Join the MySQL Team as we celebrate the health and growth of the MySQL community. Whether you are an attendee at O'Reilly MySQL Conference, a member of local MySQL user groups, a MySQL user in the Bay Area, or simply interested in MySQL technology, you're all invited to Oracle's MySQL Community Reception at 8:30pm on April 13, 2011.

You'll get the opportunity to mingle with your peers as well as meeting MySQL engineers to get the first-hand information on the latest product development. Plus, complimentary food and beverages will be served to add the flavor and color of the night. RSVP" today and get ready for an evening of relaxing and informative conversation!

Have you ever looked at your processlist and seen queries in the state “copying to tmp table” and then run an explain on it and noticed that the tmp table is being created on disk? Happens a lot with some servers and some workloads. Of course disk is much slower than RAM so this becomes a slow process and makes queries execute slower than they could if they were allowed to use RAM. So, one way to get this process to speed up (aside from tuning your queries which should be done first) is to create a tmpfs or ram-disk and let MySQL use that for it’s temp-table-on-disk creations. MySQL on Linux defaults to /tmp for the tmpdir location so this will need to be changed.

Here is how you get MySQL to use a 1G size tmpfs. How you size your tmpfs depends how much ram your system has and how much tmpdir space mysql needs for your workload. If you need more tmpdir space than you can make in a tmpfs mount then mysql allows multiple tmpdir locations …

The MySQL Council has not being idle. We have addressed the bugs database concerns, and we are continuing our dialog.
To do a better job, we would like to hear more from the community. Unlike other established user groups, MySQL does not have a world wide organization for its users. The council exists on a voluntary basis, and we are seeking support from the rest of you. Please let your voice heard. There are three main channels for this:

• A MySQL Council survey
• A set of questions that will be answered during the keynote at the MySQL Conference
• Talk to a council member

SurveyThe …

In the land of the MySQL council,  the IOUG has created a survey asking for community feedback on the future of the council and the IOUG’s programming for MySQL.  This is an excellent opportunity for us to shape how the largest independent user group supporting Oracle technologies helps our community grow and work with Oracle going forward.

As an example, I participated, as the the Chair of the MySQL Council, in a call with Luke Kowalski to talk about communicating with the community so as to avoid fomenting the FUD that our community has been plagued with for the last several years during the two acquisitions.  He has offered to have Tomas Ulin address a few questions from the community during his State of the …

Percona Server release 5.5.10-20.1 is now available for download. This is a release candidate for the Percona Server 5.5 series. In addition to MySQL 5.5.10 now being the base version, here are the changes that have been made since Percona Server beta release 5.5.8-20.0:

New Features

• Added columns ROWS_EXAMINED, ROWS_SENT, and ROWS_READ to table PROCESSLIST and to the output of SHOW PROCESSLIST. (Laurynas Biveinis)

Variable Changes

• Old status variable innodb_row_lock_numbers was renamed to innodb_current_row_locks. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• Old system variable innodb_enable_unsafe_group_commit was deleted. The existing MySQL variable …

I mentioned problems with InnoDB flushing in a previous post. Before getting to ideas on a solution, let’s define some terms and take a look into theory.

The two most important parameters for InnoDB performance are innodb_buffer_pool_size and innodb_log_file_size. InnoDB works with data in memory, and all changes to data are performed in memory. In order to survive a crash or system failure, InnoDB is logging changes into InnoDB transaction logs. The size of the InnoDB transaction log defines how many changed blocks we can have in memory for a given period of time. The obvious question is: Why can’t we simply have a gigantic InnoDB transaction log? The answer is that the size of the transaction log affects recovery time after a crash. The bigger the log, the longer the recovery time. …

For MySQL Enterprise Monitor an agent is required. I've downloaded
V23981-01.zip from https://edelivery.oracle.com which contains mysqlmonitoragent-2.3.1.2044-linux-glibc2.3-x86-64bit-installer.rpm

When I was testing the email alerting for my backup script I got an error:

/etc/mail/submit.cf: line 544: fileclass: cannot open '/etc/mail/trusted-users': Group
writable directory

Luckily RPM was able to tell me that mysqlmonitoragent had set / to the wrong permissions.

# rpm -qf /
filesystem-2.4.0-3.el5
mysqlmonitoragent-2.3.1.2044-0
# rpm -qvl mysqlmonitoragent-2.3.1.2044-0 | head -1
drwxrwxr-x    2 root    root                0 Nov 25 01:51 /
# rpm -qvl filesystem-2.4.0-3.el5 | head -1
drwxr-xr-x    2 root    root                0 Oct  1  2009 /
# echo test | mail -s …

Keeping from Getting Buried in Big Data

Boy, what a way to go into spring. We are expecting up to 1/2″ of rain (or perhaps sleet) today. This follows the 3″ of snow we had on Friday (Shaq — watch out we long ago got Nate – you are next).

Here is the picture from outside our offices on Friday:

Anyway, as I mentioned in my post last Monday, our Chief Scientist and co-founder Martín Farach-Colton had the privilege of sitting down with Sheeri Cabral and Sarah Novotny for their weekly …

Here's an interview with Nicolas Pujol who has written an excellent new book called "The Mind Share Market."  Nicolas and I were colleagues at MySQL for several years and we often discussed the role of our free open source product as a way to gain market share in the commercial sector.  In MySQL's case, our goal was to be the #1 choice for web developers worldwide both in the free and the commercial market.  Over the years, the notion of having a free product has transcended Open Source and now has many more applications in other markets.  It can be quite …

MyQuery, the ad-hoc query and scripting tool for MySQL, as always running on Windows, supporting servers on any platform, is now available in version 3.4.2. This version has a few minor bug-fixes in the "Break long lines" plugin that cleans up SQL text, and also a few additions to this plugin.
I have not heard of any issues with MyQuery itself since I released 3.4.1, but I will not take the 3.4 version into GA until I have fixed a few more things in the "Break long lines" plugin to turn it into a more full-features SQL beautifier with a lot more features than now.
Until then though, 3.4.2 is what you want, and the Compact Spaces option in the Break Long Lines plugin that is added with this release, should provide useful.

In addition to all this, if you want to meet up and discuss this tool, then I am at your service at the MySQL Usre Conference coming up next week.

Best regards
Anders Karlsson