As a follow up to the previous post about logstash, here are a couple of related init scripts for anyone implementing the OpenSource Log Analytics setup that is explained over at divisionbyzero. These have been tested on CentOS 6.3 and are based on generic RC functions from Redhat so they will work with Redhat, CentOS, Fedora, Scientific Linux, etc.

• Init script for ElasticSearch: located in the repo by clicking here – servicewrapper required
• Init script for Kibana: …

We get a lot of questions about how Fractal Tree indexes work. It’s a write-optimized index with fast queries, but which write-optimized indexing structure is it?

In this ~15 minute video (which uses these slides), I give a quick overview of how they work and what they are good for.

This post is the second in a series that I will be doing on MySQL Workbench Utilities – Administer MySQL with Python Scripts. You may want to read the first half of this post to understand how MySQL Workbench Utilities work and how you access the scripts. These scripts were written by Chuck Bell (a MySQL employee) and are available as stand-alone scripts (see Chuck’s …

Today I got asked from a friend about the differences between SQLite and MySQL and in which cases it is better to use the first or the latter one. You can’t really compare these two, I will try to explain why this is the case and when it is better to use the first or the latter.

SQLite is a single-file based database which is useful for testing and for embedding in applications. This means that all the information is stored in a single file on a file system and you use a SQLite library to open this file to read and write your data.

MySQL is a database server which got different forms to store its data (engines) and will server the data to request comming from applications who connect to it.

SQLite:

• Fast setup. You only need to include a library into your app.
• Embedded. No need to think about …

I just realized that I didn’t hear a tremendous amount of feedback about Oracle’s MySQL Connect conference. Were you there? If so, how did you like it?

I had a customer recently who needed to reduce their database size on disk quickly without a lot of messy schema redesign and application recoding.  They didn’t want to drop any actual data, and their index usage was fairly high, so we decided to look for unused indexes that could be removed.

Collecting data

It’s quite easy to collect statistics about index usage in Percona Server (and others) using the User Statistics patch.  By enabling ‘userstat_running’, we start to get information in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INDEX_STATISTICS table.  This data collection does add some overhead to your running server, but it’s important to leave this running for a good long while to get a good dataset that is representative of as much of your workload as possible.

If you miss collecting index stats while some …

MySQL 5.6 is truly a better MySQL and reflects Oracle's commitment to the evolution of the most popular and widely
used open source database on the planet.  The feature-complete 5.6 release candidate was announced at MySQL Connect in late September and the production-ready, generally available ("GA") product should be available in early 2013.  

While the message around 5.6 has been focused mainly on mass appeal, advanced topics like performance/scale, high availability, and self-healing replication clusters, MySQL 5.6 also provides many developer-friendly nuggets that
are designed to enable those who are building the next generation of web-based …

We’ve all heard the term “Big Data” thrown around a fair amount in the last several years ever since the rise of Hadoop and other distributed storage methods. But defining “Big Data” has always been a subjective term that hinges on perspective; what one engineer considers big can be vastly different than another’s.

However, there’s finally a definite description that says Big Data no matter what perspective you operate from: “That facility by my calculations that I submitted to the court for the Electronic Frontiers Foundation against NSA would hold on the order of 5 zettabytes of data. Just that current storage capacity is being advertised on the web that you can buy. And that’s not talking about what they have in the near future.” You can read more about the facility and its purpose here: …

***This post is out of date and old. I have just migrated to blogger and this post is displaying as recent. Apologies***

Whenever I talk about MySQL performance my first recommendation is normally something along the lines of “Use the InnoDB storage engine” and I always get asked the same two questions 1) Why use InnoDB over MyISAM? and 2) Isn’t MyISAM faster? The short answers to these questions are:
1) There’s rarely any reason not to.
2) No……….(pause) well sometimes… in most cases no.
In this post I will aim to explain my choice of InnoDB and try and loosely define the cases where MyISAM may be better suited for your application. I am also very aware that there are many MySQL storage engines, but I am just going to cover the big two here.
First I am going to start with the reasons that InnoDB is better suited than MyISAM:
Data safety - I cannot stress …

“Some people even think that “Hadoop” and “Big Data” are synonymous (though this is an over-characterization). Unfortunately, Hadoop was designed based on a paper by Google in 2004 which was focused on use cases involving unstructured data (e.g. extracting words and phrases from Webpages in order to create Google’s Web index). Since it was not [...]