Collaborate 12 is in Vegas and Collaborate 13 will be in Denver. Mark your calendars now!

The last MySQL session for this year’s Collaborate is over. There is another day of sessions to go but they will go on without MySQL-centric topics. The majority of those the MySQL Community Team have talked to are Oracle professionals looking to expand their support for existing MySQL instances in their organizations or those looking to move some aspect of their data over to MySQL. Many use Collaborate for obtaining technical information as they feel Oracle Open World is too frenzied to get niyty gritty details. Attendance at MySQL sessions were much larger than last year and demo pod booth action was heavy with those seeking specific answers to their questions. And they were seeking details on the NoSQL/SQL InnoDB/NDB interface, operational …

Following my previous benchmark of Samsung 830, today I want to show results for STEC MACH16 SATA card, 200GB size, this card is based on SLC, and regarding STEC website, it is an enterprise grade storage.

For tests I use sysbench fileio, 16KiB block size (to match workload from InnoDB, as this is primary usage for me), and recently I switched to use async IO mode. There are two reasons for that. First, MySQL/InnoDB uses async writes, so this will emulate database load, and second, async mode allows to see maximal possible throughput, it does not show reliable latency though, as it appears there is no a reliable way in the Linux asynchronous IO library to get time metrics for particular IO …

You might remember this little thing called the Y2K bug.  That’s twelve years ago, but MySQL still supports a YEAR(2) data type.  A recent internal discussion made me realize there were aspects of YEAR(2) that I didn’t fully understand, and prompts me to challenge readers to come up with a truly viable use case for YEAR(2) data types.

A primary reason for storing only the last two digits of years is to save on storage space, so perhaps YEAR(2) makes sense for big data or in situations where storage is constrained, right?  Well, no – the number of bytes used to store YEAR(2) data is the same as what is required when YEAR(4) is used:

mysql> SHOW CREATE TABLE y2\G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: y2
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `y2` (
`y` year(2) DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in …

In the last few weeks I’ve been caught off guard by the number of people who’ve told me they have been evaluating Percona XtraDB Cluster (link), and even more surprised at the projects they’re considering it for. Yesterday alone I spoke to several people who have been evaluating it for large, mission-critical enterprise deployments. Some new, some to replace existing systems that use standard MySQL replication. What was interesting is that some people said they’ve been putting it through its paces for months – before we even released it as GA.

Webinar, Wednesday 5/2 @ 10 am PT/1pm ET

Continuent Tungsten has broken new ground to make previously complex or completely unattainable MySQL data management solutions simple and easy to deploy. Continuent Tungsten brings high availability, performance scaling, and simple cluster management to off-the-shelf MySQL. Continuent Tungsten also includes advanced multi-master topologies that

I personally like PCIe based Flash, but from a pricing point our customers are looking for cheaper alternatives. SATA SSD is an options. There is many products based on MLC technology, and Intel 320 I would say is the most popular. I do not particularly like its write performance – I wrote about it before, that’s why I am looking for comparable alternatives. Samsung 830 256GB looked like a good product, that’s why I decided to test it.

For tests I use sysbench fileio, 16KiB block size (to match workload from InnoDB, as this is primary usage for me), and recently I switched to use async IO mode. There are two reasons for that. First, MySQL/InnoDB uses async writes, so this will emulate database load, and second, async mode allows to see maximal possible throughput, it does not show …

Database backups are typically critical to organizations, and are an important part of an overall disaster recovery strategy.

MySQL Enterprise Backup performs online "Hot", non-blocking backups of your MySQL databases, and interfaces with media management software such as Symantec NetBackup, Oracle Secure Backup and IBM Tivoli Storage Manager to execute backup and restore operations.

Two new white papers are available to help you better understand:

• How to Connect MySQL Enterprise Backup with Media Management systems through System Backup to Tape (SBT) interface.
• How to specifically use MySQL Enterprise Backup with Symantec NetBackup.

Enjoy the white papers.

After you have setup and properly configured MySQL Cluster you typically want to load data into it. There are a couple of ways to load data into MySQL Cluster, e.g, from dumpfiles or from csv files.
If you expect loading data into MySQL Cluster will be as fast as on MyISAM then you have the wrong expectations unless you parallelize your data loading. 
Also, MYISAM/INNODB stores the data in local buffers/disk and in one copy only (asynchronous replication does not count as it is asynchronous) whereas MySQL Cluster (NDBCLUSTER engine) stores two copies of the data. Synchronous replication between the two copies adds ~ 2x overhead and you have network between mysql servers and data nodes.
So, to load a dump file into MySQL Cluster is bound to be slower than MYISAM/INNODB. Also loading data files can be error prone.
Here is …

It seems the Titanic is everywhere, even inside the pyramid of the Luxor hotel. While the Luxor is within the Mandalay Bay complex, it’s about a half mile walk to the conference and a half mile back. We go by the Mandalay Conference Center’s aquarium. We thought it might be interesting but at $18 an admission, we opted to pass on it. It’s amazing to have an aquarium in the desert, but it’s probably not as nice as the Monterey Bay aquarium.

It was interesting to start the day listening to Rich Niemiec on partitioning tables and using Exadata in Oracle. The NoSQL (Not Only SQL) presentations were interesting, as was the upgrading of Oracle 11gR2 in an E-Business Suite environment presentation. Then, I finished the day with what’s new with the Oracle VM Server.

Checking out the exhibit hall I managed to get a signed copy …

XSLT really relies on XPATH.
To learn XSLT you must learn XPATH.
The most common problem with an xslt document is an XPATH issue.
The most common XPATH issue is a namespace issue.
Try changing your node references to include *: for namespace.Another common problem is the xslt engine.  Free engines are crippled to the standard.