Show notes for Episode 26: Zombies!

Question:
We wondered: Is enterprise backup still using myisamhotcopy for myisam tables?

From MySQL Product Manager Mike Frank, who is in charge of MySQL Enterprise Backup:
"As of today, there is a new mysqlbackup.exe that replaces the perl script innobackup and the myisamhotcopy from InnoDB Hot Backup. This is needed so we can do proper streaming and other media manager integration. Perl doesn't lend itself to that and is a problem on Windows in general as well. We kept the arguments compatible so it is easy to move over and the innobackup perl script is still included -- only for the sake of making transition more seamless."

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We're publishing a new Strata Gem each day all the way through to December 24. Yesterday's Gem: Kinect democratizes augmented reality.

Today's databases are designed for the spinning platter of the hard disk. They take into account that the slowest part of reading data is seeking: physically getting the read head to the part of the disk it needs to be in. But the emergence of cost effective solid state drives (SSD) is changing all those assumptions.

Over the course of 2010, systems designers have been realizing the benefits of using SSDs in data centers, with major IT vendors and companies adopting them. Drivers for SSD adoption …

Today I discovered that you are unable to compile the current stable PHP version 5.3.4 with yesterday’s MySQL 5.5.8 GA release. I was able to download the current MySQL 5.1.54 and compile without issue.

You can find all the gory details in Bug #58987 however I was able to edit a number of MySQL include file to get a build. Does this mean it’s a MySQL packaging problem or a PHP problem I don’t know, but I would hope that Oracle in the testing phase of a GA release test this against popular programming languages starting with the LAMP stack to ensure compatibility such as what I uncovered.

Percona Server version 5.1.53-11.7 is now available for download.

The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona stable release to the latest version of MySQL 5.1.

Functionality Added or Changed

•  Percona Server 5.1.53-11.7 is now based on MySQL 5.1.53.
•  New Features Added: None
•  Other Changes: None

Bugs Fixed

• Bug #643149 - Slow query log entries were not being done in the usual parsing format. (Alexey Kopytov)
• Bug #677407 - The innodb.innodb_information_schema test could fail sporadically due to flawed logic in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_LOCKS caching mechanism. (Alexey Kopytov)

Release Notes for this and previous releases can be found …

MySQL 5.5 GA has finally arrived and, if you haven't done already, it's time to test it starting with the upgrade procedure. MySQL upgrades are usually easy and uneventful, not in this case so I decided to share my experience with the RH 5 RPMs.
Step 0 - Is the upgrade for you?Do you use InnoDB? This is where most of the improvements have been made, and it could be the main reason why you may want to be an early adopter. For a complete reference of the improvements check the New Features of InnoDB 1.1 section of the official MySQL Documentation, Sheeri Cabral's and Ronald Bradford's blogs.
Step 1 - Read the manualOk, I'm the first one to admit that I usually skip …

HandlerSocket is a server plug-in that interfaces with InnoDB directly bypassing for the most part the core mySQL server all together. Using Handler socket you do not connect to the traditional port 3306 or use the mySQL protocol to communicate with the mySQL server, you use 9998 reads, 9999 writes and talks a different protocol (much smaller) to an epoll-based service. This awesome addition means that you can have many many connections with very little overhead. The core mySQL server does a good job, but can do better. I'm sure the reason why epoll is not in the core engine is probably due to licensing issues or some other reason I am not aware of, like it would be a big deal to add it.

Why bypass the server? Really bypassing the sql parser is what was desired. The sql parser ads a significant amount of slowdown at a huge …

Congratulations to Oracle and the MySQL team for getting 5.5 out the door!

I first have to acknowledge that I have not been able to follow the MySQL 5.5 development as closely as I would have wanted during the last 2 years as most of the planning of MySQL 6.0, 5.4 and 5.5 has happened behind closed doors, without insight for the community. The commits have been open, until recently, but it's not easy to follow what is happening just based on the commits. I am sure that I am missing below some of the important features in 5.5 and forgetting to acknowledge some of the people that have done great work on 5.5.

That said, the 5.5 release contains some things that a lot of heavy users of MySQL have waited a long time for. Here follows some of the main things that I know about.

InnoDB improvements:

• The new version 1.1 of the already improved InnoDB plugin is now the default (and only) InnoDB …

A bit unorthodox, I normally just write about MySQL Cluster here, but I just wanted to understand how much latency semi-sync replication adds.

The test was very simple:

• two mysql servers, interconnected (same switch) on a 1 Gig-E network
• one table (see below)
• comparing insert performance (one thread) with 'no replication at all' and 'semi sync replication enabled'.
  
• bencher (had to hack it a bit to make it work with vanilla mysql) running one thread, inserting 4B+128B+4B = 136B of data

CREATE TABLE `t1` (
`id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`data` varchar(255) DEFAULT NULL,
`ts` timestamp NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
KEY `ts` (`ts`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB 

Test 1 - no replication

src/bencher -t1 -r 30   -q "insert into t1(b) …

It's great to see the fruits of many years of labour being released as GA. Work on MySQL 5.5 started several years ago, and I remember announcing 5.5.0-m2 almost exactly a year ago, on 15 December 2009.
Seeing Oracle release MySQL 5.5 under the GPL is something I very much welcome. Access to the new Open Source features is a welcome Christmas gift.
As opposed to earlier versions, we're unlikely to see all that many reports about the exact quality level in MySQL 5.5. During MySQL AB and Sun Microsystem times, even internally discovered bugs in new features used to be out in the public scrutiny of the MySQL bugs database, yet now, external users are not in a similar position to attest to the quality of the newly released features. The fact that some features were removed that along the way were in the 5.5 release, …

  I am excited to see that MySQL 5.5 GA (5.5.8) has been finally released . All of my ex-colleagues at MySQL/Oracle have done amazing jobs. I was also positively surprised that 5.5 was released on schedule:). So far I have felt that Oracle is leading MySQL development and product management very well.
  5.5 has lots of practical features not only for web services providers, but also for enterprise users. Especially I like the following features.
Improved concurrency  Very often lots of concurrent sessions access to the same table. In such cases, one of MySQL internal global mutexes (LOCK_open) becomes very hot and serious concurrency problems have happened. Increasing table_cache have caused even negative impacts (because MySQL has to do linear search here. See bug#33948 for details). In 5.5, the problem has been fixed. Here is a very simple concurrent PK …