I’m delighted to announce a partnership with New Relic. The press release has the details (all new Gold and Platinum support contracts get free New Relic subscriptions) but I wanted to add some of the behind-the-scenes context.

The quote from me in the press release is a real quote: I really have been telling people for years that they should use New Relic. I even wrote it in the new edition of High Performance MySQL.

Why? Simple. People who use New Relic are more able to self-service. And anytime I can point people to the best solution for them, …

The April 2012 InnoDB labs release introduces a new feature in InnoDB that allows you to choose the location of specific tables.  For example, you can place critical tables onto an SSD drive while leaving the system tablespace on a hard drive.  Conversely, you can store you primary database files on an SSD and put a seldom used but very large archive or reference table on a larger cheaper hard drive.

Innodb now makes use of the following existing syntax in MySQL ;

CREATE TABLE  . . .  DATA DIRECTORY = ‘absolute path of data directory’;

CREATE TABLE  . . .  PARTITION . . . DATA DIRECTORY = ‘absolute path of data directory’;

This syntax is used in MyISAM and Archive engines to make use of symbolic links in those operating systems that support it.  But InnoDB can use this syntax on any OS since it stores the path in a new system table called SYS_DATAFILES.  There is also …

In a previous post, I analyzed how a query of the famous DBT3 benchmark was
optimized by MySQL. It was this query, named "Q16" in the DBT3 jargon:

select
 p_brand,
 p_type,
 p_size,
 count(distinct ps_suppkey) as supplier_cnt
from
 partsupp,
 part
where
 p_partkey = ps_partkey
 and p_brand <> 'Brand#23'
 and p_type not like 'LARGE PLATED%'
 and p_size in (43, 1, 25, 5, 35, 12, 42, 40)
 and ps_suppkey not in (
  select
   s_suppkey
  from
   supplier
  where
   s_comment like '%Customer%Complaints%'
 )
group by
 p_brand,
 p_type,
 p_size
order by
 supplier_cnt desc,
 p_brand,
 p_type,
 p_size;

Here is a brief recap of conclusions I had drawn:

• for this query, MySQL tranforms the IN condition to EXISTS and then
  evaluates it with the "unique_subquery" technique, which does an …

The new MySQL 5.6 Development Milestone Release (DMR) includes many new enhancements. One of the most impressive is the use of Global Transaction Identifiers (GTIDs) for replication. With GTIDs enabled, administrators no longer need to keep track of binary log files and positions. In a nutshell, GTIDs simplify the setup and maintenance of replication.

MySQL Utilities has taken this a step further by providing two new utilities that automate two of the most complex replication administration tasks - switchover and failover. Switchover is changing the role of an active, healthy master to one of its slaves whereas failover is the act of promoting a candidate slave to become the new master. Clearly, switchover is an elective operation and failover is performed when there are issues with the master.

The GTID utilities are included in release-1.0.5 of MySQL Utilities. They are included as a plugin for MySQL Workbench or via …

I think every performance engineer in his life is time to time meeting some curious performance problems within an application (not only MySQL) which is looking out of understanding and over a time only continuing to increase a headache.. (until not resolved, of course.. ;-))

I've met many of them in the past while working in the Sun Benchmark Center, but did not expect to meet it so soon once started my official work in MySQL team ;-))

The problem is looked as simple as nothing else, and that's why it was several time more painful than anything else too :-))

Let me explain: since of the beginning of this year I've got for MySQL performance testing a 32cores (bi-thread) Intel server running Oracle Linux. And ss soon I've got it, I've deployed my tools on it and started my tests..

The main surprise for me came on the Read-Only test:

• what can me more simply than Read-Only …

The MySQL Developer Tools team is announcing the next maintenance release of its flagship product, MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.39. This version contains MySQL Utilities 1.0.5, a set of command line Python utilities for helping to perform and script various administration tasks for MySQL. A complete list of changes in this release of the Utilities can be found at:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/wb-utils-news-1-0-5.html

MySQL Workbench 5.2 GA

• Data Modeling

• Query (replaces the old MySQL Query Browser)

• Administration (replaces the old MySQL Administrator)

Please get your copy from our Download site.

Sources and binary packages are available for several platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

…

As the Product Manager for the MySQL database it is always great to announce when the MySQL Engineering team delivers another great product release.  As a field DBA and developer it is even better when that release contains improvements and innovation that I know will help those currently using MySQL for apps that range from modest intranet sites to the most highly trafficked web sites on the web.  That said, it is my pleasure to take my hat off to MySQL Engineering for today's release of the MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release ("DMR"). The new highlighted features in MySQL 5.6.5 are discussed here:

New Self-Healing Replication Clusters
The 5.6.5 DMR improves MySQL Replication by adding Global Transaction Ids and automated utilities for self-healing Replication clusters.  Prior to 5.6.5 this has been somewhat of a pain point for MySQL users with most developing custom solutions or looking to costly, …

Master/slave replication is an important tool that gets used in many ways: distributing read loads among many slaves for performance, using a slave for backups so the master can handle live load, geographically distributed disaster recovery, etc. The Achilles’ Heal of slave performance is that slave workloads are single-threaded. The master can have many clients inserting, updating, querying, whereas the slave has only one insertion client: the master. InnoDB single-client performance is much slower than its multi-client performance, which means that the bottleneck in a master/slave system is often the rate at which a slave can keep up.

If the master has an average transactions per second (tps) that is higher than what the slave can handle, the slave will fall further and further behind. If the slaves are being used to distribute read workload, for example, the results they produce will fall further out of date. If a slave is used to …

InnoDB team is pleased to announce the 2012 Spring labs release, with several much anticipated new features and performance enhancements. Please download mysql-5.6-labs-april-2012 from MySQL Labs and give a try. Do not forget to provide your feedback.

The 2012 Spring labs release on MySQL Labs consists of the following InnoDB new features, which are not in the newly released MySQL 5.6.5 DMR yet:

• Online DDL: some of the DDLs are now truly online, including ADD INDEX, SET DEFAULT, and DROP FOREIGN KEY.
• Memcached plugin: with additional features, such as SASL support.
• Transportable tablespace: allow user to export data files and import them into another MySQL instance.
• Persistent statistics ON/OFF switch: the ability of controlling persistent statistics on table …

MySQL 5.6.5 Development Milestone Release has a whole new set of algorithms for processing subqueries. It is based on transforming a subquery into a semi-join operation, and then treating semi-join like another join operation throughout the optimizer.

A subquery can be transformed to a semi-join if it matches these criteria:

• The subquery is part of an IN or =ANY predicate. It cannot be e.g. NOT IN.
• The subquery consists of a single query block (it must not contain UNION).
• The subquery does not contain GROUP BY or HAVING.
• The subquery is not implicitly grouped (it contains no aggregate functions).
• The subquery predicate is part of a WHERE clause.
• The subquery predicate must not be part of a disjunctive nor a negated search condition.
• Neither query block contains the …