Percona is glad to announce the release of Percona XtraBackup 1.6.2 on 25 July, 2011 (Downloads are available here and from thePercona Software Repositories).

This release is purely composed of bug fixes and is the current stable release of Percona Xtrabackup.

All of Percona’s software is open-source and free, all the details of the release and its development process can be found in the 1.6.2 milestone at Launchpad.

New Options –version

The --version option has been added to the xtrabackup binary for printing its version. Previously, the version was displayed only while executing the …

Introduction
InnoDB has had the thread concurrency management code for some years now. Most will be familiar with the three configuration variables associated with this feature:

1. innodb_thread_concurrency
2. innodb_concurrency_tickets
3. innodb_thread_sleep_delay

The problem with the existing code is that the queueing overhead becomes too much and negatively impacts performance, especially as the number of user threads goes up. The queueing code uses the os_event_t …

Note: this article was originally published on http://blogs.innodb.com on July 25, 2011 by Jimmy Yang.

With this lab release, InnoDB now has its own Fulltext Search (FTS) support. People might wonder how different is this FTS comparing with that of MyISAM. From the usage standpoint, they seem very similar with no apparent difference. However, in the underlying FTS engine, the difference is huge, since two are built on different storage engines with totally different design. So in some aspect such as DML, it might be difficult to make it an apple to apple comparison. However, we do try to list and explain the difference, so to make it easier for user to understand our design and make the transition to use InnoDB FTS easier.

The Design:

The most significant difference is the design. Like most transaction storage engine, …

The OpenWorld early bird pricing ends this Friday, July 29!

This is the last week to use the “MYSQL11″ special MySQL discount code
and get $1,000 over regular price, so please take time to share the code
again with customers/prospects or remind them to register by Friday.

Register here and remember to enter Priority Code MYSQL11 during registration.

Oracle OpenWorld will be held on October 2-6, 2011 in San Francisco, CA. This year, we’re offering even more MySQL content and networking activities as a track under the Database Stream, including:

• 30+ Conference Sessions
• Sunday User Group Sessions
• 3 Demo Pods
• 1 Hands-on Lab
• MySQL Customer Advisory Forum
• MySQL Community Reception

If you register by …

Introduction

The InnoDB  UNDO entries reside in a special system table called the UNDO log. This log is made up of several segments. These segments are called rollback segments. A segment in InnoDB is similar to what a file would be in a file system,e.g., user tables and indexes are also stored as separate segments within the same tablespace,  only their format is different. In that sense there is nothing special about InnoDB UNDO logs. This feature allows storing of the UNDO log across several tablespaces.

Purpose

UNDO logs  contain the before image of modified records. There are two types of UNDO records, one for insert and another for updates. The insert UNDO records can be discarded on transaction rollback. The update records are used for rollback, MVCC and by purge. It is because of purge that we can’t just remove the UNDO log records  once the UNDO logs are …

Are you running an InnoDB installation with a many-gigabytes buffer pool(s)? Does it take too long before it goes back to speed after a restart? If yes, then the following will be interesting to you.

In the latest MySQL 5.6 Labs release we have implemented an InnoDB buffer pool(s) dump and load to solve this problem.

The contents of the InnoDB buffer pool(s) can be saved on disk before MySQL is shut down and then read in after a restart so that the warm up time is drastically shortened – the buffer pool(s) go to the state they were before the server restart! The time needed for that is roughly the time needed to read data from disk that is about the size of the buffer pool(s).

Lets dive straight into the commands to perform various dump/load operations:

The buffer pool(s) dump can be done at any time when MySQL is running by doing:

  mysql> SET innodb_buffer_pool_dump_now=ON;

This …

The slides for the MySQL Replication Update talk at OSCON are now available at larsthalmann.com

This is the MySQL Schedule for OSCON 2011:

• MySQL Replication Update, Mon 10:40am
• InnoDB: Performance & Scalability, Mon 4:20pm
• MySQL Community BOF, Mon 9pm
• PHP & MySQL, Wed 4:10pm
• Python Utilities for Managing MySQL, Wed 4:10pm
• PHP under the hood, Thu 10:40am
• MySQL Technology Update, Thu 2:30pm
• MySQL Binlog API, Fri 10:00am

If you are at OSCON, come and visit us at Oracle booth 701!

I was writing about PHP.next before, many things improved there meanwhile. Most notably we have a committed version number: The next PHP release will be called PHP 5.4. The topic I want to talk about today is "Improved application portability" which covers multiple small changes which aim at making it simpler for developers to write applications working on any PHP setup.

Separating <?= from short_open_tags

PHP knows quite a few ways to separate PHP code from surrounding text (usually HTML), most applications use <?php as that works on every system. There is a short form of this, <?, which can be disabled using php.ini's short_open_tags setting. Being able to disable this is important when embedding PHP code into XML documents containing XML processing instructions. Now we also have …

The primary objective of this release was to radically improve performance for subqueries, as well as for joins and single-table queries over large data sets. The MariaDB 5.3 release is based on MariaDB 5.2 (and therefor, MariaDB 5.1 & MySQL 5.1).

Noteworthy improvements in this release include:

• The biggest redesign for the MariaDB optimizer in 10 yrs
• NoSQL support
• Replication and binary logging
• Support for new datatypes
• Enhanced Windows performance

To learn more, read Monty Program’s knowledge base article on MariaDB 5.3. You can download the binaries of MariaDB 5.3 here.

Technical support, …

This Summer’s lab release includes an important feature of InnoDB – InnoDB Fulltext Search. This feature would greatly enhance InnoDB’s capability in Text search and retrieving. Since the feature is designed for our transactional storage engine, its underlying architecture design and implementation are completely different with those of MyISAM. So it is worth to give a brief technology review of this feature, familiarize users with some important concepts in the InnoDB FTS so that they can better utilize this feature.

There are a few other posts on the subject. John Russell will give a brief tutorial on the InnoDB fulltext search command and syntax. I will also discuss some comparison with MyISAM fulltext search in another post. And Vinay in our server testing will give some performance number from his experiments.

The Design:

To begin with, I will go over briefly on some key design concepts, which …