An important part of benchmarking is to draw graphs. A graph can reveal results you wouldn't have spotted just by looking at raw numbers. By the way, the process of massaging the raw numbers into graphs will often reveal things too.

Sysbench output tends to be quite wordy, especially when you have a script that runs 1, 2, 4, 8... threads with the same test. To manually copy paste the numbers into a spreadsheet is tiresome. So I came up with this monster shell one-liner to condense the output into a csv file. I'm posting it here so I will find it the next time I need it:

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My friends over at IA Ventures are looking both for an Analyst and for an Associate to their team.  If Big Data, New York and start-ups is in your blood then I can’t think of a better VC to be involved in. 

From the IA blog:

"IA Ventures funds early-stage Big Data companies creating competitive advantage through data and we’re looking for two start-up junkies to join our team – one full-time associate / community manager and one full time analyst. Because there are only four of us (we’re a start-up ourselves, in fact), we’ll need you to help us investigate companies, learn about industries, develop investment theses, perform internal operations, organize community events, and work with portfolio companies—basically, you can take on as much …

The primary reasons people are moving to the public cloud are: (1) replace capital expenses with operating expenses (pay as you go); (2) use shared resources for processes like back-up, maintenance, networking (shared expenses); (3) use shared infrastructure that enables you to pay only for those resources you actually use, instead of consuming your maximum load resources at all times (pay-per-use). The first thing you’ll notice is that all 3 cloud benefits have their basis in finances or the cloud business model.
We will focus in on #3 above: Pay-Per-Use. The old school model was to build your compute infrastructure for the maximum load today, plus growth over the life-cycle of the equipment, plus some buffer so the systems don’t get overloaded from spikes in usage. The net result is that your average usage might run 10% of the potential for the infrastructure you mortgaged your home to buy. In other words, you were paying 10X more than …

Using MySQL 5.6? Tell us what you think!

The MySQL Community Team would like to know what you folks using MySQL 5.6 think of the new features. From time to time we would like to quiz you admittedly good looking and brilliant group about how MySQL 5.6 is being evaluated, if it is solving problems that previously existed, and just how well it works for you. We need feedback from you cutting edge explorers to improve the breed. So please reply to this blog or send me a note at David.Stokes AT Oracle.

For those that missed the announcements, previews of MySQL 5.6 are available at http://labs.mysql.com for you to evaluate. The software is not ready for production but does feature new features like Full Text Search InnoDB tables, Binary Log API, Binary Log Group Commit, multi-thread slaves, memcached-to-InnoDB and more. So please try a copy today!

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A busy week at Casa Turner, as the infamous Home Renovations of Doom wrap up, I finish the final chapters of "Developing Enterprise iOS Applications" (buy a copy for all your friends, it's a real page turner!), pack for two weeks of vacation with the family in California (Palm Springs in August, 120 degrees, woohoo!), and celebrate both a birthday and an anniversary.

But never fear, WIR fans, I'll continue to supply the news, even as my MacBook melts in the sun and the buzzards start to circle overhead.

The law of unintended consequences

If you decide to install Lion Server, you may notice something missing from the included software: MySQL. Previous releases of OS X server offered pre-installed MySQL command line and GUI tools, but they are …

Abstract: In this article we discuss how big is the performance impact of MySQL TRIGGERs compared to application side logging (with INSERT) into a MySQL table.

What was in my mind from the past

A while ago when MySQL released its Stored Language features in v5.0 I have seen a book [1] about this topic. In this book was a performance comparison between different implementations of computational tasks, one was done in MySQL Stored Language. The result was, that MySQL Stored Language feature sucks also performance wise.

Now a customer of us wanted to use TRIGGERs to log/track some database activity. Because I am not a big fan of Stored Languages at all and because I had this performance comparison in mind I was not convinced if this is a good idea but I did not know it for sure and wanted to …

In this post:

• Introduction
• Reasons to submit a paper for an Oracle User Group event
• What should you talk about?

Introduction

Just a few days ago I received a reminder email from Burke Scheld for the “AUSOUG National Conference Series – Perth 2011 – Call for Papers”. I had an event-related conversation with several Oracle guys in my professional networks and the answers I received triggered this blog post. Some of the very good Oracle professionals I personally respect said “…I am not sure what I would get out of it …” or “…I haven’t done anything exciting for the last FEW MONTHS …”.
The answers I received shocked me a bit. Typically I am in the opposite situation where I have so many good things happening I would love to share with the world that I had to choose from too many topics to submit several. I am sure that I am not very different from other …

On many of our clients, we have a need to run XtraBackup as a regular OS user. Aside from running into the issue where tar4ibd was not provided with Percona’s xtrabackup-1.6.2.tar.gz package, our main issues have been with permissions when attempting a streaming backup.

I have found the following:

1. The user needs permissions for a temp directory to stream to/from. The my.cnf of the target database cannot be used because the user does not have permission to write to /tmp/mysql-stdout, so we set a tmpdir in a separate defaults-file.
2. A backup target directory must be used that the user has read/write permissions to. It seems to me a target directory should not be needed for a streaming backup, …

MySQL databases are great work horses of the internet.  They back tons of modern websites, from blogs and checkout carts, to huge sites like Facebook.  But these technologies don't run themselves.  When you're faced with a system that is slowing down, you'll need the right tools to diagnose and troubleshoot the problem.  MySQL has a huge community following and that means scores of great tools for your toolbox. Here are 7 ways to troubleshoot MySQL.

1. Use innotop

Innotop is a great tool for MySQL which despite the name monitors MySQL generally as well as InnoDB usage.  It's fairly easy to install, just download the perl script. Be sure to include a [client] section to your local users .my.cnf file (you have one don't you?).  Inside that section, place one line with "user=xyz" and one line with "password=abc".

If you're concerned that installing something new is too …

At PalominoDB we do not normally use mysqldump for regular backups, but only in some circumstances (for example MySQL upgrade).  Lately we gave a try to mydumper as an alternative to mysqldump, and results are quite promising. We found that mydumper performs very fast exporting both small and large datasets!! We also found that the […]