I recently gave a presentation at the New York Effective MySQL Meetup on the new features of, and some of the compelling reasons to upgrade to MySQL 5.5. There are also a number of new MySQL variables that can have a dramatic effect on performance in a highly transactional environment, innodb_buffer_pool_instances and innodb_purge_threads are just two to consider.

For more information on all the new variables, status, reserved words and benchmarks of new features you can Download Presentation Slides.

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There are a number of significant new features in MySQL 5.5 including semi-synchronous replication, SIGNAL and RESIGNAL, the PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA, additional STATUS variables, new partitioning options, different default storage engine, better UTF8 support and removal of deprecated functions just to list key considerations.

However some of the performance improvements are worth the investment of time. For a high concurrency InnoDB environment one new configuration alone can provide a …

During my years at MySQL AB I had the unfortunate task of manually maintaining the download page for enterprise customers. This involved a ton of boring, error prone work and almost always led to some sort of error every release. Some of our downloads were eventually replaced with an automated system written by the web team but the memory of all that time wasted still hurts me. So when I joined Monty Program and saw our downloads were manually maintained in mediawiki I knew something had to change.

Most of the websites for Monty Program and the MariaDB project are written with Django so this is where I started. I used our existing website code base and just created a new django application for downloads.  There are many models / tables involved in the system but the important ones are:

• Releases: A list of all the releases we have made, i.e. MariaDB 5.2.7, MariaDB …

Apologies for the scheduling conflict but the date has moved to the 20th of July.

Save the date: July 20, 2011

RSVP here: Ning-Tech-Talks

There have been many database infrastructure changes through Ning’s history since the company began in 2004. Our most recent, and hopefully final, database iteration is running on MySQL.  Over the past year we’ve designed and implemented a stable and highly available MySQL environment.  MySQL was chosen to reduce Ning’s total cost of ownership and increase overall availability to our customers, Network Creators and their members.

Led by Chris Schneider, Ning’s MySQL Architect, join us at this Ning Tech Talk as he explains how we implemented and currently maintain MySQL on the …

HA Provided by OVM

A new white paper is available that steps you though the benefits and the use of the Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition (also see yesterday’s press announcement). Get the white paper here.

As a reminder Oracle Virtual Manager provides a way to add High Availability to your MySQL deployment (this is separate from MySQL Replication and MySQL Cluster). The new OVM template provides a very convenient way to create one or more Virtual Machines that come pre-provisioned with OVM, Oracle Linux and MySQL Enterprise Edition as well as the scripts required to integrate MySQL …

Recently Mark Callaghan blogged about using O_DIRECT for the InnoDB transaction log. He noted that there was not a significant performance gain if the number of concurrent connections increases. I've done my share of testing and retesting over the past months to determine how useful this is. Based on a small TPCC workload (100 warehouses, 64 connections, 1 hour test, 5 minute rampup), I've seen huge performance gains by setting ALL_O_DIRECT for the variable innodb_flush_method using Percona XtraDB.

Without using Direct I/O, the benchmark generated a TpmC score of approximately 24,500 (HP DL160 G6, 2 x Xeon E5620 2.40GHz, 16GB mem, 4x300 GB SAS, RAID-10). After setting the variable to ALL_O_DIRECT, TpmC score went up to 48,000. Huge increase. This deserves some more investigation and some more testing. I want to also try this out on some older …

This week we post th' audio from th' closin' keynote o' Percona Live by Harrison Fisk o' Facebook, "MySQL at Facebook, Current and Future", I'll warrant ye. There is no ear candy this week.

Vim or vi is a text editor. It can be used to edit all kinds of plain text. It is especially useful for editing programs or UNIX/Linux configuration files.Turn on syntax highlighting:
Open file (for example test.sh):$ vi test.shNow press ESC key to enter into command mode then type  ” : syntax on OR syn on”:syntax onOR:syn onThat’s it.. the color syntax highlighting will be enabled until you close that file (useful when you working on server where you can’t enable it permanently because of restriction and not having desired access of .vimrc file.)
Turn off syntax highlighting:
Press ESC key to enter into command mode then type “: syntax off OR syn off”:syntax offOR: syn off
Enable color syntax highlighting permanently:
You may need to add "syntax on" (or "syn on") in your $HOME/.vimrc file$ vi …

1. Networks Blocking Google TV -- the networks are carrying over their old distribution models: someone aggregates eyeballs and pays them for access. In their world view, Google TV is just another cable company. They're doubling down on this wholesale model, pulling out of Hulu and generally avoiding dealing with the people who ultimately watch their shows except through ad-filled shows on their corporate sites. (via Gina Trapani)
2. Mobile Market Snippets -- lots of numbers collected by Luke Wroblewski. After the Verizon iPhone launched …

Oracle is running MySQL High Availability breakfast seminars in London, Düsseldorf and Paris.

During these free seminars, we will review the various options and technologies at your disposal to implement highly available & highly scalable MySQL infrastructures, as well as best practices in terms of architectures.

The packed agenda will include High Availability features in MySQL 5.5, MySQL Replication, MySQL Cluster, the newly released Oracle VM Template for MySQL Enterprise Edition as well as what's new in MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.2, including NoSQL access methods to MySQL.

There are a few places left for the seminar in London taking place tomorrow, June 29th, Register …