Sorry all I have been very busy transitioning into my new position for the last couple of months.

I want to just give a small note – it was very good to meet a bunch of you at the conference back in April!

However, on to more serious business – I currently work for Electronic Arts, and at this point we are actually looking for Sr. MySQL DBA’s. So if you or someone you know is interested, feel free to email me directly at nwesterlund – at – ea.com . We will of course treat everything confidentially.

On a different note – the InnoDB plugin rocks in performance compared to the built-in version! I have seen test results (from my own test) ranging from 15% to 70% performance improvement! Good job there!

This Thursday (June 10th, 14:00 UTC), Darren Cassar will rerun his February 25 presentation of Securich - Security Plugin for MySQL. (Recording of the session failed in February; hopefully it will succeed this time.) According to Darren, the author of the plugin, Securich is an incredibly handy and versatile tool for managing user privileges on MySQL through the use of roles. It basically makes granting and revoking rights a piece of cake, not to mention added security it provides through password expiry and password history, the customization level it permits, the fact that it runs on any MySQL 5.0 or later and it's easily deployable on any official MySQL binary, platform independent.
More information here: …

The Pyro Group has selected the MySQL Cluster database to power their InRoam SDP (Service Delivery Platform). InRoam enables Cell C and their network partners to provide low cost, border-less mobile communications services to hundreds of thousands of football fans from around the world as they descend on South Africa for the 2010 FIFA World Cup tournament.

This new case study can be downloaded from http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/case-studies/mysql_cs-pyro_telecoms.php

Solution Overview

• Pyro InRoam SDP is an intelligent application enabling subscribers to communicate with ease across borders
• Migrated from a Microsoft platform with SQL Server to offer greater choice and less restrictive licensing
…

Just as a quick reminder, as LinuxTag 2010 in Berlin is going into full swing: I am speaking on highly available, distributed, open source storage this Friday in room Europa I at 4pm CEST.

If you’re in Berlin, drop by! Admission is free.

…

This Thursday (June 10th, 14:00 UTC), Darren Cassar will rerun his February 25 presentation of Securich - Security Plugin for MySQL. (Recording of the session failed in February; hopefully it will succeed this time.) According to Darren, the author of the plugin, Securich is an incredibly handy and versatile tool for managing user privileges on MySQL through the use of roles. It basically makes granting and revoking rights a piece of cake, not to mention added security it provides through password expiry and password history, the customization level it permits, the fact that it runs on any MySQL 5.0 or later and it's easily deployable on any official MySQL binary, platform independent.
More information here: …

This Thursday (June 10th, 14:00 UTC), Darren Cassar will rerun his February 25 presentation of Securich - Security Plugin for MySQL. (Recording of the session failed in February; hopefully it will succeed this time.) According to Darren, the author of the plugin, Securich is an incredibly handy and versatile tool for managing user privileges on MySQL through the use of roles. It basically makes granting and revoking rights a piece of cake, not to mention added security it provides through password expiry and password history, the customization level it permits, the fact that it runs on any MySQL 5.0 or later and it's easily deployable on any official MySQL binary, platform independent.
More information here: …

I was trying to setup cacti on my ubuntu desktop to gather metrics from few new database servers we were planning to replace. Installed cacti using the following command

apt-get install cacti

Then the next step was to download and the install the cacti mysql templates from http://code.google.com/p/mysql-cacti-templates/. Thanks to Baron, was able to get this up and running fast using the templates. But had one problem though, while importing the mysql template “cacti_host_template_x_mysql_server_ht_0.8.6i-sver1.1.7.xml” cacti bombed with the below error

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 16777216 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 41 bytes) in /usr/share/cacti/site/lib/xml.php on line 32

The fix was to edit “/etc/php5/apache2/php.ini” change the parameter “memory_limit” from 16M to 32M and …

Translation of "Chapter 3. Wrong data in database or what to do with problem DML query." of  "Methods for searching errors in SQL application" just published.

 This is short chapter which discuss single method of dealing with mysterious DML query.

Chapter 3. Wrong data in database or what to do with problem DML query.

Problems with wrong data happens not only with SELECT queries like
cases we discussed in chapter 2, but in cases of querires which modify
data: DML queries.

Lets discuss example below

mysql> create table t1(f1 int);


Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

…

Quite frequently I see people confused what table locks reported by SHOW INNODB STATUS really mean. Check this out for example:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. ---TRANSACTION 0 4872, ACTIVE 32 sec, process no 7142, OS thread id 1141287232
2. 2 LOCK struct(s), heap size 368
3. MySQL thread id 8, query id 164 localhost root
4. TABLE LOCK TABLE `test/t1` trx id 0 4872 LOCK mode IX

This output gives us an impression Innodb has taken table lock on test/t1 table and many people tend to think Innodb in fact in some circumstances would abandon its row level locking and use table locks instead. I've seen various theories ranging from lock escalation to using table locks in special cases, for example when no indexes are defined on the table. None of this is right.

In fact Innodb uses …

Translation of "Chapter 3. Wrong data in database or what to do with problem DML query." of  "Methods for searching errors in SQL application" just published.

 This is short chapter which discuss single method of dealing with mysterious DML query.

Chapter 3. Wrong data in database or what to do with problem DML query.

Problems with wrong data happens not only with SELECT queries like
cases we discussed in chapter 2, but in cases of querires which modify
data: DML queries.

Lets discuss example below

mysql> create table t1(f1 int);


Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.01 sec)

…