2013 is on it's initial months and we already have 5.6 GA and the first release of 5.7, 5.7.1 DMR with lots of exciting new features, future is promising!

A new feature added in replication was the NONBLOCKING option to SHOW SLAVE STATUS command.

In the past if we stop slave during a big transaction, until the transaction was applied we cannot execute SHOW SLAVE STATUS to see the slave progress. The latter operation would block until the former finish, this would disable all external monitoring or third-party applications that need a immediate response from server.

To solve this problem, NONBLOCKING option was added to SHOW SLAVE STATUS, when it is used we can obtain immediate response from server about slave progress. As a …

This is the second part in a two-part series comparing Virident’s vCache to FlashCache. The first part was focused on usability and feature comparison; in this post, we’ll look at some sysbench test results.

Disclosure: The research and testing conducted for this post were sponsored by Virident.

First, some background information. All tests were conducted on Percona’s Cisco UCS C250 test machine, and both the vCache and FlashCache tests used the same 2.2TB Virident FlashMAX II as the cache storage device. EXT4 is the filesystem, and CentOS 6.4 the operating system, although the pre-release modules I received from Virident required the use of the CentOS 6.2 kernel, 2.6.32-220, so that was the kernel in use for all of the benchmarks on both systems. The benchmark tool used was sysbench 0.5 and the version of MySQL used was …

After a lot of fuzz, I am now releasing MyQuery version 3.5.1. This version introduces one big feature, a brand new Dictionary viewer. In addition to that, there are numerous bug fixes and the removal of one feature, which is the option to run with just 1 connection: In this version, 2 connections will always be used, and I have some good reasons to remove this as being optional, fact is, running with 1 connection was hard to diagnose, caused a lot of problems, and had no real benefit actually, just drawbacks.

So, for you Windows users, MyQuery 3.5.1 is now out there, but it is really a beta. The beta is caused by the new Dictionary viewer, the rest should be pretty stable.

Download it from sourceforge.

Happy SQLing
/Karlsson

Every so often you see something from the past and wonder “Why don’t we do that anymore?” Well, in this case it was a former co-worker wearing his MySQL Contributor shirt.

This is Antony Curtis in one of the original MySQL Community Contributor shirt

So the MySQL Community Team had a quick meeting and the result is that we are reestablishing the tradition. So if you have a signed Oracle Contributor Agreement and have contributed to MySQL, you should have in your inbox a request for your shirt size and a shipping address. If you do not see an email and you qualify for a short, let us know (we probably have an old email on record for you). And if you are working on some code for MySQL and have that OCA ready but not filed, please expedite your actions so you do not miss out on this batch.
…

Download PDF Presentation

Thanks to Tim Callaghan for speaking Tuesday night at the Effective MySQL New York meetup on Fractal Tree Indexes : Theory and Practice (MySQL and MongoDB). There was a good turnout and a full room to learn how the TokuDB storage engine from Tokutek is changing how to handle big data in MySQL.

Also interesting is how the same technology has been applied for use in MongoDB including giving MongoDB transactions; a big change for NoSQL.

Related News: …

In case you missed it, more and more people are now spreading the word about the Performance Schema, which is a very good thing.

#DBHangOps 4/10/13

Mark Leith presents the Performance Schema and ps_helpers.

Random quotes from the recording:
"I am already seeing so many benefits out of this, ..."
"This looks fantastic"
"Very cool"

OurSQL Episode 139: Starting to Perform

Sheeri and Gerry present the Performance Schema.

Ramdom quote from the recording:
"I am looking at this feature [digests], and I think it's amazing"

Webinar: MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema

PeterZ …

(This is part one of a two part series) Over the past few weeks I have been looking at a preview release of Virident’s vCache software, which is a kernel module and set of utilities designed to provide functionality similar to that of FlashCache. In particular, Virident engaged Percona to do a usability and feature-set comparison between vCache and FlashCache and also to conduct some benchmarks for the use case where the MySQL working set is significantly larger than the InnoDB buffer pool (thus leading to a lot of buffer pool disk reads) but still small enough to fit into the cache device. In this post and the next, I’ll present some of those results.

Disclosure: The research and testing for this post series was sponsored by Virident.

Usability is, to some extent, a subjective call, as I may have preferences …

We are pleased to announce RethinkDB 1.5 (The Graduate), so go download it now!

This release includes the long-awaited support for secondary indexes, a new algorithm for batched inserts that results in an ~18x performance improvement, support for soft durability (don't worry -- off by default), and over 180 bug fixes, features, and enhancements.

Upgrading to 1.5? Make sure to migrate your data before upgrading to RethinkDB 1.5. →

Secondary indexes

…

MySQL has two great features which historical haven't played well together:

1. Index-only queries:  In some cases, MySQL can resolve a query directly from the index, without having to read the underlying table.
2. Prefix indexes:  This allows you to specify how many bytes to index, which can reduce index size or allow you to index the larger data types (ie. BLOB/TEXT).  The drawback being that the entire field isn't stored in the index, so you can't do index-only queries.

One common optimization we do to reduce IOP consumption on database servers is to add additional columns to indexes in order to allow more queries to be index-only.  However, sometimes we have these large TEXT fields in order to allow for larger content -- even if the content is normally very small.

For example:

CREATE TABLE tbl (

  …

MySQL has two great features which historical haven't played well together:

1. Index-only queries:  In some cases, MySQL can resolve a query directly from the index, without having to read the underlying table.
2. Prefix indexes:  This allows you to specify how many bytes to index, which can reduce index size or allow you to index the larger data types (ie. BLOB/TEXT).  The drawback being that the entire field isn't stored in the index, so you can't do index-only queries.

One common optimization we do to reduce IOP consumption on database servers is to add additional columns to indexes in order to allow more queries to be index-only.  However, sometimes we have these large TEXT fields in order to allow for larger content -- even if the content is normally very small.

For example:

CREATE TABLE tbl (

  …