A few weeks ago Bradley Kuszmaul and I attended the Dagstuhl Seminar on Database Workload Management.

The Dagstuhl computer science research center is (remotely) located in the countryside in Saarland, Germany. The actual building is an 18th Century Manor House, first retooled as an old-age home, and then a computer science research center. Workshop participants typically spend the whole week talking and working together.

Dagstuhl Computer Science Center

Shivnath Babu (Duke University), Goetz Graefe (Hewlett Packard), and Harumi Kuno (Hewlett Packard) did a great job organizing. …

For any person actively working with MySQL databases on the command line level, logging in, logging out for a few moments, and then logging in again, all repeated many times, not only eventually becomes annoying, especially with passwords that aren’t easy to type, but it also can take a lot of time over the course of a day. For a long time I’ve been relaying on something that allows me to avoid most of this effort while working. The solution is of course not to log out unless you actually want to.

Linux, BSD and Solaris all allow suspending a running task and resuming its execution at a later time. This can be used to temporarily exit MySQL client without having it to leave the database.

When inside MySQL, you can press Ctrl+Z to suspend the client program and return to the system shell. You will be able to bring the database client back at any time by running fg command …

MySQL 5.6 has some pretty cool features in its performance_schema.  Some of the additions allow the server to collect and aggregate detailed information about query execution from queries as they flow through the server.

This gives you the ability to get nearly the same level of detail found in the slow query log, but in real time. You don't have to sample your slow query logs, and process them with external scripts anymore to get great query performance data.  Now there are things I still like about the slow query logs, but I'll discuss those another time.

Mark Leith blogged about this new feature, and shows how you can use some basic queries to display a report on the mysql command line.
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The use of tmpfs/ramfs as /tmp partition is a common trick to improve the performance of on-disk temporary tables. Servers usually have less RAM than disk space so those kind of partitions are very limited in size and there are some cases were we can run out of space.

Let’s see one example. We’re running a typical master-slave replication with ROW based binary log file. The application connects to the database using persistent connection technique to avoid creating new connections for every request so it just recycle old connections.

The application starts to load data into the database with “LOAD DATA INFILE”. After some minutes the server runs out of disk space on /tmp/partition. The first step is clear, check which files are on that partition:

# ls -lah /tmp
total 24K
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4,0K ago  2 12:53 .
drwx------ 9 root root 4,0K ago  5 11:35 ..
drwx------ 2 root root  16K ago  2 12:36 …

Last month, we evaluated Amazon's new SSD offerings with an extensive series of performance benchmarks.

As a followup, we've prepared a second series of benchmarks that specifically explore performance issues with a write-intensive workload on both NDB and InnoDB storage engines.

Download a free PDF of our findings, and as always, we welcome your feedback, comments and questions below.

Faster and faster, that is what we want from our databases. And the biggest roadblock for the MySQL Dragster is the speed of the hard disk, right? No, I'm not going to debate that, that is just the case. And how do you fix that then? Well, if what is limiting your dragster is a roadblock, then either you drive round the roadblock of you make it disappear faster, or in computer terms:

• Avoid using the disk by instead putting as much data as you can in RAM
• Use faster disks (like SSDs)

Now, to be honest, this analogy isn't that good, as the performance limiting factor of the disk so huge, and contrary to popular belief, it's not getting any better! But we have SSDs you say? Yes, that makes the hard drive faster, but the CPU and RAM is getting faster even faster! But let's assume that we have enough memory so we do not need the disk? Will just about everything go at the speed of light? Nope, what happens …

Please join us at the DOUG (DALLAS ORACLE USERS GROUP) MySQL Forum meeting on Tuesday September 4th, 2011 from 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm (different than the usual meeting time, pizza BEFORE the meeting).

Presentation Overview
MySQL 101 — The Basics
Ever wanted to get started with MySQL? This presentation is an introduction that will cover installation, starting/stopping, monitoring, and administering MySQL. You will walk away from this meeting with the basic skills needed to run simple MySQL instances. Pre-install on your laptop and follow along!

Presented by Dave Stokes, MySQL Community Manager North America, Oracle Corporation

Refreshments will be served.

To RSVP for this meeting, click on http://memberservices.membee.com/538/irmevents.aspx?id=84. Please contact

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I work for a company that is the leading supplier of automotive maps, and wants to be the leading supplier of online maps. So it was only a matter of time that I needed to learn more about how spatial extensions work in different open source databases. Let's start from the beginning, understanding various spatial data structures that are used in implementations...

Links are provided to Wikipedia articles - which are both comprehensive, yet easy to understand - for those who want to get a deeper understanding of each structure. All Wikipedia articles on spatial indexes are listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_index#Spatial_index

B-tree

read more

The MySQL for Database Administrator course teaches you to secure users privileges, set resource limitations, access controls and describe backup and recovery basics. You also learn to create and use stored procedures, triggers, views and more. For the full course description go to the Oracle University portal and click on MySQL.

You can take this course:

- From your desk, at your own pace, as a Training-on-Demand offering - streaming video of instructor delivery, plus access to course environment to perform lab exercises

- From your desk, as a Live-Virtual Class - connecting with the instructor and other students through webex and phone, with access to course environment for lab exercises. There are hundreds of events scheduled so you can choose the date, timezone and language that suits you. See the full schedule on the …

So I have noticed that people don't like it when I talk about all the cool stuff Jackrabbit can do. Many people are still scared of running Java stuff in production which I guess is to be expected since PHP shops tend to .. guess what .. PHP. So in this post I just want to talk about all the cool features we have ready to use in the pure PHP Doctrine DBAL based implementation of PHPCR. Just to say it again: PHP, no Java. So first up the implementation with all its features works with MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. Given that we started with MySQL we ended up relying on few specific MySQL behaviors. These are all gone now, so adding another RDBMS is likely just a half days work, maybe a day if you look at the code base for the first time, then again the relevant code to edit are just a few places in two classes ( …