After 15 years of slide show technology, I thought that we need to change the way we do presentations. And since I am advocating radical changes, I will eat my own dog food and be the first to present a MySQL session using 3D technology.

Since watching Avatar a few years ago, I thought that using this technology would make my presentations truly amazing. However, two years ago a 3d projector was prohibitively expensive. Now, instead, it is affordable, and fits in my briefcase!

What I needed, though, was a compelling reason for using 3d vs. traditional presentations. And I found it. As I have mentioned recently, I am working with the coolest replication technology on earth. Explaining this technology is often challenging. While regular replication …

Official MySQL documentation provides information that using regular expressions is “powerful way of specifying a pattern for a complex search”. Is it really such a powerful way of filtering and should be used, or is it a solution that should be avoided? As it usually happens in real life, there are many opinions and no universal answer. Unfortunately, it often turns out that the truth lies somewhere in the middle.

One of my clients asked me yesterday for a little help with a query badly hitting performance of their production server. They were complaining about performance of REGEXP powered query and asked for advice on how to make it efficient.

Original query used in customer’s application:

 SELECT id FROM list WHERE user_name REGEXP '^bulba[0-9]+$';

Of course `list` table was properly indexed.

Explain:

mysql> explain SELECT SQL_NO_CACHE id FROM list …

Yesterday, I needed to determine the runtime of a Linux process for a monitoring script.

Cos the format for start_time of the ps command may change if the process was not started in the same year, I decided to take the neccessary informations from the /proc/<PID>/stat file.

In this file the process start time since boot is defined at the twenty-second field, expressed in Jiffies – the scale unit of the system timer. (One Jiffie is one tick of the system timer).

To convert Jiffies to seconds I just have to divide the number of Jiffies by the frequency (hertz) of the system timer, which is defined in the Linux Kernel header file include/asm-generic/param.h. The frequency may differ between Linux kernel versions and hardware platform! On my Linux systems the frequency is 100 HZ.

In a shell script the following line will …

Yesterday, I needed to determine the runtime of a Linux process for a monitoring script.

Cos the format for start_time of the ps command may change if the process was not started in the same year, I decided to take the neccessary informations from the /proc//stat file.

In this file the process start time since boot is defined at the twenty-second field, expressed in Jiffies - the scale unit of the system timer. (One Jiffie is one tick of the system timer).

To convert Jiffies to seconds I just have to divide the number of Jiffies by the frequency (hertz) of the system timer, which is defined in the Linux Kernel header file include/asm-generic/param.h. The frequency may differ between Linux kernel versions and hardware platform! On my Linux systems the frequency is 100 HZ.

…

A number of people have already mentioned this, but the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo is just around the corner.
As Stewart has already blogged, there are a number of great sessions this year and I’m looking forward to several of them.

I’ll be giving a talk there as well –
It’s essentially all in the abstract, but I’ll be speaking about various functional testing tools that exist for MySQL-based systems.
Come to learn more about the …

Well, this week has been pretty hectic. We are really getting to the “move ALL the machines!” stage of the data center move, and the train we have going on April 9th includes many, many virtual machines. I am also preparing for the Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo in just over a week. Probably the most exciting news is that the Mozilla booth in the Dot Org Pavilion will have a Boot-to-Gecko device available. If you want to see Mozilla’s foray into the mobile device market, come see us at the conference!
This weekend I’ll be burning the midnight oil working on presentations, for the Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo (tutorial and lightning talk), …

With MySQL Cluster 7.2 we introduced native support for the memcache protocol. From the very start of the project, we knew there would be some challenges in storing large values "blobs" that are bigger than the maximum NDB row size from the memcached server. Coincidentally, in 7.2, we also increased this maximum row size from 8000 bytes to 14,000 bytes. This helped out a little bit when the first preview release became available, back in September, and there was still no way to access blobs through memcached.

We had always wanted the memcached server to be event-driven and to use asynchronous APIs on the back-end, but we had no asynchronous API for blob access. Reading a blob is a multi-step operation: it requires reading first a header row, and then a series of blob parts from a (hidden) parts table. The existing blob implementation, known as NdbBlob, encapsulates all of this into a single synchronous, blocking, API call.
…

This week we talk about package and configuration management with MySQL.

News/Events:
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There are 2 free webcasts on Efficiently deploying new MySQL applications on Windows coming up: in French on Thursday April 5th and in German, on Thursday, April 19th.

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I decided to take a look at Drizzle today and was encouraged by what I saw. Here’s my favorite part:

There is no UNSIGNED (as per the standard). * There are no spatial data types GEOMETRY, POINT, LINESTRING & POLYGON (go use Postgres). * No YEAR field type. * There are no FULLTEXT indexes for the MyISAM storage engine (the only engine FULLTEXT was supported in). Look at either Lucene, Sphinx, or Solr. * No “dual” table. * The “LOCAL” keyword in “LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE” is not supported

GO USE POSTGRES. Awesome.

List of differences from MySQL.

When was the late time you checked out a MySQL Quickpoll ? 
The current poll is :

What are your top new feature requests for MySQL Connector/Net 6.6?

Did you miss the:  What are your favorite features in the latest MySQL Cluster 7.2 DMR?

These are great ways to let Oracle know your opinions. Let us know!