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! …

Last week's podcast, containing an overview of replication

This week we have Robert Hodges, CEO of Continuent, talking about the Tungsten replicator, which has an open source component with global transaction id's and can be used for many features, including high availability and replication to systems other than MySQL. Tungsten Replicator won Application of the Year award at the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference.

read more

In a recent blog post, I wrote about four fundamental metrics for system performance analysis. These are throughput, residence time, “weighted time” (the sum of all residence times in the observation period — the terminology is mine for lack of a better name), and concurrency.

I derived all of these metrics from two “even more fundamental” performance metrics, which I’ll call the “basic” metrics. That’s what this post is about. But it doesn’t stop there, because my list of four fundamental metrics isn’t the only thing you can derive from the two basic metrics. In fact, these two basic metrics encode a tremendous amount of information, from which you can compute lots of other things. And by the way, it’s a good thing the two basic metrics really are basic, because beyond “fundamental” and …

Percona is organizing another Percona Live event, this time a one-day MySQL summit in New York.

This is a 100% technical conference with no marketing allowed, perfect for those that are only interested in the real stuff or those that want to get answers to problems they have *right now*.

The previous summit, held in San Francisco, was very well attended and I have heard a lot of good things about it from people that were there.

In San Francisco we had one of the MariaDB optimizer gurus holding a talk about all the advanced optimization we have added to MariaDB 5.3.

In NYC we have Kurt von Finck giving a talk about …