Bradley Kuszmaul of TokuDB fame pointed out that my benchmark for Green Mutexes used usleep to implement lock hold times of a few microseconds and that usleep(1) would sleep for much more than 1 microsecond. So I changed the test code to use gettimeofday to implement the lock hold time and repeated the tests.

There are a few differences with the new results. First, the lock hold time is now accurate when less than 50 microseconds. Second, the thread that holds the lock uses the CPU while waiting to unlock so CPU utilization should increase a small amount. I also report …

Bradley Kuszmaul of TokuDB fame pointed out that my benchmark for Green Mutexes used usleep to implement lock hold times of a few microseconds and that usleep(1) would sleep for much more than 1 microsecond. So I changed the test code to use gettimeofday to implement the lock hold time and repeated the tests.

There are a few differences with the new results. First, the lock hold time is now accurate when less than 50 microseconds. Second, the thread that holds the lock uses the CPU while waiting to unlock so CPU utilization should increase a small amount. I also report two …

Has it ever happened to you, when attending a party or any other convention, to enter the hall, see a gang of nice people drinking, smiling, laughing, doing small talks, and you saying “hi” to them and in response getting just and empty stare somewhere above your head? And you then – trying to approach a guy looking quite familiar to you – stretch your hand to shake his hand just to watch him demonstratively turn his back to you? And so there you nervously looking around, and stealthily checking your back (no, no tail), and throwing a glance at your toes (still no hooves), and you passing your palm across your sweating forehead (no hints of horns). And “am I plagued?” comes to your head as you start regretting utterly that your appeared here at all, and you start wishing to be disintegrated, annihilated, completely blown out... You don't have to. Calm down. You are invisible. You are invisible for them. This is an Oracle …

Call for Abstracts Deadline Extended until October 22! 

MySQL Sessions are needed ! Submit an abstract for RMOUG Training Days 2013! They have extended the abstract submission deadline to Monday, October 22.

They are looking for presentations on the following topics:

• Application Development
• Business Intelligence
• Database Administration
• DBA Deep Dive
• Database Tools of the Trade
• Middleware

All primary authors of selected abstracts receive a complimentary conference registration.

Visit …

It's the time of the year again: You have 2 more weeks to submit a great proposal to the biggest and baddest MySQL Conference: Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2013 (Santa Clara). Like many things in the MySQL community, this conference has also gone through a transformation over the past 3 years. But last year the growing pains and uncertainty ended with Percona putting up a great show. Attendance was up again (over 1000) and there was a sense of energy and excitement for the future of MySQL. If you are like me and like to dwell in nostalgia (so that you can get into the right mood for submitting great proposals) my coverage of last year's conference is found here: part 1, …

The other day I needed to run a simple mysql job to backup and delete some database records on a live server. Being a live server, it is important to make sure you aren't asking the database to take on jobs that could potentially lock it up. Better to run a batch job. Running a batch is simple. You can call it right from the mysql console with:

source [path_to]/[the_batch_script].sql

But what if there are millions of records that need deleting? Bash shell script to the rescue.

Here is the idea of the SQL job that needed to get run a few times:

START TRANSACTION;

/* Find what you want to delete and put a LIMIT on your batch size */
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE records_to_delete_temp SELECT id from `records` where ..... limit 1000;

/* Creating backup table to archive spam orders */
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `records_backup` LIKE `records`;
INSERT INTO `records_backup` SELECT * from `records` where id in (select …

As MySQL is thriving and growing, we're looking for an experienced technical writer located in Europe or North America to join the MySQL documentation team.

For this job, we need the best and most dedicated people around. You will be part of a geographically distributed documentation team responsible for the technical documentation of all MySQL products. Team members are expected to work independently, requiring discipline and excellent time-management skills as well as the technical facilities to communicate across the Internet.

Candidates should be prepared to work intensively with our engineers and support personnel. The overall team is highly distributed across different geographies and time zones. Our source format is DocBook XML. We're not just writing documentation, but also handling publication. This means you should be familiar with DocBook, and willing to learn our publication infrastructure.

…

What a relief! A few simple configuration steps gives me new hope for coping with email.

It unlikely matters to you, but it does to me: My inbox is down to zero. That is, both my two inboxes are empty. I get work email to my @skysql.com address and private email to my @arno.fi, both of which have been suffering from bad email habits.

Inspired by years of discussions with Giuseppe Maxia, who is living proof that proper IT tools make geeks work smarter, faster and better, I bought the book "lifehacker". The first one out of over 100 hacks is labeled "Empty Your Inbox (and Keep It Empty"), so I judged that piece of advice to be worth following.

That was a few hours ago. No, in that short …

I’ll be presenting “MongoDB and Fractal Tree Indexes” at MongoDB Boston 2012 on October 24th.  My presentation covers the basics of B-trees and Fractal Tree Indexes, the benchmarks we’ve run so far, and the development road map going forward.

I’ve been to this one day conference twice now and both times came away with a better understanding of MongoDB’s capabilities, use-cases, and many questions answered via their deep technical dives.  I highly recommend current MongoDB users and anyone considering a MongoDB project attend – it appears that seats are still available.

It is almost an everyday task for developers to ensure the schema are in sync in their test/development/production databases. No doubt that everyone who works with MySQL servers will encounter situations where schema should be synchronized. When this happens, there must be a reliable solution where it should work in any complex situation.

Challenge:

You have made numerous MySQL schema changes to your databases during development of a new feature. Now you want to sync development and production schemas so that they match when you push a new release. DBAs often spend significant time creating complex synchronization scripts, even though the update itself might be a simple one. You need a solution that will automatically compare and identify the object differences between two MySQL database schema …