With all the choice of database systems today, why does VividCortex use MySQL?

Given my expertise in MySQL, you might assume that I chose it simply because that's what I know. That's part of it, but there are other reasons too.

Note that I sometimes write in the first person, and a lot of this post is necessarily my opinion, because I helped start the company, and for better or worse (mostly better, I hope) many of my early decisions will probably live for a while.

MySQL is Mature and Proven

MySQL is a known quantity. Although years ago it lacked some desirable characteristics, that is ancient history. For many years now it's been difficult to find technologies that can boast MySQL's track record of simple, safe, high-performance, reliable, low-cost operation. MySQL is a standout in the field.

It's not perfect. That's not my claim. There is plenty to improve about it. Being mature and proven means that …

With all the choice of database systems today, why does VividCortex use MySQL?

Given my expertise in MySQL, you might assume that I chose it simply because that's what I know. That's part of it, but there are other reasons too.

Note that I sometimes write in the first person, and a lot of this post is necessarily my opinion, because I helped start the company, and for better or worse (mostly better, I hope) many of my early decisions will probably live for a while.

MySQL is Mature and Proven

MySQL is a known quantity. Although years ago it lacked some desirable characteristics, that is ancient history. For many years now it's been difficult to find technologies that can boast MySQL's track record of simple, safe, high-performance, reliable, low-cost operation. MySQL is a standout in the field.

It's not perfect. That's not my claim. There is plenty to improve about it. Being mature and proven means that …

My former boss at MySQL sent out a notice that MySQL 5.7.4 now supports the GB18030 character set, thus responding to requests that have been appearing since 2005. This is a big deal because the Chinese government demands GB18030 support, and because the older simplified-Chinese character sets (gbk and gb2312) have a much smaller repertoire (that is, they have too few characters). And this is real GB18030 support -- I can define columns and variables with CHARACTER SET GB18030. That's rare -- Oracle 12c and …

Replicating from a newer major version to an older major version in MySQL (for example a 5.6 master and a 5.5 replica) is generally not recommended, but when upgrading a master-master replication topology it's hard to avoid this scenario entirely. We ended up in this situation last week when upgrading the passive master of an active-passive master-master pair from 5.5 to 5.6. The primary replication flow was going from the active master (5.5) to the passive master (5.6) with no errors, but pt-heartbeat was running on the passive master, which led to a replication failure with this error on the active master:

Last_IO_Error: Got fatal error 1236 from master when reading data from binary log: 'Slave can not handle replication events with the checksum that master is configured to log; the first event 'bin-log.002648' at 4, the last event read from …

I have now released version 1.4 of my sqlstats plugin for MySQL and MariaDB. As of this version I focus on test with MariaDB, but it should work with MySQL also. In addition, I have now made the code a bit more portable by removing some features that depended on the THD struct.

So, what is sqlstats then, you ask? Well, the idea is to keep track of executed SQL statements and gather up statistics on how often they are used. The interesting thing is that sqlstats, before counting the number of executions of a statement, "normalizes" it, by which I mean that it regards
SELECT prod_name FROM products WHERE prod_id = 90;
as the same statement as
SELECT prod_name FROM products WHERE prod_id = 212;
This is useful to track those statements that takes very little time to execute, so probably they don't show up that often in SHOW PROCESSLIST, but are executed to so often to the performance effect can be …

Want to know more about recent MySQL ads? If so, and if you are closed to Paris, join us for the MySQL Tech Day scheduled for May 22nd, 2014. 

You will have an opportunity to hear the latest MySQL news, InnoDB new features and MySQL Performance Schema given by the key MySQL experts. Also this event is constructed as the interactive one, so you will have a chance to discuss and ask questions at this free event. Please review the detailed agenda below and here (in French).

Event Details:

Date: May 22, 2014

Time: 10:00 - 17:30 

Place: Oracle France, 15 Boulevard Charles de Gaulle, 92715 Colombes Cedex, Paris, France

Entrance fee: Free of charge

Registration: Please register …

Going to Percona Live and presenting MySQL Fabric gave me the opportunity to meet a lot of people and get a lot of good feedback. I talked to developers from many different companies and got a lot of great feedback that will affect the priorities we make, so to all I spoke to I would like to say a great "Thank you!" for the interesting discussions that we had. Your feedback is very valuable.

It was very interesting to read the comments on MySQL Fabric on MySQL Performance Blog. The article discuss the current version of MySQL Fabric distributed with MySQL Utilities and give …

ScaleArc recently hired Percona to perform various tests on its database traffic management product. This post is the outcome of the benchmarks carried out by me and ScaleArc co-founder and chief architect, Uday Sawant.

The goal of this benchmark was to identify ScaleArc’s overhead using a real-world application – the world’s most popular (according to wikipedia) content management system and blog engine: WordPress.

The tests also sought to identify the benefit of caching for this type of workload. The caching parameters represent more real-life circumstances than we applied in the sysbench performance tests – the goal here was not just to saturate the cache. For this reason, we created an artificial WordPress blog with generated data. …

This week we discuss MySQL and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Ear candy is how MVCC in InnoDB relates to undo logging and how you can write better queries based on this information. At the Movies is a demo of GIS.

MySQL and MariaDB geographic information
Geographic features in MariaDB
Spatial Extensions in MySQL
The SQL part of the OpenGIS Implementation Standard for geographic information, from the Open Geospatial Consortium's website.

read more

If you did not read my first blog post about Mark Callaghan’s (@markcallaghan) benchmarks as documented in his blog, Small Datum, you may want to skim through it now for a little context.

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On March 11th, Mark, a former Google and now Facebook database guru, published an insertion rate benchmark comparing MySQL outfitted with the InnoDB storage engine with two NoSQL alternatives — basic MongoDB and …