Tracing per file IOs is a mandatory task for anyone doing performance issue analysis on a MySQL database. This could help to find candidates for innodb table compression, to decide to move data around on disks to optimize IOs, to decide what needs caching … There is no direct command to do it on linux. [...]

We are pleased to announce the general availability of Zimbra Desktop 2.0!  This is a major milestone for the Zimbra team and includes significant feature and performance upgrades.  The difference between Desktop 1.0 and 2.0 is enormous thanks to the millions of downloads, thousands of forum posts, and hundreds of bugs posted by Zimbra customers and community members.

As most readers of this blog know, Zimbra Desktop is a completely unique client.  It’s the only free, cross-platform tool allowing you to meld your worlds on or offline – storing and syncing your email, …

We’re proud to announce the next release of MySQL Workbench, version 5.2.29. This maintenance release focuses on general product improvement and usability.

As always, we want to thank everyone for the great feedback we have received. This helps us to continuously improve and extend the functionality and stability of MySQL Workbench – please keep up on approaching us with any ideas to develop our product even further.

New Workbench 5.2.29 Preference/Feature

Say you have been working on a model for hours in Workbench, and you haven’t saved in the last 90 minutes, suddenly the power goes out (or some other force majeure). Now with 5.2.29, if Workbench unexpectedly quits during modeling, the model you were working on will be restored to the last auto-saved version the next time you open that model.
As always, please remember to save and version your models regularly.
Also – you can change the value of …

It seems the SkySQL website just went live, which I hope will breath some life back into the MySQL ecosphere – it’s been a while since there’s been some new competition, especially in the style of classic MySQL services.

For those too lazy to read the SkySQL site, the services offered are similar to what you’d be familiar with from Oracle:

• SkySQL’s Consulting and Training are pretty much the same as Oracle’s existing offerings, though a bit more limited. I expect this to grow as SkySQL grows, however.
• SkySQL’s …

Vadim and I have just published a new technical white paper. It shows how Percona Server with XtraDB can make large-scale multi-tenant databases easier to build with MySQL. Our experiences working with SaaS and shared-hosting companies influenced the features we included in Percona Server and XtraDB, and I think this is the best explanation of what levers are available and how to use them.

Percona Server with XtraDB for Software-as-a-Service Application Databases is posted on the white-paper section of our website. No registration is required; it is just a PDF, freely downloadable with no marketing follow-up. Many thanks to Mark Callaghan and Dimitri Kravtchuk, who reviewed and gave valuable suggestions that made the white paper better.

…

I swear, my intention was to go for a break. A year taking pictures, sharing them over the web, writing texts, running, kayaking, just being social. Honestly, ask my family and friends!

But this was not to be, in spite of what I said when I announced my resignation just days ago. Instead, I am joining SkySQL Ab, the startup that aims to become a new centre for the MySQL universe. My role will span Marketing and Engineering, and is like the title “EVP Products” inspired by Zack Urlocker’s role at MySQL AB.

I would have preferred the company to have been called KajSQL, but have come to terms with the company having an extra phonetic “s” in the beginning. Quite a while ago, having eaten my favourite fish “ …

In the last post, we saw how to create a test OpenLDAP server, populate it and secure it with SSL certificates. Now we are going to have a look at how to configure MySQL Enterprise Manager (MEM) to authenticate against LDAP. We will be examining a few different kinds of setup methods.

1. Using LDAP to fetch just the user password

The simplest form is to configure a user with MEM and set it to the LDAP type. The user’s role is setup in MEM during user creation time and is not fetched from LDAP. Below you can see the user definition page:

How to create a LDAP user in MEM - password only

The username is user1 as specified in MEM, but where do we get the password …

The latest 2.2 release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) has the ability to authenticate against LDAP. I decided to test this setup and for that, I had to create and populate an OpenLDAP server, including STARTTLS/SSL certificates. This guide was done on CentOS 5.5 but it shouldn’t be much different in other Linux/Unix distributions. First, start off by installing the packages with:

root@shell> yum install openldap openldap-clients openldap-servers

Then head to /etc/openldap where you can set you domain and the DN for the LDAP manager user. I’ve inserted some useful comments into the slapd.conf file. Lines without comments have not been changed from the default slapd.conf file.

shell> grep -v "^#" /etc/openldap/slapd.conf | grep -v "^$"
include         /etc/openldap/schema/core.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/cosine.schema
include         /etc/openldap/schema/inetorgperson.schema
include …

With the release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor (MEM) 2.2, there is now the ability to monitor queries using the Query Analyzer (QUAN) without needing the agent proxy to be running. You can use a .NET or JDBC connector plugin to directly gather the query statistics. In the example below, we will use the MySQL Enterprise Plugin for Connector/J.

First, make sure both the Connector/J, the Connector/J plugin and the Apache Commons Logging jars are in the $CLASSPATH. At the time of writing, these are the files needed:

mysql-connector-java-5.1.12-bin.jar
c-java-mysql-enterprise-plugin-1.0.0.42.jar
required/commons-logging-1.1.1.jar

Then, add the plugin to the connection string so that it changes from something like this:

conn = …

Every so often I get a question on "where does Innodb technology come from right now?"

I was thinking about it this morning and decided to break it out via a chart. This is a rough number, and in it I give Percona points for the Xtrabackup.

Most of the work that I see, which is not niche work, is done by Oracle, hands down, no question. I don't see any sign of Heikki being very involved anymore but his legacy seems to be alive (or at least embers of them see to have not gone out). Percona provides a lot of niche changes to Innodb, and the Percona XtraBackup Tool (which if you don't know about, you should).

I, and others, look at changes that occur to Innodb for Drizzle. We adopt ones we are comfortable with(keep in mind, that I personally look at MySQL, PostgreSQL, and a couple of other open source databases as …