I’m presenting two talks at the OpenWest Conference next month.  The first talk, on May 2nd, will be about PHP security.  The second talk, given on May 3rd, will be about database optimization, geared towards web developers.  I’ll discuss some of the same things that I have discussed on this blog.

We’re going to have some great speakers at that conference.  On the PHP front, we’ll have Rasmus Lerdorf giving a keynote as well as another presentation.  From the MySQL community, Mark Callaghan from Facebook will be giving another keynote, and we’ll also have Colin Charles from MariaDB.

It should be an exciting conference!

For reasons that I will blog about in a couple of weeks, several people last week asked me what I think about open core. My answer was that nowadays I don't care much about the topic. Long time readers of this blog might be surprised at such an answer, so I thought this was a good time to reflect on why I don't think it is very important anymore, and more importantly to document the empirical evindence that we now have about open core as a business strategy.

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In early Spring 2003 I called Erik Granström @MySQL, wanting to discuss if we could work with MySQL on a new storage engine.  He directed me to Mårten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL. After a brief call with Mårten, we were to take up the discussion later in the Spring.  Mårten was very busy, and did not have time to take the discussion further, he did not tell me why, but I learned it a few months later.

At the time I was heading up a database start-up.  We had struggled for some time with customers, as they all wanted a “standard interface” to access the data, and all we could offer was a proprietary C++ interface. The answer lay in SQL, and we had done some initial work on an ODBC driver, where the parser and query execution was all done in the api.  It was tedious work, and clearly not where our key differentiator was.  Reading in the Linux Journal that Winter about MySQL seemed to present a solution to our …

Today’s blog post diving into the waters of the MySQL buffer pool is a cross-post from Groupon’s engineering blog, and is Part 1 of 2. Thank you to Kyle Oppenheim at Groupon for contributing to this project and post. We’ll be posting Part 2 on Thursday. I’ll be at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo next week in Santa Clara, California so look for me there – I’d love to connect and talk more about MySQL buffer pools or anything else that’s on your mind!

There …

The Micron P320h SSD is an SLC-based PCIe solid-state storage device which claims to provide the highest read throughput of any server-grade SSD, and at Micron’s request, I recently took some time to put the card through its paces, and the numbers are indeed quite impressive.

For reference, the benchmarks for this device were performed primarily on a Dell R720 with 192GB of RAM and two Xeon E5-2660 processors that yield a total of 32 virtual cores. This is the same machine which was used in my previous benchmark run. A small handful of additional tests were also performed using the Cisco UCS C250. The operating system in use was CentOS 6.3, and for the sysbench fileIO tests, the EXT4 filesystem was used. The card itself is the 700GB model.

So let’s take a look at the data.

With the sysbench fileIO test in asynchronous …

On configuring the Performance Schema

This article is a user guide about MySQL 5.6 Performance Schema configuration. As with many things, the way to approach problems may vary a lot based on systems, user experiences, or just plain opinions, so the "Your Mileage May Vary" caution applies here.

It is easy to get lost in details, and yet starting with the big picture in mind helps to understand not only how, but also more importantly why, to do things ...

The magic recipe is as follows

• Define your goals
• Define what to instrument
• Define how much detail to collect
• Provide sizing data
• Monitor sizing problems

Define your goals
Performance instrumentation in general can be used for many different things, ranging from casual monitoring in production to debugging in development, with every flavor in …

If you are importing large CSV or SQL dumps to MySQL, chances are you were looking for ways to see how far the import has gone. If you know how many rows there are from the file being imported, you can do a SELECT COUNT(*) but that would take sometime for the query to finish especially on really big imports.

Using lsof, you can monitor the current file offset to which a process is reading from using the -o option. Knowing the size of the file and some snapshots of the offset, you can get a somewhat rough idea of how fast the import goes. Note though that this is only file-read-pace not actual import speed as MySQL import can vary depending on a number of conditions i.e. table growth, secondary indexes, etc.

Let’s say I am importing a 1.1G CSV file into a table.

[revin@forge msb_5_5_300]$ ls -al /wok/dta/samples/ft_history.csv 
-rw-rw-r--. 1 revin revin 1075456654 Nov 8 23:25 /wok/dta/samples/ft_history.csv …

You might have noticed from my profile picture on this blog, as well as on Facebook, Twitter, etc., that I am a fan of Julian Cash‘s photography.

If you’re in the MySQL community, you almost certainly know his photography, both the “white background” style and “light painting” style. Julian took a bunch of photos of the MySQL community at conferences a few years ago, but the community has changed tremendously since then, and it’s time for a whole lot of new ones! I’ve asked Julian to come to the conference and take a bunch more photos of the MySQL community in his iconic “white background” style at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo …

Did you see this when you are migrating from your lovely MySQL 5.1 to MySQL 5.5?
Oh, sorry, you remain attached to your pretty 4.1. Yes, I know, MyISAM has become so important in your life…

Ok, seriously, I would like to share this little observation I made recently when switching to MySQL 5.5 on one slave.
You can see below two graphs for the transactional activity, there is exactly the same volume of update, delete and insert queries :

MySQL 5.1

MySQL 5.5

But the gray area represents the number of commit per second.
I find that I have much more commit with MySQL 5.5, why? …

I’ll be on a whistle-stop tour of California next week, including two presentations at the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.

On day one at 1:20pm I’ll be presenting CAP Theorem: Two out of three ain’t right, in which I will be challenging the popular ‘two out of three’ explanation of CAP Theorem, examining the evidence from a variety of experts, including Dr Eric Brewer.

Then on day three at 9:00am I’m very honoured to be providing a keynote presentation, The State of the MySQL Ecosystem.

Here’s an overview of the presentation:

It is now over three years since Oracle …