This past Monday updates in both the 5.1 and 5.2 series of MariaDB were released. It’s a pretty big deal, as some issues have been solved that affect a large number of users. You should read the release notes for MariaDB 5.1.53 and for MariaDB 5.2.4 as well as the release announcement. The annoucement contains download links from worldwide mirrors.

Speaking of downloads, the 5.2 series has seen a remarkable increase in download totals. Several orders of magnitude, in fact. That’s usually a pretty good sign, so I’ll take it as such. It hopefully means more people are using MariaDB, and when talking about such matters with …

Innodb/XtraDB tables do benefit from being reorganized often. You can get data physically laid out in primary key order as well as get better feel for primary key and index pages and so using less space,
it is just OPTIMIZE TABLE might not be best way to do it.

If you're running Innodb Plugin on Percona Server with XtraDB you get benefit of a great new feature - ability to build indexes by sort instead of via insertion. This process can be a lot faster, especially for large indexes which would get inserts in very random order, such as indexes on UUID column or something similar. It also produces a lot better fill factor. The problem is.... OPTIMIZE TABLE for Innodb tables does not get advantage of it for whatever reason.

Lets take a look at little benchmark I done by running OPTIMIZE for a second time on a table which is some 10 times larger than amount of memory I allocated for buffer pool:

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XtraBackup works great for backing MySQL up to an NFS volume, but there is a gotcha that you need to be aware of. This applies to anything you do with NFS, not just XtraBackup. The gotcha is that NFS uses client-side caching to reduce overhead of sending data across the network.

If you backup to an NFS mount from your database server, and then use a different server that also mounts that volume to prepare the backup (apply the logs), that other server might not have a consistent view of the data. That's because the data might not be flushed to the NFS server yet -- it might just be sitting in the database server's cache.

If this happens, xtrabackup will potentially see corrupt or inconsistent data. And InnoDB does not tolerate that. It will refuse to work, which is a good thing. The preparation step will fail. This is one reason why you should always prepare your backups so they are completely ready to use. (You should …

I’ve started a little series on how to migrate your MySQL applications and databases over to CouchDB. Most of the process is about how you think about your data, not about the database itself, the application, or the interface to the database storage. There are some use cases for data storage that lend themselves to the CouchDB document model that provides some advantages over the table-based structure in MySQL. The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.

We've just published the recordings for our webinars; Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB and Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.  To listen, click on (Watch: Recorded Webinar) on each of these links.

We're planning for future webinars next year.  If you have any suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.

Entry posted by Morgan Tocker | 5 comments

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Over the years Windows has become a major development and deployment platform for MySQL. As a matter of fact, Windows consistently ranks as the #1 development platform in our surveys, and now also ranks higher than any Linux distribution as a deployment platform among MySQL Community Edition users.

We've made various technical resources available in our MySQL on Windows Resource Center including articles, whitepapers and archived webinars. MySQL users are also sharing their experiences and writing how-to articles, and it's great to see former MySQL/Sun/Oracle employees still contributing! Thanks Anders for a recent step-by-step part 1 article on working with MySQL on Windows.

We also got feedback from customers wishing to get …

Over the years Windows has become a major development and deployment platform for MySQL. As a matter of fact, Windows consistently ranks as the #1 development platform in our surveys, and now also ranks higher than any Linux distribution as a deployment platform among MySQL Community Edition users.

We've made various technical resources available in our MySQL on Windows Resource Center including articles, whitepapers and archived webinars. MySQL users are also sharing their experiences and writing how-to articles, and it's great to see former MySQL/Sun/Oracle employees still contributing! Thanks Anders for a recent step-by-step part 1 article on working with MySQL on Windows.

We also got feedback from customers wishing to get …

Just as a friendly reminder about what I wrote a month ago: we've already received a number of great talk submissions for the MySQL & Friends Developer Room at FOSDEM 2011, thanks to everyone who contributed so far! However, we still are looking for some more!

You can submit your proposal via this form. The deadline for turning in your talk is Sunday, 26th of December, 2010.

Just to recapitulate, the DevRoom (H.2213) will be available to us on …

I’ve started a little series on how to migrate your MySQL applications and databases over to CouchDB. Most of the process is about how you think about your data, not about the database itself, the application, or the interface to the database storage. There are some use cases for data storage that lend themselves to the CouchDB document model that provides some advantages over the table-based structure in MySQL.

The first part of the series is Moving from MySQL to CouchDB: Part 1.

I will present two talks at the MySQL Conference next April.
One is a three hours tutorial on Advanced MySQL Replication Techniques, and the other is a normal session on The art of sandboxing. Reducing Complex Systems to Manageable Boxes.
The first topic is not a first to me. But the contents are going to be fresh and new. There has been so much going on in the replication field, that the talk on this topic that I presented in 2007 looks like ancient history.
The second topic is completely new. I have often presented the result of my sandboxing efforts, but I have never thought of explaining the techniques themselves. Now that I have got some experience at reducing differently complex systems to sandboxes, I want to share the knowledge, to promote more work in this field.