Next Tuesday I’ll be speaking at the DevOpsDC meetup at CustomInk’s offices. I’ll talk about why MySQL downtime happens and what you can do to avoid or prevent it. This is a research-based talk (but it’s not scientific… they’re different) that draws on hundreds of downtime issues I’ve studied. The related white papers are available on Percona’s website. Hope to see you there!

Back in January 2010, I wrote an article titled Proxy Trace : Tracing the Variables and Functions Available within MySQL Proxy.

That post was basically a lua script I posted which traces the steps of Proxy, outputting comments as it traverses through the various functions, and then outputs the names and values of [most of] the available variables available within Proxy.

That script worked fine with Proxy 0.7.2 and 0.8.0. It also works just fine with Proxy 0.8.1 (though you need to specify your admin settings in 0.8.1) and 0.8.2 (admin values not necessary).

However, I did go ahead and build it out a little further.

I did not add too much, but I did add the following (the full script, trace.lua, is provided at the end of this post):

• Outputs backends.type variable
• Expanded the rows returned outputs (returns more detailed row …

The slides from last week’s talks I (co-)presented at Percona Live and Linuxcon Europe are now available from our web site.

• In my tutorial MySQL High Availability Sprint: Launch the Pacemaker, I gave a fast walk-through of Pacemaker high availability for MySQL. Tutorial presented at Percona Live UK 2011 in London, England.
• In Fencing and Maintaining Sanity in High Availability Clusters, Madison Kelly and I explored the importance of fencing in HA clusters, highlighted important considerations for fencing, and shared technical details and best practices. Talk presented at Linuxcon Europe 2011 in Prague, Czech Republic. …

Read the original article at 5 Tips to Cache Websites and Boost Speed

Often when we think about speeding up and scaling, we focus on the application layer itself.  We look at the webserver tier, and database tier, and optimize the most resource intensive pages.

There's much more we can do to speed things up, if we only turn over the right stones.  Whether you're using WordPress or not, many of these principals can be applied.  However we'll use WordPress as our test case.

Test Your Website speed

There are web-based speed testing tools that will help with this step.  Take a look at Webpagetest , …

Last time I used MySQL Enterprise Backup to save an entire database. Now it is time to test that backup. The first step is to shutdown the MySQL server using mysqladmin.

bin# ./mysqlbackup --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/my.cnf --backup-dir=/home/dstokes/foo2 copy-back
MySQL Enterprise Backup version 3.6.0 [2011/07/01]
Copyright (c) 2003, 2011, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All Rights Reserved.

INFO: Starting with following command line ...
./mysqlbackup --defaults-file=/etc/mysql/my.cnf
--backup-dir=/home/dstokes/foo2 copy-back

IMPORTANT: Please check that mysqlbackup run completes successfully.
At the end of a successful 'copy-back' run mysqlbackup
prints "mysqlbackup completed OK!".

mysqlbackup: INFO: Server repository configuration:
datadir = /usr/local/mysql/data
innodb_data_home_dir = /usr/local/mysql/data
innodb_data_file_path = …

In addition to reporting MySQL Connector/Python bugs on Launchpad, it is now also possible to enter them using http://bugs.mysql.com.

Appcelerator raises $15m. Hortonworks launches Data Platform. And more.

# Appcelerator raised $15m in a third round led by Mayfield Fund, Translink Capital and Red Hat.

# Modo Labs closed a $4m investment from Storm Ventures and New Magellan Ventures.

# Hortonworks launched its Hortonworks Data Platform Apache Hadoop distribution, as well as a new partner program. Eric Baldeschwieler put the …

I had the pleasure of being invited to blog at the MassTLC unConference on Friday. The event was a full day of diverse topics and discussions ranging from the latest in recipe sharing sites, to entrepreneurial CEO war stories, to hot trends in venture investing. An excerpt covering Big Data from my MassTLC blog is below.

Big Data and Analytics in MA

Hosted by Steve O’Leary of Aeris Partners and Bob Zurek (@bzurek) of Oracle

First question – what is Big Data? While often debated, Steve had a working definition of “big” in terms of Volume, Velocity and Variety. Fritz Knabe of IBM noted that Big Data can come from even the most unexpected places, such as the point-of-sale coupons at checkouts as managed by Catalina (an IBM customer). …

I got a question from the NDB folks that are currently adapting MySQL Cluster to
MySQL 5.5 about whether any special developments are needed to adapt the NDB
storage engine for use with the thread pool. Then I realised there are more
people out there that write storage engines that want to know how to optimise
their storage engines for the thread pool.

So first of all any storage engine will work with the thread pool as they are today
without any modifications. It is however possible to improve the performance of the
MySQL Server when using the thread pool by adapting the storage engine to the
thread pool APIs.

The new API that has been added to the MySQL 5.5 server is the thd_wait interface.
This interface makes it possible for storage engines to report to a thread pool
plugin before starting a wait and after finishing a wait.

As an …

In a previous post about different output for the same query there were 3 databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite) and 3 different results.

I attended the "Fixed in Drizzle: No more GOTCHA's" talk during Percona Live London. The talk was full of issues which I've encountered many times and which were all fixed. So I wondered whether or not this is already fixed in Drizzle.

Here is the results for Drizzle:

drizzle> select version();
+------------+
| version()  |
+------------+
| 2011.03.13 | 
+------------+
1 row in set (0.000418 sec)

drizzle> create database test;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.000622 sec)

drizzle> use test; …