What this is about

The following is a review of the real status about Amazon RDS in comparison with EC2.

The purpose is to have a better understanding of possible limitation in the platform usage, and what is a possible fit and what not.

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Why

I did a first review an year ago for internal purpose, but now we are receiving the same questions over and over from different customers.

Given that and given a lot of things could happen in one year, I have decide to repeat the review and perform the tests once again.

What needs to be underline is that, I am doing this in consideration of a usage in PRODUCION, not as QA or development.

So my considerations are obviously focus on more demanding scenarios.

About EC2 and RDS. …

A special extended edition of Tech Messages for 2013-03-07 through 2013-03-10:

• http://eyeseast.github.com/python-tablefu/
  Really looking forward to trying this out. Anyone interested in weighing in with their experiences?
• How to selectively kill queries in MySQL? — dba square | A resource on MySQL
  Especially helpful when you have hundreds of queries that need to die.
• Redis with an SSD swap, not what you want - Antirez weblog

There are many thing changed in MySQL 5.6 which are related to passwords:

• There is a new password hash algorithm (SHA-256)
• There is obfuscation for passwords with the .mylogin.cnf file.
• The option to store slave passwords in a database table.
• It's now possible to supply a password to START SLAVE.

But that's not what this blog post is about.

This blog post is a great new feature: Hiding passwords from your log files, automatically.

MySQL 5.6 will by default hide passwords from the general log. This is not just obfuscation as only the one-way hash will be put in the log files. By setting log-raw=OFF you can disable password hiding for the general log. The log-raw setting will only influence the general log, so the passwords in the slow query log and the binary logs will still be hidden.

With MySQL 5.5 this could be done manually by …

I’m going to take the numbers from my previous post, MySQL Modularity, Are We There Yet? for the “kernel” size of MySQL – that is, everything that isn’t a plugin or storage engine.

For Linux kernel, I’m just going to use the a-bit-old git tree I have on my laptop. I’ve decided that the following directories are for “plugins” drivers/ arch/ sound/ firmware/ crypto/ usr/ virt/ tools/ scripts/ fs/*/* and everything else is core kernel code.

During the second half of our CUBE discussion with Wikibon analyst Jeff Kelly at this year’s Strata Conference in Santa Clara, we talked about the tipping point for Big Data. Strata veterans could see at a glance that this year’s conference was markedly different. No longer the exclusive domain of geeks and database administrators, this year’s Strata featured some of the biggest enterprise vendors around. With heavy weight enterprise players Intel and EMC Greenplum announcing their own Hadoop distributions, big data is clearly going mainstream. Now that we know how to capture, store, access and analyze big data, what’s the next step? Listen in to hear my conversation with Jeff Kelly about taking big data down its last mile and finally putting it in the hands of business users.

Source: …

There is one more day until the 2013 Virtual Developer Day for North America so register today! Europe, Middle East, Africa and Some Asian Countries have a week before their event!

Virtual Developer Day: MySQL is a one-stop shop for you to learn all the essential MySQL skills. With a combination of presentations and hands-on lab experience, you’ll learn the latest features in MySQL 5.6, have the opportunity to practice in your own environment and sharpen your skills to:

Develop your new applications cost-effectively using MySQL
Improve performance of your existing MySQL databases
Manage your MySQL environment more efficiently
Don’t miss this exclusive opportunity to learn tips and tricks from the MySQL experts at Oracle!

WHO:
Rob Young, Product Management Director, Oracle MySQL
Craig Sylvester, Principle Sales Consultant, Oracle MySQL
Ligaya Turmelle, Principle Technical Support …

Stating the problem.

In my job, I do a lot of testing. And no matter how much organized we try to be, we end up with fewer machines than we would need to run all the tests that we want.

For some tasks, we can run MySQL Sandbox, and get the job done. But sometimes we need to make sure that applications and systems work well across the network, and we need to install and run systems on separate servers.

However, when you test replication systems, and every cluster takes three or four servers, you run our of available hosts very quickly. So you decide to use the clusters that are dedicated to automated testing to also run your own manual tests. Soon you realize that the tests that you are running manually are clashing with the automated ones, or with the ones that your colleagues are running.

A simple solution is installing additional sandboxes for the MySQL …

MySQL 5.6 vs MySQL 5.5 & the Star Schema Benchmark

So far most of the benchmarks posted about MySQL 5.6 use the sysbench OLTP workload.  I wanted to test a set of queries which, unlike sysbench, utilize joins.  I also wanted an easily reproducible set of data which is more rich than the simple sysbench table.  The Star Schema Benchmark (SSB) seems ideal for this.

I wasn’t going to focus on the performance of individual queries in this post, but instead intended to focus only on the overall response time for answering all of the queries in the benchmark. I got some strange results, however, which showed MySQL 5.6.10 to be much slower than MySQL 5.5.30 even with only a single connection. I felt these results warranted deeper investigation, so I did some research and detailed …

On Thursday, I will travel to Boston, MA, to attend the Northeast LinuxFest, which includes also an edition of the Open Database Camp. The events will be at one of my favorite places on earth: The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a.k.a. the MIT. Every time I speak at an event there, I feel at home, and I look forward to be there once more.

The Open Database Camp is organized, as usual, with the formula of an un-conference, where the schedule is finalized on the spot.

There are a few ideas for sessions. I have proposed two of the topics I am most familiar with:

• …

Ever see an error like this in your console or error log, respectively, and wonder where it originated from?

Console (5.5.30):

ERROR 1017 (HY000): Can't find file:
'.\test\select@0020@002a@0020from@0020t1.frm' (errno: 22)

Error Log (5.5.30):

130307 23:22:04 [ERROR] C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.5\bin\mysqld: 
Can't find file: '.\test\select@0020@002a@0020from@0020t1.frm' (errno: 22)

(Fwiw, they are harmless, unless it is indicative of some sql injection – but you may want to sanitize your data better, unless it’s just a one-time user error. Also, if you’re seeing it from the command line, then you’ll likely realize what you did immediately, and thus no need to ‘figure out’ what happened. However, when you *only* see this entry in the error log, and you want to know how that happened after the fact, then this is more relevant.)

At any rate, after searching the code, one can see …