Another good day today: I attended the keynotes and found them quite interesting.

I especially liked the way Twitter uses MySQL to build up a NoSQL solution. Jokes aside, I took a few notes on things I must analyze and dig in.

The introduction of the Paypal models seemed very interesting, which brought me to attend the presentation later on. It was well constructed and had some good theoretical work, but I was quite disappointed. I found the presentation incomplete and missing real numbers for the MySQL Cluster NDB setup.

I attended the presentation done by Ronald B. It was good — nothing really advanced, but it was on purpose. He was very informative and explanatory for a junior MySQL DBA, and I enjoyed his presentation for the logical approach and construction.

Ronald also highlighted that it was the content of less then a chapter of one of his books and was done on purpose to give an initial understanding of …

I attend five sessions today, and I think that some of them were very interesting, like the one on the Optimizer insight. It was quite informative and accurate.

Another one, done by the MySQL Cluster (NDB) group on the installer and new Javascript API interface, left me a little bit…foggy. Why? Because in my mind, one of the most important things to accomplish in NDB is the correct dimensioning of the memory, buffers, possible operation, attributes, and so on. All these things should come from the schema definition review and from the application analysis.

Now given the review analysis of the schema is still not present in the installer, I think that we missed a very important piece of information. When I raised the issue, Bernd mentioned that they were thinking of integrating that as well. It’s a good move, and I hope to see it soon. About the JavaScript API, I honestly think this was a real waste of …

I’m excited to be here not only to catch up with old friends and ex-colleagues, but also to witness what seems to be the start of a very significant conference from MySQL.

I really enjoyed the introductions done by Edward Screven and Thomas Ulin. Edward highlighted the fact that MySQL is increasing its presence in the market and in the community. This could be thanks to the unbelievable effort done by Oracle in keeping its production cycle on target. Thomas stressed that point and gave a great description of it. He demonstrated Oracle’s main focus points, which are mainly on InnoDB, with implementation and enhancement of the internal contentions, then on Optimizer improvements and NoSQL integration.

Replication remains a pending issue from my side because if we have the global transaction ID, we still suffer from delay in replication given that parallel replication is still working by, schema and not …

Oracle OpenWorld 2012 is just over a month away, and yes, we are organizing the Annual Oracle Bloggers Meetup — one of your top favorite events of OpenWorld.

What: Oracle Bloggers Meetup 2012

When: Wed, 3-Oct-2012, 5:30pm

Where: Main Dining Room, Jillian’s Billiards @ Metreon, 101 Fourth Street, San Francisco, CA 94103 ( …

MySQL management plugin for EM 12c has been long overdue. I’ve initially migrated the older plugin to EM 12c about 6 months ago, and few dozen people received this as the initial beta of the plugin. It worked OK but didn’t use any of the new 12c features, and its home page was a bit of a mess in the EM 12c Cloud Control web interface.

I’ve had lots of new features to add, but I didn’t really have much time to invest into completing them all. Finally, I decided to just finish the home page dashboard and clean it up from all unfinished new features. I did, however, finish MySQL Slave configuration and status monitoring, which was the largest gap in the the functionality of the previous plugin. There is no custom UI for MySQL slave management yet (that’s coming), but monitoring is available as standard metrics and configuration management …

This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out there, especially relating to multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …

These past couple of weeks have been quite intense and generated a lot of news.

What stood out to me was the escalation in the race between MySQL/Oracle and MariaDB to be better. I have to say that all of us are benefiting from this competition. I am also not fully sure that Oracle would have put in such effort if Monty and his team was not pushing so hard. Certainly, Thomas Ulin has his agenda, but Monty is doing a great job for his product and in pushing the competitor to do his best. The result is that MySQL is becoming a better product day by day.

Thanks guys!

MySQL Internals

Is it a crazy idea to use MySQL for Json and HTTP embedded? I love crazy things, and this seems crazy, but it is closer to our reality than we can imagine:

“PoC: HTTP, JSON, JavaScript, Map&Reduce built-in to MySQL

What if MySQL had an HTTP interface and would reply JSON? What if MySQL …

Stalls During DDL, Faster DROP TABLE Courtesy of the InnoDB Team

Mark Callaghan mentioned a simple issue on DDL operation. I found the back porting interesting, but not always a possible option. I have nothing to comment on top of what was already stated there, but I’ll mention it because it is interesting to read.

Why do threads sometimes stay in ‘killed’ state in MySQL?

Customers often ask me (and I believe all MySQL DBAs can relate): “Why did that query remain in a KILL state and does not go away?”

As we know, KILLed queries remain in MySQL until a clean up takes place, given that the action is not done synchronously. I found this article to be a good description of such events …

This week has been rather calm.

I was busy with day-to-day work but had some spare time to use on simple implementations and tests. My work was related to Tablespace management in 5.6 and Table partition EXCHANGE. You can read the articles here.

I have also started to dig a little bit more in the details of Mongo’s architecture, given the need to have it properly reviewed and implemented in parallel with MySQL installations. As for news and reviews, I was interested in a couple of articles:

Interesting article from Vadim about SSD. This is more of a suggested reading then one I can comment on.

What really makes me unhappy was the …

When preparing for the the IOUG Collaborate 12 deep dive on deploying Oracle Databases for high Availability, I wanted to provide some feedback on what hardware components are failing most frequently and which ones are less frequently. I believe I have reasonably good idea about that but I thought that providing some more objective data would be better. I couldn’t find and results of a more scientific research so I decided to organize a poll. This blog post shows the results and I promised to share it with several groups.

The results are also in the presentation material but it might be hidden deep into 100+ slides so here is the dedicated blog with some comments on the …