Aloha Everybody!

I'm happy to announce XtraBackup Manager Pre-Release v0.8!

Now that XtraBackup 1.6.4 is released and I have completed some of my final show-stopper bug fixes, I feel that XtraBackup Manager is now in a state ready for more general consumption.

I have yet to package up tarballs, but the Quick Start Guide in the Project Wiki contains all the steps you should need to get up and running from the svn trunk.

There is also some great detailed documentation, including diagrams of all of the different Backup Strategies …

A lot have been written about Battery Learning Cycle problems and its impact to MySQL Performance. Here are couple of links (1,2). It is good to see though there are some controllers coming out which solve this problem, namely Adaptec 5Z series controllers (Z stands for Zero Maintenance). This is not quite new technology they have appeared on market about 2 years ago but it is just now we can state they have been working well for number of customers.

As Explained in this PDF ZMCP (Zero-Maintenance Cache Protection) does not use battery but instead Capacitor plus flash. Capacitor provides …

Previously, I’ve called out years for non-desktop Linux in 2008, Linux in both the low and high-ends of the market in 2009, ‘hidden’ Linux in 2010 and last year, cloud computing in 2011. For 2012, I see continued growth, prevalence, innovation and impact from Linux, thus leading to a 2012 that is dominated by Linux.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and …

While tinkering with some things the other day, I noticed that if I create a table named "ñ", MySQL creates a .frm file with the name of @0x.frm. Similar "encoding" is done for any file that needs to be created (.MYI, .ibd, .TRG, .TRN, et cetera). I'm not sure this is necessary or useful when my filesystem seems to support all kinds of fanciful characters in filenames, and especially when character_set_system is set by default (and unchangeably!) to utf8, but it's happening nevertheless and I decided to learn more about how it works.

This behavior is discussed in the reference manual at Mapping of Identifiers to File Names. There's even a chart that claims to show how the mapping is performed. The chart and text below it on the "Mapping of Identifiers to File Names" page show that characters in the range 00C0..017F should …

A a new tracing capability has been added to the MySQL optimizer with 5.6.3. Optimizer Tracing goes beyond EXPLAIN EXTENDED to show how the optimizer treats queries. The demonstration of this feature at Oracle Open World had several noted DBAs speechless.

SET optimizer_trace="enabled=on";
SELECT Name FROM City WHERE ID=999;
SELECT trace into dumpfile '/tmp/foo' FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.OPTIMIZER_TRACE;

And the trace follows (sadly WordPress kills the indentations, PDF of trace here)


{
"steps": [
{
"join_preparation": {
"select#": 1,
"steps": [
{
"expanded_query": "/* …

In my opinion, The Server Option and Variable Reference at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysqld-option-tables.html rates as my most important page. This is a consolidated index that enables a drill down to the Server Command Options, System Variables, Startup and replication specifics, as well as important information on default values and differences between versions including point releases.

However, there is another page not in the actual manual, but at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysqld-version-reference/en/mysqld-version-reference-optvar.html which is an Options/Variables reference akin to the Reference Manual, but includes a 5.x version matrix.

Recently I was asked about some options that had to be …

I've been promising I should re-visit once more the disk bound sysbench tests I ran on Galera. In December I finally had some lab time to do that. If you remember what troubled me then it was that in all my other Galera benchmarks performance with Galera was equal or much better compared to performance on a single MySQL node. (And this is very unusual wrt high availability solutions, usually they come with a performance penalty. This is why Galera is so great.) However, on the tests with a disk bound workload, there was performance degradation, and what was even more troubling was the performance seemed to decrease more when adding more write masters.

In these tests I was able to understand the performance decrease and it had nothing to do with Galera and not even …

First of all, I wish you a happy new year.
Many things happened last year, it was really exciting to be involved in the MySQL ecosystem.
I hope this enthusiasm will be increased this year, up to you !

To start the year, I propose the MySQL[plus] Awards 2011
It will only take 5 minutes to fill out these polls.
Answer with your heart first and then with your experience with some of these tools or services.

Polls will be closed January 31, so, vote now !
For “other” answers, please,  let me a comment with details.

Don’t hesitate to submit proposal for tools or services in the comments.
And, please, share these polls !

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, …

db4free.net has been updated again.

The server now runs MySQL 5.6.4 m7, the very latest, and lets hope, the very greatest.

Enjoy!

I am working on a presentation for the San Francisco MySQL Users Group on using EXPLAIN and EXPLAIN EXTENDED. But I need some help from the MySQL Community. Do you have any good examples of EXPLAIN EXTENDED providing unexpected results when compared to the original query? Please post your statement and possibly a SHOW CREATE TABLE below or send them to david.stokes AT Oracle.

Thanks!

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