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!
…

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 …

Last month was one of the busiest months for the InnoDB team:

• MySQL 5.6.2 milestone release with many InnoDB features
• MySQL Lab release of NoSQL to InnoDB with Memcached
• Three talks at O’Reilly MySQL Conference and COLLABORATE 11
• Ten blogs

The slides of the three talks are now available:

• InnoDB: Status, Architecture, and Latest Enhancements, O’Reilly MySQL Conference, April 14, 2011, by Inaam Rana, John Russell
• InnoDB: Performance and Scalability Features, COLLABORATE 11, April 11, 2011, by Calvin Sun
• …

When I think of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt), I think of the intangible (and irrational) sense that a given technology is inherently bad, will cause your site to go down, and your girlfriend to leave you.  

Over time SQL FUD has cropped up from all the NoSQL evangelists hammering on about how NoSQL solves all the traditional problems RDBMSs have.  Do they have valid points?  In a lot of cases, sure.  But that doesn’t mean that NoSQL is without its own problems.

Part of making peace between the SQL and NoSQL camps should include being honest about the strengths and weaknesses of each technology, so engineering decisions get made, not sales decisions.  Every technology has its strengths and weaknesses, just like physical materials in, say, …

As you know, Tomas announced the availability of MySQL 5.6.2 Dev Milestone in his MySQL O'Reilly and Collaborate keynote presentations a few weeks back.  Downloads so far have been great, which reflects the feedback and excitement we picked up on from the attendees of both events, especially at the O'Reilly Community reception on that Wednesday (it was great to so many friends, family, peers there!).

You can read John Russell's excellent recap of the new things in 5.6.2 and new innovations currently available in the MySQL Labs here.  And all of the 5.6 ready docs are available to help you learn how to enable and implement those you might find most interesting.

I am especially excited about our continued use of the …

A couple of years ago I wrote a patch for the MySQL command line client which shows the progress of a import as it happens (I also created a similar patch for mysqldump which later made it into Drizzle).  I don't have the blog archives from back then but Harrison Fisk commented suggesting I use a utility called 'bar' instead.

The 'bar' utility actually is a lot better than the patch I wrote and I highly recommend it when you are importing a large dump file.  To use it simply run:

shell> bar -if=data.sql | mysql

This will generate an output such as:



If you are using Ubuntu then it is a simple case of 'sudo apt-get install bar' to …

A couple of years ago I wrote a patch for the MySQL command line client which shows the progress of a import as it happens (I also created a similar patch for mysqldump which later made it into Drizzle).  I don’t have the blog archives from back then but Harrison Fisk commented suggesting I use a utility called ‘bar‘ instead.

The ‘bar’ utility actually is a lot better than the patch I wrote and I highly recommend it when you are importing a large dump file.  To use it simply run:

shell> bar -if=data.sql | mysql

This will generate an output such as:

If you are using Ubuntu then it is a simple case of ‘sudo apt-get install bar’ to install it.  Enjoy! …