For the Friday after the MySQL conference, Oracle had invited all storage engines to the traditional storage engine summit, but this was then canceled (or postponed) in the last minute. Since the engine vendors had already booked the day anyway, we agreed to sponsor the facility so the meeting could take place. In addition to those who had planned to be there, the meeting was also attended by Mikael Ronström, Jonas Oreland and Sanja Byelkin who had their flights cancelled. (Oracle was already represented by Konstantin Osipov.)

Also see http://askmonty.org/wiki/Storage_Engine_Summit_2010 for more complete notes of the summit.

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Welcome to Log Buffer. This week’s issue #187 was another group effort. Thanks to all our contributors – you rock!

Suggested by Pythian’s Bradd Piontek, is a post he really liked because he used to write pipelined functions for Dynamic Search queries, – Tom Kyte’s something new I learned about estimated cardinalities. He’s also highlighted something new Tom learned about sqlplus. And the fact that Richard Foote announced the …

I recently discovered that there’s a youtube video of the talk I gave at OpenSQL Camp in Portland in 2009.

This is a whiteboard presentation and is less well developed than the talk I gave a the MySQL conference (I posted those slides two days ago. But since it includes audio it may be easier to understand.

This talk presents the data structure underlying the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL.

There will not be a May meeting of the North Texas MySQL Users Group but I am scrambling to get us a great location for the June meeting. I have left my Job with MySQL/Sun/Oracle and am no longer responsible for MySQL Certifications. That means my access to the Sun office were we have been meeting is ended also.

I am now the Customer Service Manager for Calpont and the InfiniDB storage engine. InfiniDB is column based, multi-threaded, and the community edition is open source. If you run intensive reports against InnoDB or MyIsam databases, you need to investigate this product. And if you regularly run massive queries in data warehousing or business analytic operation that you need to see how the massively parallel process architecture of the enterprise product can make life easier.

Let me premise this post with the statement I think the MySQL documentation is an excellent and highly accurate resource. I think the MySQL docs team do a great job, however like software and people, documentation is not perfect.

As members of the MySQL community you can always contribute to improve the process by reading the documentation and logging any issues as Documentation Bugs.

Some time ago in a discussion with a friend and colleague, we were talking about changes in historical defaults that had been improved finally in MySQL 5.4 The specific discussion was on the new default innodb_buffer_pool_size and we both agreed it increased significantly. One said 1GB, the other said 128MB. Who was right? Well we both were, and we were both inaccurate depending on versions.

Referencing the 5.4 Manual in …

Let's take quick look at the performance of the new InfiniDB Subquery processing available with the 1.1.1 Alpha.  The arrow was added to be sure our timings weren't confused with the axis.

This was against a relatively small dataset, the Star Schema Benchmark with 6 million rows in the fact table.  A base query was run where the outer query...

This post is Part Two of my State of the Internet Operating System. If you haven't read Part One, you should do so before reading this piece.

As I wrote last month, it is becoming increasingly clear that the internet is becoming not just a platform, but an operating system, an operating system that manages access by devices such as personal computers, phones, and other personal electronics to cloud subsystems ranging from computation, storage, and communications to location, identity, social graph, search, and payment. The question is whether a single company will put together a single, vertically-integrated platform that is sufficiently compelling to developers to enable the kind of lock-in we saw during the personal computer era, or whether, Internet-style, we will instead see services from …

Whether you’re working with MySQL, MySQL Cluster, or any other RDBMS, every database with a requirement for persistent data should always have a backup. As a Production DBA you’re the insurance policy to safeguard the data. Bad things do happen. Backups are your safety net to ensure you always have a way to recover should the worst happen and the database becomes irreparable.

There are many ways to produce a consistent backup of MySQL, I have listed a few of the options available below; Remember backups are your safety net, failing to retrieve a consistent backup when you need it most can be a very career limiting move, so no matter what backup method you choose always test your backups!

Logical Backups
The ever popular mysqldump is a backup and export utility provided with the MySQL binaries …

A couple of things:

1. There is now a Monty Program Group Blog. Its brand new, and in a company where most people spend time on writing tonnes of code, expect posts to be sporadic, but of great technical nature. We’ll also cover things like events, conferences, etc. i.e. where can you meet a Monty Program person. Do subscribe to our RSS or ATOM feed.
2. At the MySQL Conference recently, Monty announced the rename the Maria engine contest. The competition is still running, and the winner gets a System76 Meerkat NetTop. Some interesting names have already shown up. …

Percona wants to upgrade our documentation to improve its readability
and to make it more useful for you, our clients and partners. We are
so busy developing software and handling your needs that we have
trouble finishing all the documentation! We think you can help.

Helping us will give you a chance to interact closely with lead Perona
developers and learn more about Percona's products as well as our
development process.

Tasks include talking to developers, writing text, and interacting
with an editor. (Andy Oram, our O'Reilly editor on the book High
Performance MySQL, will take on the volunteer role.) You should have
some understanding of MySQL and Percona's extensions, and of way
XtraDB and XtraBackup work.

Documents we want to start with include:

* Product features (we made a …