Learned a few things during my trip to the Philippines this time. Another country that amazes me. For the first time in history, Philippines attracted more foreign direct investments (FDI) than Malaysia, in 2010 (see: Malaysia’s FDI plunge).

Mobiles

There are a lot of people here using prepaid phones as opposed to postpaid phones. This is because the requirements of getting a postpaid account is quite tough (you need bank documents, etc. before they give you an account).

Many people carry more than one phone (or have more than one SIM). Smartphones face an uphill battle – they cost too much and there is generally no operator subsidy because everyone prefers prepaid accounts. It makes economic sense to have more than one SIM, as you’ll end up saving money (operators like to offer free text, calls, …

Exactly one month from today, OpenSQLCamp Boston 2010 will begin its technical content (we will have a social event on Friday evening, Oct. 15th, starting no earlier than 6 pm). Have you registered yet? It's 100% free! Make sure to get your flight before next week or the costs will go up, as it is generally more expensive to book a flight within 21 days of your trip. Also do not forget to book your hotel, we have a good rate of $149 per night for single or double occupancy....click here for details.

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TokuDB’s loader uses the available multicore computing resources of the machine to presort and insert the data. In the last couple of posts (here and here), Rich and Dave presented performance results of TokuDB’s loader. Comparing load times with TokuDB 2.1.0, Rich found a 2.1x speedup on a 2 core machine, and a 4.2x speedup on an 8 core machine. Comparing load times with TokuDB 3.1, Dave found an 8.2x speedup on Amazon Web Services c1.large node with 8 cores while loading a table with 256 byte rows.

This leads to these natural questions: how does one use the TokuDB loader? Under what scenarios is it used?

The loader has two purposes:

• 
  
• to ease migration of data from other sources (e.g. …

Special thanks to Tim Callaghan for giving a fantastic presentation of VoltDB at Monday's Boston MySQL User Group meeting. Even though the title was "for SQL developers" there was a lot of content for DBAs as well (how backups are done, what the data and server-level architecture is, etc). It was an EXCELLENT presentation on how VoltDB works, and what applications it is and is not appropriate for. The video is almost 2 hours long; there's a LOT of excellent information in it.

The slides can be downloaded (PPT format) from:
http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_09_VoltDB.ppt

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With one of its partners FromDual plans to offer an Advanced MySQL DBA Workshop. The first workshop should run in November 2010.

To offer the best possible contents to the participants we want your feedback about the proposed topics, about the missing topics and what you think in general about such a workshop.

Please let us know your opinion. Either as comment on our web-site or for our eyes only at Feedback.

Thank you for your participation.

Recently I saw a MySQL Stored Function requirement on Experts-Exchange for converting date into some specific words format. You may find MySQL function for date to words conversion online; even…

The post MySQL Function to Convert Date To Words first appeared on Change Is Inevitable.

MySQL’s binary logs are an important part of a properly functioning database.  They facility point-in-time recovery, and allow replication to operation.  We dig into these files, and look at what’s inside them, and how they work.

An Inside Look at the MySQL Binary Log Files

1. jsTerm -- ANSI-capable telnet terminal built in HTML5 with Javascript, Websocket, and Node.js. (via waxpancake on Twitter)
2. MySQL EXPLAINer -- visualize the output of the MySQL EXPLAIN command. (via eonarts on Twitter)
3. Google Code University -- updated with new classes, including C++ and Android app development.
4. Cloudtop Applications (Anil Dash) -- Anil calling "trend" on multiplatform native apps with cloud storage. Another layer in the Web 2.0 story Tim's …

Lately I worked quite a bit with Python and Linux, writing monitoring and automation utilities. I am in a transition period, so I thought I ought to write some Python stuff interfacing with MySQL for fun, and start positioning myself for expanded career horizon, I hope.

To get started, I thought it would be fun to rewrite a Perl utility I wrote before with Python. That script converts MySQL character sets to utf8, a very common task for wikis and blogs during an upgrade. This time, I did everything from scratch: firing up an Amazon EC2 Linux instance, hand install and configuring MySQL 5.1.50 (creating mysql user, group, wget tarball, setting directory ownership and permissions, creating symbolic to MySQL binaries, editing my.cnf, /etc/init.d/ and chkconfig automatic startup, environmental variables, the works), compiled and …

The newest release of Percona Server includes a trivial change that I think will be extremely valuable. This is the addition of a new thread state, “Waiting on query cache mutex.” Fixing the query cache to make it scalable is hard. Fixing the server to report when the query cache is a bottleneck is not hard. It has historically been very difficult for users to diagnose what’s wrong with their server when the query cache is locking it intermittently. Now it will be trivial: they will look at SHOW PROCESSLIST and the evidence will be unmistakable.

Related posts:

1. Making Maatkit more Open Source one step at a time
2. …