It is that time of the year, again: Percona Live is the name of this years MySQL conference in the Santa Clara Hyatt Regency.

Booking.com is there, and we are hiring, looking specifically for Admins and DBAs, but we also have Developer positions open.

Meet Nicolai and Sheila at the booth, if you have any questions.

Whilst I am not a fan of Juniper Network Connect in the last few years I have had to connect to several networks that use it.  The biggest problem with it is that it is a combination of Java and a 32bit C library which will not work when executed with a 64bit version of Java.
There are other ways of connecting such as the Mad Scientist script but if you use things like two-factor authentication this will not work.  So I brought together things I have learnt from web postings about getting it to work in Ubuntu and have created these steps.  They work in Fedora 17 and should work in 16 too:
Step 1We need to install OpenJDK Java, we also need xterm for the root password during installation:

sudo yum install java-1.7.0-openjdk.i686 java-1.7.0-openjdk.x86_64 icedtea-web xterm

Step 2Now we need to tell Java to execute the Juniper …

I must admint I was greatly impressed by the Oracle activity on MySQL yesterday. I cannot say I didn’t see it was coming, but most certainly the magnitude of what happened, the flood of announcements, was a bit overwhelming. Looking at the list of improvements, I started wondering what can it actually mean to the MySQL ecosystem.

Several years ago MySQL was forked into several different projects driven by groups of passionates as well as commercial businesses. Many considered the pace of MySQL evolution to be insufficient, while some didn’t agree with the direction or was complaining on the quality.

These were not unfounded. Rather than on the software itself, MySQL AB was focusing more on preparing itself for public offering, which eventually didn’t happen. It sold out to Sun. However, instead of …

Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on April 11, 2012 by Vasil Dimov.

After introducing InnoDB persistent statistics in MySQL 5.6, in this April Labs release we have dressed it up in a nice UI and refactored the internals a bit to make the code more elegant and straight-forward.

The persistent stats are now controlled globally and can also be overridden at table level, should any table require a different behavior.

Global

The server global flag –innodb-stats-persistent (boolean) now controls whether all InnoDB tables use persistent statistics or not. Keep in mind that if a table is using persistent stats then its statistics will not be updated automatically and you are responsible for …

As MySQL continues to grow (as a technology and as an ecosystem) the need and importance of creating and deploying robust MySQL backup solutions grows as well. In many circles Zmanda is known as “The MySQL Backup Company”. While we provide backup of a wide variety of environments, we gladly take the label of backing up the most popular open source database in the world, especially as we kick off our presence at the 2012 MySQL Conference.

Here are some of the updates to our MySQL backup technologies that we are announcing at the conference:

Announcing Zmanda Recovery Manager 3.4

We have updated the popular Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL product for …

After introducing InnoDB persistent statistics in MySQL 5.6, in this April Labs release we have dressed it up in a nice UI and refactored the internals a bit to make the code more elegant and straight-forward.

The persistent stats are now controlled globally and can also be overridden at table level, should any table require a different behavior.

Global

The server global flag –innodb-stats-persistent (boolean) now controls whether all InnoDB tables use persistent statistics or not. Keep in mind that if a table is using persistent stats then its statistics will not be updated automatically and you are responsible for running ANALYZE TABLE periodically, whenever you think the table contents has changed too much. Thus the default for –innodb-stats-persistent is currently set to OFF.

…

Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on April 11, 2012 by Jimmy Yang.

In this April MySQL Lab release, we’ll provide you a more robust and release-ready InnoDB Memcached Engine with a few enhancements. The most notable addition is the SASL support, which gives users the capability to protect their MySQL database from unauthenticated access through memcached clients. In this blog, I will walk you through steps of getting this option enabled.

Background Info:
SASL stands for “Simple Authentication and Security Layer”, which is a Standard for adding authentication support to connection-based protocols. Memcached added SASL support starting its 1.4.3 release. And here is a good article that gives you some background on why …

Pedro’s dinner was full! I didn’t count, but we had 9 tables of 8-10 people or so – dare I say almost 100 people? Lots of beer, margaritas, and good conversations! Here are a few pictures from the event:

Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on April 11, 2012 by Sunny Bains.

The problem
After making several performance fixes, notable among them being the kernel mutex split and the new handling of read-only transaction and in particular non-locking auto-commit read-only transactions, we weren’t seeing any increase in transaction per second (TPS) on our high-end hardware. On this one particular host, a 24 core with 2 threads per core host. The TPS using Sysbench was a tepid 5.6K at 16 threads and more or less plateaued till 1K user threads. No matter what config setting we used, we would more or less end up with the same result.

We ended up getting together for a meeting at Paris to discuss this issue and during the brain storming, one of the potential issues that cropped up was the effect of …

Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on April 11, 2012 by John Russell.

This feature is a continuation of the “Fast Index Creation” feature introduced in Fast Index Creation in the InnoDB Storage Engine. Now you can perform other kinds of DDL operations on InnoDB tables online: that is, with minimal delay for operations on that table, and without rebuilding the entire table. This enhancement improves responsiveness and availability in busy production environments, where making a table unavailable for seconds or minutes whenever its …