One of the things we (Team MariaDB) talked quite a bit about since we released was PBXT. It was a feature differentiation to MySQL as we shipped another storage engine. It was included in MariaDB 5.1, 5.2, and 5.3; however with our release of MariaDB 5.5, PBXT (docs in the Knowledgebase) has been deprecated and not built by default any longer.

The reason behind it is clear: PBXT is currently not under active development. We still include it in the source releases and if you would like to use it, you just have …

Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona Server 5.1.63-13.4 on May 24th, 2012 (Downloads are available from Percona Server 5.1.63-13.4 downloads and from the Percona Software Repositories).

Based on MySQL 5.1.63, including all the bug fixes in it, Percona Server 5.1.63-13.4 is now the current stable release in the 5.1 series. All of Percona‘s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release can be found in the 5.1.63-13.4 milestone at Launchpad.

Bugs fixed:

The DB news this week is being posted a day early, because in about 2 hours I will be leaving to fly to Finland, where I will be speaking at the Harmony conference next week. This week has been one of organization, and we were able to get a lot done!

• Added a monitoring check for uptime to our database systems, using the PalominoDB Nagios Plugin for MySQL
  
• Fixed monitoring checks for our MySQL backup instances
  
• Fixed the two seamicro machines that were crashing, and put them back in the slave pool for addons.
  
• Dealt with data inconsistencies between the master and slaves on our …

Growth is good, right? Yes, unless you are the one building and managing a MySQL database tier to handle all this growth!

Your company has built a great new app and launched it in the cloud. And now you are seeing what many wish for: an exponential adoption of your app. 

But is your database tier really up to the job? 

What happens if your MySQL server fails? Can you fail over to a replica

This week we talk about numeric data types in MySQL.

News/Events/Feedback
OurSQL Listener Jesper Hansen was nice enough to take a screen shot of episode 0 of the ourSQL podcast hitting 12,345 downloads.

Conferences:
MySQL Innovation Day Schedule Tuesday June 5th, Redwood Shores, CA. Register here (free). Content will be available via live stream, so save the date!

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Many database management tasks become difficult as you move from millions of rows and gigabytes of data to billions of rows and terabytes of data. Such tasks include ingesting data while maintaining indexes; changing schemas without downtime; and supporting connections, replication, and backup. For some scaling problems (connections and replication), MySQL® is better than most of the competition. For others, such as indexing, schema changes, and backup, MySQL has typically been harder to use. Fortunately, the tasks MySQL does well are in its core, whereas the tasks that are more difficult can be solved with storage engine plug-ins.

I recently gave a talk at IOUG Collaborate, a copy of which can be found here. This …

Read the original article at Best of Guide – Highlights of Our Popular Content

We cherry pick the top 5 most popular posts of various topics we’ve covered in recent months.

• 5 Things Toxic to Scalability

We use a broad brush to highlight the biggest no-nos in web application scalability.

We dig into scalability, steering to the richest areas to focus on.

MySQL on Amazon EC2, the what, how …

Yes, things certainly changes all the time for us IT folks. New classes of hardware, new cool pieces of software and cool gadgets. Stuff that usually gets better and better, and if not, at least they are on the move. Constantly.

If it isn't Ivy Bridge based motherboards, it's "New iPad" (that is a strange name by the way, what is wrong with iPad 3? And it will not be "new" for long) or MySQL 5.6 or Ubuntu 11.10.

And then there are things that don't improve much over time, and still stays around. Sometimes because they have some powerful backers, despite it being pure evil (Adobe Flash anyone), but sometimes because it's so good that you just cannot improve …

Whenever I learn about a new technology, I typically want to know the major administrative touch points more than I want to know exhaustive detail about every configuration option.  Give me the gist, show me enough to get started, and give me a link to the manual.

XtraDB cluster (and Galera, the technology on which it is based) has been attracting a lot of interest in the community and we want to start presenting information about both what we know is essential, but also what we suspect will become essential as more and more production experience is logged with these important new technologies.

As such, I put together a baseline talk for getting you into a working knowledge of XtraDB …

I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance to do it. I have it now!

One of our customers was complaining that the database would lock up at random times and then it would go back to normal in just a few seconds. This was MySQL 5.0 running MyISAM/InnoDB mix, not heavily loaded. We used pt-stalk (at that time it was aspersa stalk) trying to figure out what is happening, however all we found was a spike in writes, many queries piled up and looking at the system process list it was quite obvious that page flush daemon was acting out. I/O Pattern was rather awkward – here is an output from …