I was interviewed at the Xeround booth at the MySQL Users Conference and Expo in April, talking about databases in the cloud, and although this was a vendor interview, the issues were pretty much cloud generic. I think you know my views on clouds and elasticity and stuff like that by now, but if not, the you might want to read my blogpost The E is for Elastic. And if you don't don't want to read my rant, then Xeround has published the interview on YouTube, so you can see it there:
Challenges for databases in the cloud

On Elasticity and Cloud Databases

/Karlsson

Most analytical and BI databases have date dimension table(s). One frequently needs to generate and populate such data. I present a solution below for such data generation, written in Python. Please use different database drivers/modules to connect to your specific database server (MySQL, SQL Server, Oracle, etc.) for data population.

Notes:

1. It takes 2 parameters, start date and end date, in YYYYMMDD format, inclusive. Extensive error checking is built in, but let me know if you have comments/suggestions;

2. The script produce a Python dictionary (associated array) and print out its content;

3. The output includes dayNumber: a day’s position in a year. For example, 2011-02-01 is the 32ed day in 2011, therefore its dayNumber is 32;

4. The output includes weekNumber: a week’s position in a year. The week number in year is based on ISO standard. From documentation: the ISO year consists of 52 or 53 …

Deploying in the Amazon cloud is touted as a great way to achieve high scalability while paying only for the computing power you use. How do you get the best scalability from the technology?

1. Use Auto-scaling

Auto-scaling is a unique feature of cloud computing and Amazon's EC2 offering. Setup a load balancer and a couple of webservers for your application as you normally would. Design your webserver based on a template AMI that you'll reuse over and over. Then setup auto-scaling and set thresholds based on the traffic you forecast. When a threshold is passed, AWS will spinup a new instance of your webserver, and roll it into the load balancer pool automatically. Once traffic falls below the scale back threshold, Amazon will take a server out of the pool for you.

Be sure to monitor this …

This comment is in regard to this InnoDB blog page. Trying to post a message says you need to be logged in, but there’s no register/login page I could see…

Anyway the page talks about a new feature which allows you to save on shutdown an InnoDB buffer pool and to load this on startup, this ensuring that once loaded the database will perform with this “hot” cache.

That sounds interesting as I have seen on numerous occasions that if the buffer pool is not warm then performance can be a magnitude worse.

This looks like a very welcome feature. However, a couple of things are not clear to me.

1. Having some example benchmark times of using this process and comparing it to trying to warm up the buffer pool by hand would be useful.  While this may heavily dependent on database …

Backing up data is always necessary, especially for Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Planning (BCP). One rule of thumb for me is let the computer do the work by automating repetitive tasks. Running things by hand over and over sucks, so if I do something more then once I typically automate the process. Backing up INNODB data is a good example of a solution that requires automation.

I always start off with what are the requirements and limitations when deciding to automate something. My requirement was simple. Every night at 2am backup the database and upload it to s3 without downtime. The limitation is to avoid downtime, I must keep in mind that the database cannot go down and the tables cannot be locked. Thus I use xtradbbackup provided by Percona.

The second part of the requirement is to upload the data to s3 automatically. This is not hard, but there is a limitation. Uploading files > 5GB is not …

One common theme in the questions our MySQL Support customers ask is Replication Lag. The story is typically along the lines everything is same as before and for some unknown reason the slave is started to lag and not catching up any more. I always smile at “nothing has changed” claim as it usually wrong, and one should claim I’m not aware of any change. Digging deeper we would find some change, though often subtle as computers are state machines and with no external and internal changes they behave the same way. First let me start pointing out common causes of replication lag

Hardware Faults Hardware faults may cause reduced performance causing replication to lag. Failed hard drive getting RAID in degraded mode could be one common example. Sometimes it is not fault per say but operating mode change may cause the problem. Many RAID controllers …

A big congrats to Baron Schwartz for his Oracle ACE Award.

Baron is extremely respected in the MySQL community. He is the Chief Performance Architect at Percona, an independent services provider for the MySQL database server. He is the lead author of High Performance MySQL, and has created several popular open-source software projects for MySQL, including Maatkit.

Thank you Baron.

With the new MySQL 5.6 release there are some more InnoDB Data Dictionary Tables in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA:

New with MySQL 5.5 are:

New with MySQL 5.6 are:

Open Cloud Initiative launches. HP joins OpenStack. Oracle releases Java 7. And more.

# The Open Cloud Initiative launched to drive open standards in cloud computing.

# HP announced its support for OpenStack.

# Oracle announced the availability of Java SE 7. The Apache Software Foundation warned of index corruption and crashes in Apache Lucene and Solr.

# Nebula …

When I interviewed at Tokutek, I met a team of distinguished academics and engineers who could calmly and thoughtfully wax eloquent about the finer points of B-tree and Fractal Tree™ indexing,  drive I/Os, and database engines. Soon after, I discovered that several of my colleagues have a second passion — they practice Mixed Martial Arts (MMA). As Wikipedia explains, MMA showcases the “fighters of different disciplines, including boxing, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, wrestling, Muay Thai, karate and others.” I’ve since learned about many different fighting styles.

This was useful to understand when an MMA-style fight broke out in the MySQL world earlier this month between the different variants or …