relwithdebinfo --target package

I end up with:

...
    238 Warning(s)
    110 Error(s)
Time Elapsed 00:05:08.53

Looking through the output, the main error is this:

C:\mysql\webscalesql-5.6.16\include\atomic_stat.h(33):
fatal error C1083: Cannot open include file: 'atomic':
No such file or directory
[C:\mysql\webscalesql-5.6.16\bld\storage\innobase\innobase.vcxproj]

Of course the directory does exist, and permissions are correct.

C:\mysql\webscalesql-5.6.16\include\atomic_stat.h contains the following line:

#include <atomic>

And this exists:

C:\mysql\webscalesql-5.6.16\include\atomic

So there must be some …

This is a follow up to the :  WebScaleSQL Installation attempted... part 1

So being a typical geek, developer, idiot or whatever.. I failed to RTFM or in this case the FAQ.

So once I paid attention and didn't just rush into it,  I installed WebScaleSQL correctly.
The biggest problem was that I was using the Linux OS (Oracle Linux VM) which is just too old and  the Oracle repositories did little to help get it upgraded. While I wanted to start with something that everyone could use easily, that just was not it.

I downloaded …

Facebook’s Yoshinori Matsunobu

I spoke with Facebook database engineer Yoshinori Matsunobu here at Percona Live 2014 today about a range of topics, including MySQL at Facebook, the company’s recent move to WebScaleSQL, new MySQL flash storage technologies – and why attending the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo each year is very important to him.

Facebook engineers are hosting several sessions at this year’s conference and all have been standing room only. That’s not too surprising considering that Facebook, the undisputed king of online social networks, has 1.23 billion monthly active …

Looks like this post was rather unclear. See the bottom for how to build the rpms quickly.

WebScaleSQL was announced last week. This looks like a good thing for MySQL as it provides a buildable version of MySQL which includes multiple patches from Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter needed by large users of MySQL, patches which have not been incorporated into the upstream source tree.  Making this more visible will possibly encourage more of these patches to be brought into the code sooner.

The source is provided as a git repo at https://github.com/webscalesql/webscalesql-5.6 and as detailed at http://webscalesql.org/faq.html the documentation says there is currently no intention to provide binaries. …