I’ve posted slides for my Velocity talk on VividCortex’s blog. The talk explained how we use exponentially weighted moving statistics to generate a meta-metric of abnormality for the time-series metrics measured from MySQL. That’s kind of a mouthful. Maybe you had to be there :-)

One of the challenges of big data is that it is, well, big. Computers are optimized for math on 64 bits or less. Any bigger, and extra steps have to be taken to work with the data which is very expensive. This is why a BIGINT is 64 bits.  In MySQL DECIMAL can store more than 64 bits of data using fixed precision.  Large numbers can use FLOAT or DECIMAL but those data types are lossy.

DECIMAL is an expensive encoding. Fixed precision math is expensive and you eventually run out of precision at which point you can't store any more data, right?

What happens when you want to store a counter that is bigger than the maximum DECIMAL?  FLOAT is lossy.  What if you need an /exact/ count of a very big number without using very much space?

I've developed an encoding method that allows you to store very large counters in a very small amount of space. It takes advantage of the fact that counters …

One of the challenges of big data is that it is, well, big. Computers are optimized for math on 64 bits or less. Any bigger, and extra steps have to be taken to work with the data which is very expensive. This is why a BIGINT is 64 bits.  In MySQL DECIMAL can store more than 64 bits of data using fixed precision.  Large numbers can use FLOAT or DECIMAL but those data types are lossy.

DECIMAL is an expensive encoding. Fixed precision math is expensive and you eventually run out of precision at which point you can't store any more data, right?

What happens when you want to store a counter that is bigger than the maximum DECIMAL?  FLOAT is lossy.  What if you need an /exact/ count of a very big number without using very much space?

I've developed an encoding method that allows you to store very large counters in a very small amount of space. It takes advantage of the fact that counters …

#DBHangOps for 6/26/13 is all done! Check out the recording below:

Hey everybody!

#DBHangOps is back this week at a slightly earlier time this Wednesday, June 26th, 2013 at 11:00am paciifc (18:00 GMT) . We’ll have special guest Shlomi Noach talking about the open source tools he’s developed to improve a DBA’s day-to-day work.

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!

Thanks and see all of you there!

In MySQL Workbench 6.0 two new additions have been made to the supported RDBMS sources list in the Migration Wizard: Sybase SQLAnywhere and SQLite. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to migrate your Sybase SQLAnywhere databases to MySQL.

As usual, we’ll start with a couple assumptions:

• You have MySQL Workbench 6.0 installed.
• You have a running Sybase SQLAnywhere database in your local computer (i.e. the computer where you are running MySQL Workbench. I’ll be using the demo database that Sybase distributes with SQLAnywhere 12.
• A running MySQL Server instance with proper user access is available and you are able to connect to it from MySQL Workbench. The Migration Wizard supports MySQL versions from 5.1 onwards so make sure you have a supported version. For this tutorial I’m using MySQL Server 5.6.12 CE installed in a virtual box inside my home network. …

My fellow testers and others who run RQG tests on MySQL flavors might be interested in some additions that are being used for MariaDB testing. While none of them is a major breakthrough, maybe they will make somebody’s life a little easier.

RQG Introduction

A quick introduction for those who have never heard of RQG, but are still curious what this blog post is about.

RQG stands for Random Query Generator, also known as randgen — an open-source product, available under the GPL v2 license. Quoting its home page on Launchpad, it is a “pseudo-random data and query generator that can be used to test any Perl DBI, JDBC or ODBC-compatible SQL server, in particular MySQL, but also JavaDB and PostgreSQL”.

The framework was created by my former colleague Philip Stoev, who not only developed a great tool, …

Tue, 2013-06-25 12:00elenst

My fellow testers and others who run RQG tests on MySQL flavors might be interested in some additions that are being used for MariaDB testing. While none of them is a major breakthrough, maybe they will make somebody's life a little easier.

RQG Introduction

A quick introduction for those who have never heard of RQG, but are still curious what this blog post is about.

RQG stands for Random Query Generator, also known as randgen -- an open-source product, available under the GPL v2 license. Quoting its home page on Launchpad, it is a "pseudo-random data and query generator that can be used to test any Perl DBI, JDBC or ODBC-compatible SQL server, in particular MySQL, but also JavaDB and PostgreSQL".

The framework was created by my former colleague Philip Stoev, who not …

I am actually quite excited about Tokutek’s release of TokuMX. I think it is going to change the landscape of database systems and it is finally something that made me looking into NoSQL.

Why is TokuMX interesting? A few reasons:

• It comes with transactions, and all that good stuff that transactions provide: a concurrent access to documents (no more global write-lock in MongoDB); crash recovery; atomicity
• Performance in IO-bound operations
• A good compression rate, which is a money-saver if you use SSD/Flash
• But it is also SSD/Flash life-time friendly, which is double money-saver

So having all these factors it is just a no-brainer if you have a …

My MySQL bugs is a list I recently created and intend to keep up to date with issues I have seen.

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraDB Cluster 5.5.31-23.7.5 on June 25, 2013. Binaries are available from the downloads area or from our software repositories.

New Features:

• Information about the wsrep sequence number has been added to INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_TRX table.
• Percona XtraDB Cluster can now be bootstrapped with the new bootstrap-pxc option in the init script.
• Percona XtraDB Cluster has implemented parallel copying for rsync …