We already blog a lot on temporary tables on disk, how this could be bad for your workload and should be avoid.  Each temporary table will open a file descriptor,  external kernel call and by nature a well know file system slow operation.

We can point this benchmark simulating a working mail server


Monitoring of such queries can be trace via the status of

created_tmp_disk_tables 
Evidence of what is happening watching many Aria or MyISAM tables created on disk :

/usr/sbin/lsof  | grep "mysql" | grep "#"
mysqld     1855     mysql 1658u      REG                8,1       8192    1505932 …

Limelight Networks

Issue addressed: Managing metadata at exabyte scale

Delivering Agile Storage in the Cloud with Billions of Assets

The Company: Founded in 2001, Limelight Networks, Inc (NASDAQ: LLNW) is an Internet platform and services company that integrates the most business-critical parts of the online content value chain. Limelight’s cloud-based services enable customers to profit from the shift of content and advertising to the online world, from the explosive growth of mobile and connected devices, and from the migration of IT applications and services to the cloud. More than 1,800 customers worldwide use Limelight’s massively scalable services to better engage audiences, optimize advertising, manage and monetize …

A year ago I posted a blog on The state of MySQL forks: co-operating without co-operating. (Also Giuseppe wrote about the topic at that time, and Peter Zaitsev covers it in his conference keynotes.) So I've been wondering if it would be good to write an update on the topic now, and in that case what to write.

read more

Just in time for the holidays, SkySQL has published new white papers to keep you occupied while dealing with holiday travel delays, waiting for your turkey to roast, or hiding from your in-laws! Download them, today:

• "Should I Migrate to Version 5.3 of the MariaDB Database?" - Written by Mark Riddoch, SkySQL's Senior Software Architect, this white paper looks at those features that have been added in the version 5.3 of the MariaDB™ database and compares them to what is available with version 5.5 of the MySQL® database. This white paper addresses the value that might be gained from migrating from version 5.5 of the MySQL database (or earlier) to version 5.3 of the MariaDB database.

• …

There has been a lot going on in MySQL community and I didn’t blogged about MySQL for some time. So this is a small update regarding MySQL in openSUSE Build Service and in openSUSE in general. This post is intended to let you know what, where and in which version we’ve got in Build Service And as I recently dropped server:database:UNSTABLE repo, everything is now in server:database, so the where part is quite easy

MySQL Community Server

First, let’s take a look at MySQL Community Server provided by the open source company we all love – Oracle. There are several versions around. Which one is the right one for you? That question …

We welcome everyone to Amsterdam where on Friday at 16:00 CET we will be giving a talk together with SpamExperts at the Open Source Conference 2011. The talk will be about MariaDB and how SpamExperts successfully overcame their problems with MySQL by migrating to MariaDB. The talk will focus on the MariaDB features that differentiate it from vanilla MySQL and an in-depth case study on SpamExperts and the problems they faced when deciding to migrate to MariaDB and a detailed overview of the actual migration process.  For more information about the conference, check out their website: http://www.opensourceconference.nl/

Just a friendly reminder to let everyone know you can still sign up for tomorrow's Open Discussion on Using MariaDB in commercial database projects provided by Monty Program and SkySQL.

You can register here:

http://www.skysql.com/news-and-events/webinars/mariadb-future-mysql-community-enterprise-open-webinar


When:

Thursday, December 8, 2011

11:00am ET, 8:00am PT, 16:00 UK, 17:00 CET, or 18:00 EET


Agenda & speakers:

Colin Charles, Chief Evangelist at Monty Program
When and why to use MariaDB in a commercial setting

Rasmus Johansson, COO at Monty Program
The offerings of Monty Program Ab and how to interact with us commercially

…

MariaDB and MySQL performance boost using noatime. Take a peek at your filesystem mount file on your Linux Box /etc/fstab

/dev/VolGroup01/LogVol01 /data ext3 defaults 0 0

In many cases just like the above you'll see that MySQL data location is mounted with "defaults" options - in our case MySQL data files are located in /data partition.

What does it mean? It means that you are taking a performance hit every time the file is accessed (read or write) on your file system. There is a record created i.e. physically written to the file system, that is besides MySQL access.

The issue is that if you do not explicitly specify "noatime" mount option for your ext3 file system the default "atime" will be used. This option is constantly writing to the disk bogging down your io performance. Unless you have a specific need for "atime" you are wasting io resources especially if you are using database …

DrupalDownUnder 2012 will be held in Melbourne Australia 13-15 January. A great event, I’ve been to several of its predecessors. People there don’t care an awful lot for databases, but they do realise that sometimes it’s important to either learn more about it or talk to someone specialised in that field. And when discussing general infrastructure, resilience is quite relevant. Clients want a site to remain up, but keep costs low.

I will teach pre-conference training sessions on the Friday at DDU:

• MySQL Query Design ($220 half-day)
• MySQL Server Tuning ($220 half-day)

The …

I was curious what information MariaDB’s “phone home” user feedback plugin sends. (It works on more than just MariaDB, by the way.)

It’s easy enough to find out: just load the plugin, then select from the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.FEEDBACK table. This returns a lot of rows that are obviously the status counters and variables, as well as the plugins loaded in the server. A quick exclusion join will eliminate those, and the result on my laptop is this:

select f.* from feedback as f
   left outer join global_variables as v on f.variable_name = v.variable_name
   left outer join global_status    as s on f.variable_name = s.variable_name
   left outer join plugins          as p on f.variable_name = p.plugin_name
where s.variable_name is null and v.variable_name is null and p.plugin_name is null;
+--------------------+--------------------------------------+
| …