This morning I watched Tomas Ulin’s Keynote at Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo, delivered yesterday. I missed this live as I am not at Percona Live (I am on a conference hiatus from March through September for personal reasons). As far as the technical content in it, there have been a few posts about the Hadoop Applier and MySQL 5.7, so there’s not much of a need to delve in there.

Message #1: Failure
I was impressed that Ulin spoke of failure. Around 7:27 in the video above, Ulin says, “We really failed with 5.0,” and “even 5.1 we weren’t fully and back on track when we released.” He spoke about the new way MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 were engineered, a hybrid agile/milestone development cycle. There are some hidden messages here:

Hidden Message #1: Oracle is a great steward for …

In the past… One of the typical problems you have when restarting mysqld is that the InnoDB buffer pool (buffer pool from now on) is empty and consequently access to the database requires reading directly from disk. Performance suffers dramatically as a consequence.

So the common solution is to artificially warm upthe server by doing queries which will fill the buffer pool. Typical solutions might be to do: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM some_table FORCE INDEX (PRIMARY) LIMIT ... on a number of tables to fill up the pool on startup. Fitting this into the standard mysql init start script is somewhat tricky as no hooks are provided for this sort of post-start action. (It would be nice to have this for other tasks too.)

Of course choosing the right parameters here can be tricky as workload changes over time, and as the ratio of the size of the database to the size of the buffer pool increases, you need to be more selective …

MySQL 5.6 is out now and that is good news. I have already been using pre-GA versions on some production servers with good success and now that the few wrinkles I have seen have been ironed out, I am sure a lot of people will find the new features in 5.6 well worth waiting for.

However, that does lead to the question of: “what next?”

I still have several things that I would like to see in MySQL in no specific order of preference such as:

• Session transaction state exposed as a variable to allow you to determine if you have started a transaction or not, and thus allowing you to use BEGIN WORK, ROLLBACK or COMMIT as needed.  This information is available via the C API I believe but not via SQL.  Something like @@in_transaction = 1.  Makes modular programming easier.
• Table space management. The default behaviour now in 5.6 is to move to innodb_file_per_table = 1, but really on a large …

I’ve just completed my first month here at Continuent, strangely back into the MySQL ecosystem which I have been working in for some time before I joined CouchOne, and then Couchbase, two and half years ago. Making the move back to MySQL is both an experience, and somehow, comfortable…

Continuent produce technology that makes for easier replication between MySQL servers and, more importantly, more flexible solutions when you need to scale out by providing connector and management functionality for your MySQL cluster. That means that you can easily backup, add slaves, and create complex replication scenarios such as multi-master, and even multiple-site, multiple-master topologies. This functionality is split over two products, Continuent Tungsten, which is the cluster management product, and the open source Tungsten Replicator, which provides the basic replication functionality.

Those who know me well will know that I am no fan …

Open Database Camp was just over a week ago, Mar 16-17th at Harvard University, co-located with Northeast LinuxFest. We had a great lineup of speakers, and we have processed all 11 videos in record time! We got new video cameras at the beginning of the year, so the video quality and resolution is stellar, you can see everything. Here are the videos:

2013 Open Database Camp
and Related Northeast LinuxFest Videos

• Fractal Tree Indexes by Tim Callaghan of Tokutek

  …

I have had a lot of folks wanting to know when talks would be during Open Database Camp, and we had enough space in the schedule that we did not need to vote on talks, so I present the Open Database Camp Boston Schedule, now online. Lots of MySQL talks, but also a Mongo talk thrown in for good measure! (still hoping to sneak a Postgres talk in…)

As with any conference schedule, this might change. See you at Harvard University in Cambridge on Saturday and Sunday!

Over at the OurSQL podcast, Gerry and I were inspired by the Percona blog post about MySQL 5.5 and 5.6 default variable values differences. We were going to do a show where we talked about that, but in researching that topic, we found there were lots (around 20 to be exact) of variables and a few features in MySQL 5.6 that are ignored, removed or deprecated.

These are variables that should be removed from your configuration so as not to cause warnings or errors. When I was writing up the show notes I realized that it was a pretty good list of variables, that anyone can just read – whether or not you are willing/able to listen to the 28-minute podcast.

So if you want to see the list of variables that are deprecated, removed and ignored, complete …

At Confoo last week, I tried out a new presentation, called “Different MySQL Forks for Different Folks”. The idea was to explain the differences among all the forks – Drizzle, MariaDB, Percona and of course Oracle’s MySQL. But I did not just go into technical merit of each fork; I also explained the values of each company, as that can be a big decision in deciding what software to choose.

There are PDF slides and a video on youtube. But I wanted to put some of the links I used to gather information here, as an easy place for folks to come and click links if they like, or if they want to research on their own.

At the official Drizzle documentation:
What is Drizzle?
…

While many attendees are repeat offenders, if 2013 is your first MySQL conference and you are relatively new with MySQL (say < 2 years experience), it can be daunting to determine which of the 8 or more concurrent sessions you should attend during the conference.

Here are my top recommendations that give you a good grounding in the various conference topics and a wealth of experience from known MySQL authorities, on important topics.

1. A backup today saves you tomorrow by Ben Mildred at Pythian. Losing your data is a terrible experience. Learn what is needed to keep your data safe and you system highly available.
2. …

This month is a special month. It’s not because of President’s Day or even the exciting day where we revel in groundhogs. No, this month is special because the free book give-away is happening again. This is where you, the reader, gets to win something free for doing nothing more than posting a comment saying that you want a copy of my recently published book – The InnoDB Quick Reference Guide from Packt Publishing. The book is a great reference for DBAs, PHP, Python, or Perl programmers that integrate with MySQL and want to learn more about the InnoDB database engine.

So, all you have to do is post a comment here saying that you want a copy and write out a single (or more) sentence about how you use InnoDB in your development or production environment. At the end of the month two readers will be chosen via a random list sorting script that …