I’m sitting in SFO tonight, awaiting my return trip back to Hurricane Pending Maryland. (As a former Floridian, I must of course scoff at any notions that this hurricane is significant). Walking through the airport I noticed a large billboard about “Big Data and the Cloud”. This is the kind of billboard you only see in Silicon Valley; I don’t see signs like that in Portland or Ottawa, and certainly not when I had to change flights in Detroit this year.

Anyway, these two buzz words aren’t a local phenomenon, and are actually taking the tech world by storm. Big Data has become serious enough that there are multiple conferences now for folks interested in the topic. And cloud, well, perhaps harder to define, but more and more businesses are moving to the cloud every day. The problem here is that, most of the traditional ideas on big data run entirely counter to the ideas that work well in the cloud.

Last spring I moderated …

Yesterday I was discussing with a fellow DBA about ways to check the status of existing and/or past RMAN jobs. Good backup scripts usually write their output to some sort of log file so, checking the output is usually a straight-forward task. However, backup jobs can be scheduled in many different ways (crontab, Grid Control, Scheduled Tasks, etc) and finding the log file may be tricky if you don’t know the environment well.
Furthermore, log files may also have already been overwritten by the next backup or simply just deleted. An alternative way of accessing that information, thus, may come handy.

Fortunately, RMAN keeps the backup metadata around for some time and it can be accessed through the database’s V$ views. Obviously, if you need this information because your database just crashed and needs to be restored, the method described here is useless.

Backup jobs’ status and metadata

A lot of metadata about …

Archimedes, the first DBA

According to a recent MIT Sloan Management Review study, top performing organizations use analytics 5 times more than lower performers. That’s pretty astounding. And while we all know about the ocean/lake/waves/(your favorite water analogy) of Big Data we struggle with everyday, information is not knowledge. So how can we get insight from data? Recent articles from O’Reilly and HBR offered some …

Yesterday I wrote about the new Full-text search for InnoDB. Some of you may have not noticed there is a package on Labs.MySQL.Com named mysql-5.6-labs-innodb-features that needs attention. Some of the features are already in the main MySQL source trunk and others will soon be there. Code to support solid state drives with 4K and 8K pages is there. Along with REDO logs up to 2TB in size. There is better thread scheduling and an option to pre-load the buffer pool for better performance after a restart. And UNDO logs can be in their own table space. And please let us know what you find in your testing so we can improve the product!

…

MySQL provides you with a nice utility for creating a backup of your databases. From the mysqldump documentation page: “The mysqldump client is a backup program originally written by Igor Romanenko. It can be used to dump a database or a collection of databases for backup or transfer to another SQL server (not necessarily a MySQL server). The dump typically contains SQL statements to create the table, populate it, or both. However, mysqldump can also be used to generate files in CSV, other delimited text, or XML format.”

The mysqldump utility doesn’t provide you with a “hot” or live backup like MySQL Enterprise Backup does, and there may be issues with mysqldump locking tables during the backup process. So for critical data, you should consider …

Here is the script to take full backup from replication server with out blocking production server. It is very useful for point in time recovery if you have binary log enabled ################################################################## #!/bin/sh # database backup script echo "Starting backup program....."; backupdir="/bkp/fullbkp/"; bdate=`eval date +'%d-%b-%Y-%A'`; #echo -e $bdate; # MySQL Login information master_user="root"; master_pwd="<password>"; master_host="localhost"; [...]

Full-text searching with InnoDB tables is now available for your evaluation at Labs.MySQL.Com. Those used to the full-text search from MyIsam will find the basics are familiar. The MATCH() ... AGAINST syntax is there and has been augmented with some new features. How about better performance? You can use innodb_ft_sort_pll_degree to set the number of parallel threads used during tokenization and sorting (see this Transaction on InnoDB for details and timings). So if you wanted to move completely over to InnoDB but were holding back because of full-text searches, you need to check out MySQL 5.6!

…

Many thanks to all of those from MySQL Community who attended the Washington DC Developer day. We had great questions from a full room of community users and we look forward to any feedback that you might have.
I look forward to the next one ! 

To whom it may concern -

Today, I received an email from a user of the udf_init_error UDF (which resides in the lib_mysqludf_udf library). The purpose of this UDF is to generate an error condition, which can be used to abruptly terminate a trigger or stored procedure. As such it is a workaround for bug #11661. This is all described extensively in my now ancient article here.

The user wrote me because of a problem experienced in MySQL 5.5: ...calling

select …

My recent post on setting up Tungsten parallel replication in a hurry got a lot of hits, though to be fair it was probably not the great writing but the fact that at least one popular MySQL blog posted a link to it.  (Thanks, we like you guys too.)  Anyway, I would like to invite anybody who is interested in parallel replication to attend a webinar on Thursday September 1st at 10am PDT to cover installing and using Tungsten.  It's straight-up technical talk to help you start quickly. 
Bringing up Tungsten on an existing MySQL slave only takes a few minutes, so once we have that out of the way I will explain how Tungsten works inside and show you some …