Percona is sponsoring RailsConf again this year, and we’ll be at booth #110 in the expo hall. Use our discount code to save 20% off the ticket price: rc11mysql. We hope to see you there! (Sadly, we didn’t get any sessions accepted this year, so we won’t be speaking. Maybe next year.)

There are plethora of thrilling business software trends on the horizon as the summer of 2011 starts. Many of these will significantly impact IT organizations seeking to align IT operations with business objectives. Awareness of such trends can help you to keep ahead of the competition. What better way to get abreast of these trends in a nutshell than the Log Buffer? Log Buffer #219 is in your hands to enjoy.

Oracle:

When Arup writes it, it stays written. In a very refreshing post, he is sure to convince anybody why he or she needs Tanel Poder’s class.

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The Open DB Camp in Sardinia 2011 has had a number of sessions on varying topics. Topics range from MySQL over MongoDB to replication and High Availability.

I decided to tap into the database expert resources present here at Sardegna Ricerche by discussing a non-database issue, where one can expert database experts to have insights beyond those of end users. And they did.

The topic was the particular case of information overload many of us suffer from on our hard disks: Too many files, too hard to find.

• How do we find the bank statement from April 2007 from the more-seldom-used account?
• What are the ten best work-related pictures from last year?
• Is this the most current …

In March I posted a series of blog posts on my paternity leave MepSQL project, which I called MepSQL. There was still one piece created in the MepSQL buildsystem that I didn't publish or blog about. Since it is generally useful, I wanted to generalize and polish it and publish it separately. I finally had that done last week, when I also found that somebody else, namely alestic.com already published a similar solution 2 years ago. So yesterday I ported my BuildBot setup to use that system instead and am happy to publish it at the Open DB Camp 2011 in Sardinia.

Ok, so let's go back a little... What is the problem we are solving?

Let's …

Permalink: http://bit.ly/QuBLVB



Read part 1 for the rationale behind the code.

As discussed in the first part of this blog entry, we'll be utilizing a statement that uses base 36 to generate the random name. We will be adding the $ and _ characters using the ELT function. Here is a true random database and table name generator:

DELIMITER $$
DROP FUNCTION IF EXISTS `randomNameGenerator` $$
CREATE DEFINER=`root`@`localhost` FUNCTION `randomNameGenerator`(
 ) RETURNS varchar(64) CHARSET utf8
BEGIN
 DECLARE numberOfChars, charDiceRoll TINYINT(2);
 DECLARE charCount TINYINT DEFAULT 0;
 DECLARE randomChar CHAR(1);
 DECLARE randomName VARCHAR(64) DEFAULT '';
 …

Shard-Query is an open source tool kit which helps improve the performance of queries against a MySQL database by distributing the work over multiple machines and/or multiple cores. This is similar to the divide and conquer approach that Hive takes in combination with Hadoop. Shard-Query applies a clever approach to parallelism which allows it to significantly improve the performance of queries by spreading the work over all available compute resources. In this test, Shard-Query averages a nearly 6x (max over 10x) improvement over the baseline, as shown in the following graph:

One significant advantage of Shard-Query over Hive is that it works with existing MySQL data sets and queries. Another advantage is that it works with all MySQL …

We’ve given discount coupon codes to all of our Percona Live sponsors, so watch the Twitter tag #perconalive to find discount announcements. Here’s the list of sponsoring organizations: Clustrix Vork Continuent Fusion-io Infobright Pentaho Schooner Information Technology SkySQL Virident …

MySQL Lunch-n-Learn is not a new performance schema table or a new BLOB data type for Chef Gordon Ramsey. It is where a MySQL engineer comes to your office bringing lunch to talk about the most popular open source database. I was asked to participate in one this morning at a major company headquartered in Dallas. The company wanted some information on updates to the MySQL server, a comparison between InnoDB and MyISAM, and some company specific questions.

It is often hard to get new product news to our users and this program provides us with a way to answer specific questions. And the customer gets to select the agenda items to make certain they get what they need form this event.

So if you want to get the latest on MySQL 5.6, Memcahched-to-InnoDB, or replication strategies, use the link at the top of this entry to set up your …

Just a quick note - I have added support for email alerts on failed backups into XtraBackup Manager.

Now if something goes awry, XtraBackup Manager can optionally send some detailed information to the email address(es) of your choice!

This should allow you to easily hook to SMS gateways, NOC alert lists, etc.

Additionally, we have been doing some preliminary testing of XtraBackup Manager on a Nexenta machine with 8 Xeon CPUs using ZFS with lzjb compression.

We are getting around 3.8x compression and the Gigabit NICs seem to be the bottleneck in the speed here. Both CPU and disk utilisation look very low.

Our plan is to use a 10 Gigabit NIC in the Nexenta Backup host and stack it with storage - it should make for a very cost effective and space efficient backup host.

Meanwhile, development work continues towards a 1.0 !

Happy Friday!
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On April 1st, the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University, where I am a professor, held an open house. I gave a talk called “Elephants on a Trapeze: Keeping Big Data Agile”.

The talk is an introduction to performance issues related to big data without getting too technical. You’ll have to decide if I succeeded with the “not too technical” part. My take is on how to keep big data indexed — not surprising since the work in this talk is the basis for TokuDB®, Tokutek’s MySQL storage engine for keeping large data indexed. A video of my talk can be found here.

Elephants on a Trapeze: Keeping Big Data Agile from Tokutek on …