One could say that MariaDB now is 2 years old as a packaged product. The latest version, MariaDB 5.3 Beta, is the culmination of many years of hard work. We believe it contains the largest and most significant change to the code of MySQL since the launch of MySQL 5.0. I’m talking about the changes made to the central product component called the Optimizer.

Why did we touch something so central to the product? The fast answer is that the original Optimizer is about 17 years old. Prior to the work we did for MariaDB 5.3, the Optimizer hadn’t had any huge evolutionary improvements or changes in a decade (except for some features that were added in 2003-2005). It was missing basic functionality that one can expect in any 2010s relational database. Things like hash joins or efficient handling of subqueries.

We’ve also wanted to gradually make MariaDB better at handling bigger tables and bigger queries. This requires query plans to …

Have you ever tried to power on a new ESXi guest host and come across an error message saying "The host is VT-capable, but VT is disabled. VT might be disabled if it has been disabled in the BIOS settings or the host has not been power-cycled since changing this setting". An example screen shot of this error:


To correct this issue, reboot the server and pull up the bios settings (usually F2)
You will need to pull up the …

As public clouds are commoditized, the public cloud vendors are increasingly moving to higher margin and stickier managed services. In the early days of the public cloud, renting compute and storage was unique, exciting, sticky and profitable. It has quickly become a commodity. In order to provide differentiation, maintain margins and create barriers to customer exit, against increasing competition, the cloud is moving toward a collection of managed services.
Public clouds are growing beyond simple compute instances to platform as a service (PaaS). PaaS is then comprised of various modules, including database as a service (DaaS). In the early days you rented a number of compute instances, loaded your database software and you were the DBA managing all aspects of that database. Increasingly, public clouds are moving toward a DaaS model, where the cloud customer writes to a simple database API and the cloud provider is the DBA. …

Two of my proposals for Percona Live London on October 24-25 have been approved! Yes, I really had to propose them and get them approved like everyone else, although as I’m sure you can imagine, I had a good chance at being accepted :-) Not all of my talks were accepted, though. I’ll be presenting a half-day tutorial on how to get great results when troubleshooting MySQL problems, and a conference session on how to use TCP packet headers to measure and analyze a surprising variety of aspects of MySQL performance and scalability.

As something of a follow-up post to the previous entry, here’s a quick recipe for creating a Virtual Machine using the VirtualBox command line tools:

We’re using Windows Server 2008 64bit as an example, modify to taste.

$ VM='Windows-2008-64bit'

Create a 32GB ‘dynamic’ disk.

$ VBoxManage createhd --filename $VM.vdi --size 32768

You can get a list of the OS types VirtualBox recognises using:

$ VBoxManage list ostypes

Then copy the most appropriate one into here.

$ VBoxManage createvm --name $VM --ostype "Windows2008_64" --register

Add a SATA controller with the dynamic disk attached.

$ VBoxManage storagectl $VM --name "SATA Controller" --add sata \
>  --controller IntelAHCI
$ VBoxManage storageattach $VM --storagectl "SATA Controller" --port 0 \
>  --device 0 --type hdd --medium $VM.vdi …

It took nearly eight months to get this new version of XAMPP released. A long time, but somehow this year it was harder than usual. Alone in the last four weeks, there were two new versions of Apache, two new versions of PHP and even two new versions of MySQL.

But let's get to the point: What's new in this version?

This time we updated Apache to 2.2.21, MySQL to 5.5.16, PHP to 5.3.8, and phpMyAdmin to 3.4.5, as well as the usual minor updates of libraries or system-specific components.

Also new: There's now a Solaris version for x86 processors and both Solaris versions now support the PHP Oracle extension out-of-the-box, i.e. there is no installation of additional libraries needed to access an Oracle database.

All downloads and further details about the new versions are available at the respective XAMPP project …

Historically it is tradition to start learning a new programming language by writing a 'Hello World' application.  While this is not a new language, we are certainly opening up a new communication channel so the title seemed appropriate.

MySQL has and continues to be the world's most popular open source database.  It  has millions of users and processes billions of records every day. The breath and scope of it's reach is truly staggering.  While many consider MySQL to be targeted primarily at Linux and other Unix variants, you may be surprised to find out that Windows is the most popular development *and production* platform for MySQL.  Take a second and go back and read that sentence again.

 Oracle has been very clear in it's commitment to MySQL and especially MySQL on Windows.  My name is Reggie Burnett and I lead a team that is on the front line of this effort.  My team and I are working on …

Historically it is tradition to start learning a new programming language by writing a 'Hello World' application.  While this is not a new language, we are certainly opening up a new communication channel so the title seemed appropriate.

MySQL has and continues to be the world's most popular open source database.  It  has millions of users and processes billions of records every day. The breath and scope of it's reach is truly staggering.  While many consider MySQL to be targeted primarily at Linux and other Unix variants, you may be surprised to find out that Windows is the most popular development *and production* platform for MySQL.  Take a second and go back and read that sentence again.

 Oracle has been very clear in it's commitment to MySQL and especially MySQL on Windows.  My name is Reggie Burnett and I lead a team that is on the front line of this effort.  My team and I are working on …

Perl script for checking MySQL database disk space usage (in GB)

#!/usr/bin/perl

# database size verification
use DBI;
use Getopt::Long;

#Commandline arguments
#my @cmdline = @ARGV;
#my $counts =@cmdline;

sub usage {
print STDERR @_, “n” if @_;
die <<EOF;
Usage: [ options ]
Options:
-?,  –help             show this help
-h,  –host=…         connect to host
-u,  –usr=…          user for login if not current user
-p,  –password=…     password to use when connecting to server
-s,  –socket=…       socket to use when connecting to server
-d,  …

Percona is happy to announce that our conference schedule is up online! We are thrilled to be able to offer such a wide variety of talks from so many MySQL experts. Come see Devananda van der Veen a Percona Consultant speak on Replication.

“Replication is one of MySQL’s most widely-used features, and despite significant improvements over the years, it still fails occasionally. When this happens, it can be due to any number of factors, either internal or external to your MySQL database. For those who do not have a thorough understanding of the MySQL binary log format or the slave’s two-phase replication architecture, safely restoring replication while maintaining data integrity can be a daunting task. This talk will show you how to interpret SHOW SLAVE STATUS, how to read MySQL’s binary logs, and how to recover a replication slave …