I was honored to get two talks accepted at the MySQL conference this year, but interestingly both of them are actually only indirectly about MySQL.  

The first is called “Writing non-blocking code for interaction with data systems and web services in Node.js and Perl”.  This sounds fancier than it is, I picked up some non-blocking programming in Perl and a bit of Node.js (which, strangely, is pretty straightforward once you write some Perl AnyEvent) my last year or so at Yahoo.  This talk really is just meant to be a gentle introduction to what this type of coding is, how it works, and some of the things you can do with it.  My goal is to present something I could have …

I was honored to get two talks accepted at the MySQL conference this year, but interestingly both of them are actually only indirectly about MySQL.  

The first is called “Writing non-blocking code for interaction with data systems and web services in Node.js and Perl”.  This sounds fancier than it is, I picked up some non-blocking programming in Perl and a bit of Node.js (which, strangely, is pretty straightforward once you write some Perl AnyEvent) my last year or so at Yahoo.  This talk really is just meant to be a gentle introduction to what this type of coding is, how it works, and some of the things you can do with it.  My goal is to present something I could have …

The MySQL query cache is a special buffer, where database stores the text of a SELECT statement together with the corresponding result that was sent to the client. For as long as no table that a statement refers to changes in any way, including the contents, the cached result can be re-used to answer any identical sub-sequent SELECT statements. But how to tell whether a query was executed or returned from the cache?

There are at least three ways to check it.

Method 1

MySQL exposes a number of runtime statistics that are accessible with SHOW STATUS statement. Among the long list of various counters, one is called Com_select which shows how many times a SELECT statement was executed. However if a SELECT is served from the query cache, it does not actually execute, so it is not accounted in Com_select. The conclusion must be that if a query runs, but it …

I am excited to announce the availability of the GA release of our new product Percona XtraDB Cluster.

Percona XtraDB Cluster is a High Availability and Scalability solution for MySQL Users and is based on Percona Server 5.5.20.

With this release we make clustering very easy and affordable for everyone. You can convert your existing MySQL replication setup into a cluster in just a couple minutes.

Tomorrow, 4-April-2012, I will be giving a webinar where I will explain what Percona XtraDB Cluster is and how does it …

On April 2nd 2012 FromDual released the new version v0.9 of its Performance Monitor for MySQL (mpm). The new version can be downloaded from here.

The Performance Monitor for MySQL (mpm) is an agent which is hooked into Zabbix. Zabbix is an integrated Enterprise Monitoring solution which can produce performance graphs and alerting.

The changes in the new release are:

New functionality

• A new server module gathers MySQL database specific server informations. This is especially interesting for the Monitoring as a Service customers.
• You can monitor …

Very interesting blog post by Todd Hoff at highscalability.com presenting “7 Years of YouTube Scalability Lessons in 30 min” based on a presentation from Mike Solomon, one of the original engineers at YouTube:

…. The key takeaway away of the talk for me was doing a lot with really simple tools. While many teams are moving on to more complex ecosystems, YouTube really does keep it simple. They program primarily in Python, use MySQL as their database, they’ve stuck with Apache, and even new features for such a massive site start as a very simple Python program.

That doesn’t mean YouTube doesn’t do cool stuff, they do, but what makes everything work together is more a philosophy or a way of doing things than technological hocus pocus. What made YouTube into one of the …

I’m excited by all of the recent developments surrounding the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo! Our own Baron Schwartz will moderate the Diamond Keynote Panel entitled “Future Perfect: The Road Ahead for MySQL” which will feature a panel of MySQL industry leaders, including: Sundar Raghavan, director product management at Amazon; Paul Mikesell, CEO of Clustrix; a representative from HP; and, a representative from McAfee. The Diamond Sponsor Keynote Panel will take place at 9:30 a.m. on Thursday, April 12th and provide insight into the future of MySQL technology, adoption, and the ecosystem landscape. I am also very pleased to introduce two new sponsors including McAfee which recently joined as a Diamond Sponsor and AOL which …

Looks like we’ll be having some more fun at the Percona Live MySQL Conference! In addition to our booth and my colleague Tim’s talk, my lightning talk was accepted. The title is “OLTP and OLAP – Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!” The lightning talks, given in a TBD order, will start Wednesday evening (April 11th) at around 6:30 pm.

Below is the abstract I submitted.

OLTP and OLAP – Have Your Cake and Eat it Too!

…

Swapping occurs when system moves some data between memory and a special area on disk called swap space. The process is called swapping in or swapping out depending on the direction in which it happens. System swaps out when it makes a decision to free up some physical memory (RAM) and pushes data out to disk. It swaps in when an application needs to access data that was swapped out. MySQL is like any other application and any memory it holds can also be sent to disk. It may have severe negative impact on performance.

The foremost step to prevent swapping is ensuring that not database, not any other application can either independently or collectively use up all available memory. The peak usage may not exceed a threshold that still leaves comfortable buffer for any remaining system activity. If this condition is not met, nothing can help and swapping may occur.

Further tuning can be done …

I will be spaking at the conference "Reality Check: Big Data" coming up on April 26 here in Stockholm. This is all about big data in in's different shapes, and the conference is run by Swedish Computer Society and is sponsored by IDG. Read more about it here: http://www.dfkompetens.se/konferenser/kurser/1112022/index.xml

If you are there and want to talk, just catch me there, I'll be there most of the day, and my talk is in the afternoon, at 15:15.

Cheers
/Karlsson