Bloggers are striving hard to up their game. They are writing, editing, formatting, trimming, enhancing their blogs to offer maximum value. This Log Buffer Edition #306 cherishes these efforts.

Oracle:

To use ASMlib or not to use ASMlib? That is the question, and James Morle has more.

This is what happens when a vacation in Hawaii fades away for Richard Foote.

Charles Hooper has a feeling ANSI About Oracle Join Syntax?

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Get up-to-date on MariaDB, MySQL, Cloud Databases and SkySQL’s expertise: whitepapers and presentations now available on skysql.com

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How do you implement a parallel algorithm for a software which needs to be streamed to tapes?
How do you ensure that you have the capability to be able to tune the level of parallelism for varying input and output devices and varying levels of load?
These were some of the questions that we needed to answer when we were trying to implement multi-threading capability for MySQL Enterprise Backup (MEB).
The trivial way of achieving parallelism is by having the multiple threads pick up the different files (in a file per table) scenario. But this did not seem adequate because:
a) The sizes of these files (corresponding to the tables) could be different and then one large file would limit the level of parallelism since it would be processed by a single thread.
b) If you have to stream the backup how do you reconcile these multiple files being streamed by separate threads? Large backups are streamed directly to tape so it is …

Coverity is a static analysis tool, which although proprietary itself does offer a free scanning service for free and open source software (which is great by the way, I totally owe people who make that happen a frosty beverage).

Prompted by someone volunteering to get MariaDB into the Coverity Scan, I realized that I hadn’t actually followed through with this for Drizzle. So, I went and submitted Drizzle. As a quick overview, this is the number of problems of each severity both projects got back:

Overview Last night a customer call us because was having issue on the server and loss of performance on the MySQL server. When I join the bridge I ask to the customer a quick report of what was his experience and concern so far.

Luckily all the participants were technically skilled and team was compose by, SAs, DBAs, Team leader, so I was able to have a good overview in short time. Mainly there were two fronts, one was the problem on the server in the network layer, the other in MySQL that was not able to manage efficiently the number of thread opening requests.

The machine has a single NIC, Storage attach by fibre channel, 8CPU hyper threading, 64GB RAM and finally heavy usage of NFS.

The same server was in the past using the volumes on the NFS also for MySQL, but now everything was moved to the attached storage.

As said the issue was that NIC was reporting drop …

I'm not the only one to have noticed this, but I spent a sufficient amount of time banging my head against a wall finding this out that I thought it important to make more people aware of this.

While trying to validate new database hardware we were seeing some serious performance issues in production.  Most MySQL benchmarks using sysbench or pt-playback couldn't reproduce it, but a simple sysbench 16 threaded filio test on the mysql partition showed about 1/3 the throughput we would expect.   The fact that much of the hardware was new as well as the OS we were using made tracking down the cause difficult (changing from CentOS 5.5 to Scientific Linux 6.)

Finally some of our ops people working on different systems started noticing similar issues, and they uncovered the XFS issue.  Sure enough -- when took existing hardware, upgraded to SL6 and ran the same sysbench filio test we immediately saw a …

When you enable binlogs in the my.cnf file you can either set the log-bin flag to true, or you can set it to a path and file name prefix such as this:

[mysqld]
log-bin=/path/to/binlogs/mysql-binlog

This changes the default location where binlogs are stored.  The problem is that when you connect to mysql there is currently no way to query the server to find out if that path has been changed, and what it currently is.  This means you can't be sure where any server's binlogs are actually stored.
Ok, so they're not really missing, but it's a known issue that mysql doesn't make them easy to find.  The server obviously knows the path internally, but it doesn't make this information available. Bug #35231 has been open on this issue since 2008 and is currently being ignored.

Why?
This is such a trivial change …

The MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.8.1 release's main goal was support MySQL 5.6 server. But also beyond that primary goal MEB team added some valuable new options and features to ensure you'll get most from the new features in 5.6 as well. At a glance, here are some of the highlights,

MEB copy of InnoDB undo log tablespaces

MySQL 5.6 introduces a new feature to store undo logs in separate files called as undo tablespaces for improved performance. These undo tablespaces are logically part of system  tablespace. All the commands associated with MEB - "backup", "apply-log" and "copy-back"  now take care of the undo tablespaces in the same way as they process the system tablespace. MEB now supports innodb_undo_directory[logs][tablespace] option variables. When backup is executed, undo datafiles (up to number specified by innodb_undo_tablespaces) are stored in same directory as the datafiles of system tablespace. During …

The deadline is fast approaching to submit proposals for the Birds of a Feather Sessions (BOFs) and the Lightning Talks (presented during the Wednesday Evening Networking Reception) for the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013. Applications for the DotOrg Pavilion close soon as well. The deadline is February 24th for all three opportunities so submit your proposals now!

Lightning Talks are 5-minute presentations focusing on one key point in the MySQL world, technical or not. Lighthearted, fun or otherwise entertaining submissions are highly welcome. They might include a new …

First, congratulations Oracle on the GA of MySQL 5.6! Well done!

In this post I walkthrough the features of the first two alpha versions of MariaDB 10.0. The first, 10.0.0-alpha, which was made available in November, and 10.0.1-alpha that saw daylight yesterday. I will go through the features by placing them in the following categories:

• MariaDB 10.0-only Features (features that aren’t in MySQL 5.6)
• MariaDB 10.0 Merged Features (features merged from MySQL 5.6)
• MariaDB 10.0 Reimplemented Features (features reimplemented from features in MySQL 5.6)
• MariaDB 5.x Features now in MySQL 5.6 (features introduced in earlier MariaDB versions which have now been introduced in MySQL 5.6)
• MariaDB 5.x Features Backported from MySQL 5.6 (features introduced in earlier MariaDB versions which were backports of features from MySQL 5.6 development …