I’ll be speaking on April 11th at 4:30 pm in Room 4 in at the Percona Conference and Expo Talk. The topic will be “Creating a Benchmark Infrastructure That Just Works.”

Throughout my career I’ve been involved with maintaining the performance of database applications and therefore created many benchmark frameworks. At Tokutek, an important part of my role is measuring the performance of our storage engine over time and versus competing solutions. There is nothing proprietary about what I’ve created, it can be used anywhere.

My presentation will cover how I created the benchmark infrastructure at Tokutek:

• Hardware and software …

Let me tell you a very touching story about these awards.
As I said in the comments : Sometimes we think about something and the next minute we did it…
And it exactly what happened, I took my inspiration from the TUAW Best Of 2011 (Yes, I’m also an Apple fan boy, sorry :-)), and a few minutes later, MySQL[plus] awards 2011 were live !

I thought I could have 50 voters, perhaps 100 voters, in my wildest dreams…

But more than 300 voters and more than 4000 views later, the reality is there : You are amazing !

But, no, it wasn’t perfect !

Shlomi said “You’ve got yourself into a bottomless pit!”, and it’s …

Percona recently evaluated the performance of Clustrix appliances by running tpcc-mysql benchmark at a scale factor of 5000 warehouse. Based on Percona’s blog, each Clustrix appliance node comprises of the following:

• 2x Intel 4-core processors (Xeon)
• 48GB RAM (40GB allocated to InnoDB buffer pool)
• 7x Intel SSD G2 (160GB each), software RAID0

The following results are taken from the report for Clustrix (tpcc-mysql new-order transactions/ 10 seconds):

For convenience, the above results have been converted to TPM (transactions/minute):
…

Gearman is awesome. If you do not know what it is, its a queue and load balancing system for an arbitrary number of workers which enables distributed computing across many nodes. Some of the same guys who worked on mySQL source worked on Gearman.

Feel free to search my blog on other gearman uses.

The Problem:

We store a lot of stats, make a lot of changes and we want to see the result of the stats in realtime. Our stat system is pretty slick. For each tag increment the application increments a count and group said tag by minute, hour, month with a hash tag numeric representation of the text for compact writes. This means 1 tag write produces 4 SQL statements. We track over 239211 …

If you connect to Cisco WebVPN with port-forwarding and get the message “applet not initialized” although Java applets work in your browser, you may have to enable third-party cookies in your browser.

Instead of the usual text-heavy blog posts that appear here, I thought it would be fun to mix things up and do a screencast showing exactly how easy it is to upgrade MySQL to MariaDB:

Some notes:

• The laptop I’m using had MySQL 5.1.55 installed with one database (apart from the system database). Installing MariaDB does not impact existing data in any way and once the install completed I had instant access to my data.
• As part of the install you are given the option to set a new password for the root user. I choose to do it in the video, but you don’t need to. If you leave the password field blank the root password will not be changed. Other database users are preserved, of course.
• As with any database upgrade, before doing this to a production system you should have backups and test.

Links:

Links shown or mentioned in the video:

• …

I will be in Austin for SITE presenting Teaching Database Concepts with Open Source Software on Wednesday, March 6th. So if you are a teacher attending SITE, please come attend my session. And bring your boots so we can hit 6th Street afterwards!

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An attendee to Espen’s recent webinar asked how to check tables for corruption. This kind of ties into my recent post on InnoDB’s handling of corrupted pages, because the best way to check for corruption is with CHECK TABLES, but if a page is corrupt, InnoDB will crash the server to prevent access to the corrupt data. As mentioned in that post, this can only be changed by changing InnoDB.

So how are you supposed to check for corruption that might be introduced by bad hardware, a bug, or so forth?

It’s a great question. The answer I would give for most cases is “check your backups for corruption instead of your live server.” You need to do this anyway — a backup that …

Continuent is increasing its presence in Europe to offer our solutions and services for the open source database business sector in the region. VNC is Continuent's new partner in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH). Read the entire press release here.Continuent and VNC are hosting a live webcast demonstrating advanced MySQL and PostgreSQL replication and clustering with Continuent Tungsten

In various discussions I have expressed that I think that there are way too many options and variables in MySQL (and it gets worse for every new release). There are simply too many to know and remember them all.  If you manage a server yourself  it is (probably) a minor problem as you should know the options you use and not use those that you don’t know.  But if you are connected to a server that you don’t manage yourself you may get surprises if some rare option you are not familiar with has been set.

The last one I came across is ‘skip-character-set-client-handshake’.  MySQL documentation http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/server-options.html says “To ignore client information and use the default server character set, use –skip-character-set-client-handshake; this makes MySQL behave like MySQL 4.0.”

Now what is the idea in having a recent server ‘behave like MySQL …