Patrick Hurley has been successfully delivering his presentation entitled “MySQL: The Least an Oracle Professional Needs to Know” at various conferences.

Oracle DBAs may appreciate his blog post “MySQL: An Introduction for Oracle DBAs”:

“You are an Oracle Database Administrator. You enjoy looking after Oracle databases and you are really good at it. In the corner of the machine room, on the edge of your peripheral vision, is a server running a database called MySQL….

…One day your manager calls you into his office, “Can you just have a quick look at that MySQL database server, the one with the website and the blog on it? You know, make sure it’s secure and stuff. Shouldn’t be too hard for an Oracle DBA like …

I think you have heard me say it before, but in this case I think repetion is needed: We should be much more innovative in the database world. And no, I am not talking NoSQL here, not at all. For all the good things with the NoSQL technologies and the movement itself, it's not really innovative. Rather, in my mind, NoSQL sacrifices functionality for performance, largely. The schema-less design of most of these technologies is probably the one aspect I would consider innovative, the rest is just RAM based storage, sharding, key-based lookups and good, old B-Trees.

Talking about B-Trees, isn't it time we retired them soon? There should be better ways if indexing data. Look at something like Mongo. With MongoDB, you really want to have your indexes in-memory, all of them, without that, performance will be awful (there are exceptions though, but in general this is true). Now, a B-Tree is an index mechanism that has worked well, as the …

High Availability is one of the hottest topics for MySQL DBAs. As a matter of fact, when we (SkySQL) are called by users and customers, the top two questions for our PS team are:

1. How can I make my MySQL database scalable?
2. How can I make my MySQL database highly available

Since MySQL is the most used online database, these two questions are totally appropriate. Although the two concepts walk together, they should not be confused.

We refer to scalability when we define that a system must sustain a specific workload, measured in different ways – response time, latency, transactions or operations per second to name few, or a combination of them. So, we define the level of scalability we want to achieve and we design a system that can scale to that level.

We refer to high availability when we define that a system must be available, within …

In our recent release of Percona Server 5.5.19 we introduced new value for innodb_flush_neighbor_pages=cont.
This way we are trying to deal with the problem of InnoDB flushing.

Actually there is also the second fix to what we think is bug in InnoDB, where it blocks queries while it is not needed (I will refer to it as “sync fix”). In this post I however will focus on innodb_flush_neighbor_pages.

By default InnoDB flushes so named neighbor pages, which really are not neighbors.
Say we want to flush page P. InnoDB is looking in an area of 128 pages around page P, and flushes all the pages in that area that are dirty. To illustrate, say we have an area of memory like …

db4free.net is joining the protest against SOPA & PIPA and will stay down for 24 hours, starting January 18, 2012 at 02:00 UTC.

Learn more on what this is all about at americancensorship.org …

… and why the WEB GOES ON STRIKE …

… or watch some of the many videos related to SOPA on YouTube.

The installation through the Solaris repository is as simple as typing:

$ pkg install mysql-50

to obtain MySQL 5.0.91 (status Jan 18, 2012) or click on this link to launch the interactive installer.

$ pkg install mysql-51

to obtain MySQL 5.1.37 (status Jan. 18, 2012) or click on this link to launch the interactive installer.

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The votes have been counted and now there is a schedule for MySQL and Friends devroom at FOSDEM 2012.

I’m giving two talks:

• MariaDB 5.3’s query optimizer: taking the dolphin to where he’s never been before
• Replication features of 2011: what they were, how to get and how to use them

There and in coming posts I am going to cover main features of Percona XtraDB Cluster. The first feature is High Availability.

But before jumping to HA, let’s review general architecture of the Percona XtraDB Cluster.

1. The Cluster consists of Nodes. Recommended configuration is to have at least 3 nodes, but you can make it running with 2 nodes too.
2. Each Node is regular MySQL / Percona Server setup. The point is that you can convert your existing MySQL / Percona Server into Node and roll Cluster using it as base. Or otherwise – you can detach Node from Cluster and use it as just a regular server.
3. Each Node contains the full copy of data. That defines XtraDB Cluster behavior in many ways. And obviously there are benefits and drawbacks.

Benefits of such approach:

…

Not counting obtaining the source code, and once you have the prerequisites satisfied, [Windows] users can build from source code in 5 easy steps.

Prerequisites – Install & ensure they are in the $PATH:

1. CMake <-- Download
2. C++ compiler <-- Visual Studio 2008 Express - Free Download
3. Bison <-- Download (ensure m4.exe is also included, which it should be)

Optional (but most likely you’ll want):

1. Perl <-- For Test Suite/Scripts. Strawberry Perl is a great option.
2. Bazaar <-- If want latest …