July marks my sixth month working on the OpenStack project for HP. Over the past few years I have had people ask me about my journey to where I am now, especially students working on the Drizzle project. So I decided to write it today.

Back in 2007 I worked as a freelancer developing PHP code, doing DBA work and administering Linux systems. One of my biggest clients was an online magazine called The First Post, I was doing so much work for them they hired me as a full time employee under the title Technical Architect. We made great strides whilst working there and I even got the site running from a MySQL Cluster installation.

Towards the end of 2007 the magazine was in financial difficulty and there was a real risk of everyone losing their jobs over Christmas. As luck would have it one of our biggest fans was a guy called Felix Dennis who owns a magazine empire called Dennis Publishing. They bought our magazine business and my …

This past week I attended OSCon, the annual conference for open source’s true believers. And there was a religious fervor in the air, particularly from the point of view of someone more accustomed to Oracle conferences.

And if open source is the religion, proprietary closed-source companies are the devil. That having been said, I was surprised how virtually all large companies were demonized. Even long-time defenders of open source like IBM were ignored at best. That didn’t prevent them from coming though, with Microsoft and HP in particular with high-profile sponsorships and PR offensives that didn’t seem to have much influence with the crowd.

The companies generating buzz were the small companies built around development of their own open source products. There are a surprising number of them out there, especially relating to multiple forks of a popular product like MySQL or …

So last week was a great week at the Community Leadership Summit (CLS) and the Open Source Conference (OSCON).  The two conferences had a big focus on community as a whole and their features within them. I was also able to talk and interact with people from MariaDB, SkySQL, Percona, MongoDB, facebook, and of course others from MySQL and Oracle.

At the Oracle booth we talked with numerous people from the community about the MySQL features of MySQL 5.6 as well as the …

Three rules on making indexes around queries to provide good performance

Application performance often depends on how fast a query can respond and query performance almost always depends on good indexing. So one of the quickest and least expensive ways to increase application performance is to optimize the indexes. This talk presents three simple and effective rules on how to construct indexes around queries that result in good performance.

Time: 2PM EDT / 11AM PDT

This webinar is a general discussion applicable to all databases using indexes and is not specific to any particular MySQL® storage engine (e.g., InnoDB, TokuDB®, etc.). The rules are explained using a simple model that does NOT rely on understanding B-trees, Fractal Tree® indexing, …

Thanks for this awesome tutorial. I was up and running with my RDS database in just a few minutes!

One of the tools we use to qualify MySQL Server is the Random Query Generator (RQG for short). This is an SQL generator (and more) to test database systems such as MySQL. I plan to post more on that later.

The RQG is an open source tool written in Perl, and is available on Launchpad. Up until now the RQG documentation has been part of the MySQL Forge wiki. As you may have seen from this blog post, MySQL Forge is going away soon (August 1st). Unlike other parts of the Forge wiki, the Random Query Generator documentation has moved to github, and will continue to be maintained by the RQG community:

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Learn how to develop applications in PHP and how to use MySQL efficiently for those applications! Through a hands-on approach, this instructor-led course will help you improve your PHP skills and combine them with time-proven database management techniques to create best-of-breed web applications that are efficient, solid and secure.

You can take this 4 day class through:

• Live-Virtual Delivery: Take this course from your own desk. Over 200 events already on the schedule for a wide range of timezones.
• In-Class Delivery: Events on the schedule include:

FromDual is having a talk at Frankfurter Datenbanktage 2013, March 14/15

A couple students in one of my classes ran into a problem when competing Java threads tried to insert new rows in a table. They raised an error when they tried the DELAY keyword to avoid the race (collision) condition in an INSERT statement. It was simple to explain to them that the DELAY keyword doesn’t work with an InnoDB table. Any attempt throws the following error:

      ERROR 1616 (HY000): DELAYED OPTION NOT supported FOR TABLE 'message'

Important Update: INSERT DELAYED is gone in MySQL 5.6.6 (announcement) and the whole issue comes down to synchronizing threads (some dislike the solution) or using the ON DUPLICATE KEY …

Today, I had the need to debug mysql, given that I download the code and I try to compile on my MacBook pro.

Surprise I got the following issue:

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      -- Performing Test HAVE_IB_ATOMIC_PTHREAD_T_GCC - Success
-- Check size of pthread_t
-- Check size of pthread_t - done
-- Performing Test HAVE_PEERCRED
-- Performing Test HAVE_PEERCRED - Failed
-- GTEST_LIBRARIES:optimized;/Users/marcotusa/mysql_work/source/gtest-1.6.0/test;debug;/Users/marcotusa/mysql_work/source/gtest-1.6.0
-- Configuring incomplete, errors occurred!
tusamac:mysql-5.6.5-m8 marcotusa$ cmake . -G Xcode -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/Users/marcotusa/mysql_work/template/mysql-5.6.5

      -DCMAKE_USE_RELATIVE_PATHS=1 -DDEBUG_EXTNAME=1 -DDISABLE_SHARED=OFF -DENABLE_DOWNLOADS=1 -DWITHOUT_SERVER=0

      -DWITH_ARCHIVE_STORAGE_ENGINE=1 …