I have a bunch of notes from the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011, and I figure its about time I started blogging it. These are notes from the panel on the SkySQL Reference Architecture, led by Kaj Arno and Ivan Zoratti. The notes are raw (read their FAQ for more), and I talk a little bit about the SkySQL Configurator at the end (a tool I immediately used, and submitted some bugs/improvements for – 7 at last count, which I hear got fixed in the 0.02 release, which got pushed last night!).

There were 7 panelists. The MySQL world needs:

• technical support
• monitoring & administration tools
• simplified …

Five Things Your Need to Know About MySQL is a short article intended for Chief Information Officers warning them that they may have MySQL installed within their company but not to worry! Many in the MySQL world will probably smile (or wince) at the article. I know those of us around MySQL in particular and the Open Source in general are use to FUD, ignorance, and sometime apathy about the software we know and love. The article was intended to be a quick brief for CIOs about MySQL but it falls short in many areas. Maybe we in the MySQL need to find our CIOs and educate them about the product before they get fixated on an article that could do a disservice.

You may also want to know other analytical pieces CIO is publishing cover …

I thought people may be interested to know what the PBMS patch for MySQL actually patches, in case they should think this is a major hack into the MySQL source code.

Almost all of  the patch consists of  the PBMS daemon source code which is added to the "storage/pbms" folder in the MySQL source code tree. Other than that here is a list of the actual MySQL files touched and what the patch is for:

• sql/CMakeLists.txt:
  Added PBMS source directories to the header file search list.
  Lines added: 1.
• sql/handler.cc:
  Added PBMS server side API calls to check for longblob columns being modified or tables containing longblob columns being dropped or renamed. This is the guts of the PBMS patch.
  Lines added: 170.
• libmysql/CMakeLists.txt:
  Added PBMS API functions to the client API functions list and …

Today we have a dedicated MySQL conference in New York with Percona Live. It is great to see an overflowing room in the opening keynote. With over 20 speakers and 4 dedicated tracks there is a lot of content for attendees.

With all the confusion over conference ownership since the Oracle acquisition I applaud Percona for taking an initiative, first in San Francisco and now here in New York. Also announced today is the next Percona Live in London which is great for the MySQL ecosystem in Europe.

Severalnines is proud to announce that it won the Best Startup prize at the EuroCloud Sweden Award in Stockholm this week. The company was chosen out of a number of promising startups targeting the emerging cloud computing market.

The jury noted that “Severalnines have a compelling idea to cloud-enable any customer-preferred database in mission-critical setups. Together with a simple-to-use configurator they put the user in control.”

We are quite honored and proud to receive the Best Startup award. Through our flagship product ClusterControl™, it is our objective to make complex database tasks easy and even enjoyable for our users, and above all, to make sure …

Monty Program and SkySQL have decided to be good corporate citizens to the Linux Foundation and have decided to sponsor a few of their LinuxCon events. We will be at LinuxCon Japan, happening June 1-3 2011 in Yokohama, Japan.

It’s my first LinuxCon, so if anyone has tips, please don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments. Cheers!

A lot is happening in the world of MySQL lately. If you’re in Asia, SkySQL has been organising roadshows. On May 18, there was a captive audience in Singapore, listening to David Axmark (advisor to SkySQL, co-founder of MySQL Ab), Daniel Saito (SkySQL), and Colin Charles (Monty Program). On May 20, there was a huge audience in Manila, and I was totally bummed to have missed out on it.

I’m told there’s going to be an awesome audience tomorrow, May 27, in Seoul, South Korea. Lotte Hotel will be abuzz with all things SkySQL, Monty Program, and MariaDB, and it will feature Kaj Arno and Daniel Saito from SkySQL, and Colin Charles from Monty Program.

May 30 brings upon the SkySQL Roadshow in Tokyo, hosted at the Yurakucho International Forum.

If you plan to attend any of these events (Daniel tells me they’re also reaching capacity) and are in the area, don’t …

With the just released version 5.2.34 we also changed the python version used in MySQL Workbench (to 2.7). However, this produces a problem when upgrading from 5.2.33. The reason is that the installer leaves all the compiled python files (*.pyc) in the installation folder. On next load of Workbench you can’t even get beyond the splash screen.

We will soon publish a new release with that problem fixed. In the mean time simply uninstall Workbench before you install 5.2.34. Your stored connections, starters, settings etc. are not touched by this. Make sure that you remove any remaining file once uninstallation finished, before you install 5.2.34.

This problem was first encountered on Windows using the msi package, but might also affect the zip package or even other platforms. In any case remove the old files before installing 5.2.34.

About any product, be it computer hardware, software or any other product, has features that are annoying to some of us. But few products has so many features that are annoying to just about everyone as computer software. And among computer software, database software in particular seems to to have these features, which some people seems to like, and some just find annoying. And then there are features, or lack of them or implementation specific details that seems to annoy just about everyone. Things that work in a partuicular way because someone, somewhere, in some distant universe, had the notion that this was a good thing. Often features relating back to ancient times. And sometimes features that you just know work in a weirdo way because the person, if it was a person, figuring out the feature of the implementation of it, really must have been smoking something that is illegal in many parts of the world. Which is not to say that these features …

As part of my research for my Ph.D. thesis, I spent a lot of time
understanding the impact of CPU caches on the performance of a DBMS.
I concluded that in a parallel data server it is actually possible
to get better than linear scaling in certain workloads.

When executing a benchmark with 2 machines consisting of 8 cores where
those 8 cores share a 2 MByte cache has a total of 4 MByte CPU cache.
Assuming that the benchmark executes with a data set of 2 GByte, then
0.1% of the data fits in the CPU cache. As the number of machines grow,
the available CPU caches also grows, this means that when we have
32 machines, we have 64MByte of cache available. This means that we can
now store 1.6% of the data set in the CPU cache.

For benchmarks one mostly tries to scale the data set size when increasing
the number of nodes in the system. This is however not …