My technology stack services more then 2 Million Daily Active users.  Its very basic. PHP talks to mySQL, Memcache, RabbitMQ, Gearman and Facebook.  Now that we have more Java specifically to support our SmartFox Server and other services, blurring the lines between what data is set in PHP and what data is read in Java is very necessary.

Java J-Connect makes reading mySQL Data as simple IMHO as PHP's PDO. What is hard is reading PHP's serialized format from PHP's Memcache library.

In PHP there are two main C backed Libraries. There is Memcache the original PHP library which I happen to use, and Memcached which is the library I wanted to use but didn't deploy since EC2 package system conflicted and cause issues (I fixed them but …

Are you involved with an open-source project that’s interesting to MySQL users, such as Nginx, PHPMyAdmin, Drupal, Jenkins, PHP, and so on? Percona just published the application form for dot-org groups to have a free expo hall booth in the Percona Live MySQL Conference in April. Please submit your applications now, and tell your friends about this, because a) the schedule for applying is very short, and b) space is limited.

For those of you who don’t know what this is, it’s another of the O’Reilly traditions we’re trying to continue. (We are trying very hard to make this event as close to a clone of O’Reilly’s as we can.) It’s a free table in the expo hall where people who participate in a non-commercial open source project can exhibit. I organized a Maatkit booth a few times in the past, and was always …

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have been more natural to build those needs on …

I will be speaking on new MySQL features at the PHP UK conference on February 25th in London. A few days later on march 3rd, I will be presenting the Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database at Confoo in Montreal. If you are attending either event, please introduce yourself!

Fellow Community Manager Keith Larson and I working hard to keep up with all the upcoming shows. If you think we might have not notices your upcoming event, please drop us a line. We will have thumb drive, baggage tags, stickers, and maybe (fingers crossed) t-shirts or plush dolphins soon.

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While it might not have been New England’s weekend on the Big Gridiron, it was certainly New England’s day for Big Data at the New England Database Summit on Friday at MIT.

The summit was well attended, with 350 registrants and keynotes from prominent MySQL users such as Mark Callaghan. The coverage was quite broad, with presentations running the gamut from grad students (complete with bodyguards and intimidating academic advisors) to established companies such as StreamBase. The sponsor list was an …

As you may or may not know, Windows is not yet a supported platform for XtraDB.

I thought I’d try to build it, and see what happens:

1. Download XtraDB 5.5 Source
2. cd C:\xtradb-5.5
3. mkdir bld
4. cd bld
5. cmake ..
6. VS08: File -> Open -> Solution -> C:\xtradb-5.5\bld\MySQL.sln

Build Ended With:

========== Build: 70 succeeded, 17 failed, 2 up-to-date, 10 skipped ==========

The first failure had to do with innobase:

18>Generating Code...
18>Build log was saved at "file://c:\..\innobase.dir\Debug\BuildLog.htm"
18>innobase - 9 error(s), 3 warning(s)

I checked the innobase build log and found this:

February is going to be a busy meetup month for me. In addition to speaking in Raleigh I will visit Charlotte to speak at Meetup out there on February 23rd. Last year I visited Charlotte meetup was in the great place and we had great food and great crowd of people showing up. I will talk about Optimizing MySQL Configuration which I believe is a great topic for this meetup as it will be helpful for developers to learn basics MySQL configuration as well as for Advanced MySQL DBAs to learn a trick or two they did not know. As an extra treat for attendees I will bring exclusive discount to MySQL Conference and Expo as well as some signed …

What's in a datatype then? A MySQL SMALLINT? A C int? An Oracle BLOB? One thing is for sure, they are not very well standardized, not even within the same environment, and much less so across them. And what does it means, really? When should I use a BLOB, when a BINARY VARCHAR and when to use a long long?

A datatype defines many attributes:

• What data I can store in it: Only numbers? Printable alaphanumeric characters? Unicode? Binary data? An object?
• What I can do with a value of that particular type and how does it behave? Can I concatenate two values? Add them (that is NOT the same as concatenate! The same operator (+) may be used, but it's not the same thing!)? Save it to a file?
• How is it stored and represented in technical terms. And this can be argued, a C int doesn't define how it is stored on disk, but a MySQL INT does! And a BLOB is a type that is largely there just because it …

Databases fail in interesting ways.  About a week ago I was called in on a support case for Tungsten Enterprise.  We were getting failures in which the master MySQL 5.1.50 server would run out of connections, block applications for 5 to 10 minutes and eventually trigger automated failover to a slave.  Running out of database connections is a classic symptom of blocking on a shared resource inside the server.  The blocked transactions hold onto their connections, which are quickly exhausted if new transactions constantly arrive from applications.  So where was the hold-up?

Our first clue was to notice that Tungsten Replicator was processing a huge transaction at the time of one of the failovers.  To find out more I dug into the MySQL binlog using the …

Are you involved with an open-source project that’s interesting to MySQL users, such as Nginx, PHPMyAdmin, Drupal, Jenkins, PHP, and so on? Percona just published the application form for dot-org groups to have a free expo hall booth in the Percona Live MySQL Conference in April. ** Please submit your applications now, and tell your friends about this**, because a) the schedule for applying is very short, and b) space is limited.