(This is a cross-post from the Engine Yard blog. The original article appears here.)

Here is a question I've actually been asked a few times:

"I am writing a batch processing script which modifies data as part of an ongoing process that is scheduled by cron. I have the ability to group a number of modifications together into a transaction, but I'm not sure what the correct number is?"

First off, I think that this question is interesting not just in the context of batch processing, but it equally applies to all parts of the application. If you are designing a high throughput system for MySQL, there are actually some potential pain points that you can design your way around.

Potential Pain Points

Here are the situations where the size of the transaction could impact performance:

Very Small …

March 5, 2014 By Severalnines

The Severalnines team is pleased to announce the release of ClusterControl 1.2.5. This release contains key new features along with performance improvements and bug fixes. We have outlined some of the key features below. 

For additional details about the release:

• 1.2.5 ChangeLog
• Documentation
• Upgrading
  • Upgrade instructions
  • Blog that covers different upgrade scenarios …

In January we encouraged you to prepare for the MySQL Connect Call for Papers, indicating how.

While dates are still subject to change, we wanted to let you know that the CFP (for MySQL Connect and Oracle OpenWorld overall) will likely open around March 18th. Remember to prepare your submissions in advance in order to swiftly submit them during the 4 to 5 weeks that the CFP will remain open!

Awhile ago I wrote a blog post regarding a funding one of my team members (in the MySQL Support at Oracle) have started, to cover the costs for his wife’s medical treatment. Today it is Amie’s birthday, so I would like to share the funding once more. Please see: Amie’s lottery chances were better..

When someone you know, or somebody close to someone you know, get sick, it is hard to know what to say. While the illness may be a nightmare, needing to pass around the hat, like Shawn have to, does not make things better.

I did not know what to put in my old post, but I did get quite some positive feedback on it. If you would like to read it you may find it at When one of our most talented MySQL Support Engineers …

I recently had the pleasure of presenting the "State of Big Data Markets" to a non-technical audience. Big data might be the biggest hyped term of 2013/2014, but the interesting part for VividCortex and many others in the industry might not be as obvious.

Big data disrupts traditional technology vendors and creates an emerging world order where legacy technologies and business models fall short. Sure, like any industry, legacy players will become entrenched rent collectors, but the innovators are a new breed of software and services, built on top of increasingly commoditized hardware, with costs that are miniature compared to just months ago.

But how do we get to these conclusions?

Digitalia

For lack of a better term, 'digitalia' means the increasing digitization of our world. Companies, from Google, to your local …

#DBHangOps 03/05/14 -- Indexing tips and more!

Check out the recording below:

Hello everybody!

Join in #DBHangOps this Wednesday, March, 05, 2014 at 12:00pm pacific (20:00 GMT), to participate in the discussion about:

• Indexing Tips, tricks, and best practices

  • Given a set of known queries, how do you best index for them?

Be sure to check out the #DBHangOps twitter search, the @DBHangOps twitter feed, or this blog post to get a link for the google hangout on Wednesday!

See all of you on Wednesday!

Show notes

Indexing Tips, tricks, and best practices

• Great talk from Zardosht @ Tokutek about indexing -- …

The wild and crazy guys over at S&T Geotronics, James Sanderson and Marc Tessier, have decided to go full tilt with a Kickstarter version of their DIY Open Enigma Project.  For those who missed the fanfare last year, they were featured on Instructables showing how to build an Arduino-based encryption machine that works exactly like a WWII era Enigma.  You know, the thing that Alan friggin' Turing and his team at …

If you haven't read the Wikipedia article on deprecation, you might not know it's from the Latin word deprecare, meaning "to ward off (a disaster) by prayer." That pretty well describes the quandary for any software product that has a big established user base. Is it better to keep junk features, in case removing them will cause disasters for the old users? Or is it better to remove junk features, to avoid ridicule and to make the manual slimmer for the new users?

Historically MySQL has deprecated with caution, and usually MySQL has followed these steps:
(1) In version X, for any SQL statement that appears to use the feature, return a warning that the feature "has been deprecated and may be removed in a future release".
(2) Also in version X, put a notification in the manual. Notifications have a regular pattern so they're easy to find by looking in the …

Building a MySQL Galera cluster with Docker and Ansible

Galera replication has been very useful for having a relatively simple to set up and manage a MySQL HA database backend for various platform services at HP. Asynchronous replication is fine, it's just that for complex cloud systems, a simple solution is desired for replication and asynchornous replication would require PRM (corosync/pacemaker). Over the past two years, I've worked with both …

Building a MySQL Galera cluster with Docker and Ansible

Galera replication has been very useful for having a relatively simple to set up and manage a MySQL HA database backend for various platform services at HP. Asynchronous replication is fine, it's just that for complex cloud systems, a simple solution is desired for replication and asynchornous replication would require PRM (corosync/pacemaker). Over the past two years, I've worked with both …