As I said at the end of the Day 3 post, I did well enough at the Ignite session that I "won" the opportunity to give it again. There was some confusion about the right time to be seated, and some of the "winners" were not actually properly informed of what they had "won". Fortunately, IM conversations sorted most of it out, and Gerry, Sarah, Gillian, and myself reprised our talks.





I got the opportunity to take notes at the MySQL Ecosystem Summit, but instead spent the time taking in a few more sessions. It was a hard choice, and from what I learned later about the cool discussions at the summit, I think I may have made the wrong choice.

There were some sessions I was glad to have gone to, however. The best was Paul Vallee's "Worst Practices of Database Outsourcing Infrastructure Support", which was an excellent "peopleware" presentation on, well, exactly what it says on the tin, how …

Proofs of Concept Last week at the MySQL conference in Santa Clara, I presented some slides on our work towards group commit on the MySQL binlog. We examined the effects of not holding the prepare_commit_mutex across the binlog fsync, combining this with a timed wait on a condition variable to enable binlog group commits, and then we explored the effect of releasing row locks during the prepare step instead of in the commit step.

The proof-of-concept code I worked on up to that point made me very quite familiar with the parts of the MySQL codebase that these changes are in. Energized by the MySQL conference, I got to work on writing some production-quality patches that are taking Facebook's MySQL 5.1 towards the performance gains we discussed at the conference.

Patches for Production The first step was to set up some new performance monitoring so we could understand the effects of the changes as we made them. The first patch keeps …

Much has been made of certain limitations of MySQL’s query optimizer (“planner”). Subqueries, lack of sort-merge joins, and so on. This is not MySQL-bashing and no one should be offended. Some people have worked to make things better, and that code is in branches that were intended for future releases. But if that work were available right now, would you trust it? This question is important because the optimizer is complex and full of compromises and black magic.

The video of my 5-minute Ignite talk on XtraDB is up on YouTube. Ignite talks have exactly 20 slides on auto-advance every 15 seconds. “Enlighten us, and make it fast!” It’s better than a lightning talk. I explained the difference between Percona XtraDB and other technologies such as standard MySQL, OurDelta, and MariaDB.

Here’s a sneak peek at a video matrix — this is all the videos that include Pythian Group employees at the MySQL conference. I hope to have all the rest of the videos processed and uploaded within 24 hours, with a matrix similar to the one below (but of course with many more sessions).

So about 4 monts ago there was the crazy idea to start a new FOSS event in Belgium targeted at sysadmins.

What started out as an event for local people to meet local people with some local speakers actually ended up being a small local event with some top international speakers on onfiguration mananagement and system administration mixed with a bunch of good local ones !

I had the honour to open the conference with an extremely short version of the Devops talk I gave earlier last year.. extremely short as I knew that over the course of the weekend the topic would reoccur a lot.

We had the first european talk on Chef, by Joshua Timberman, and we had Puppet talks amongst by Dan Bode from Puppetlabs and CFengine talks , devops was a frequently dropped word,

We had a book raffle where …

I still exist.

Currently working with a number of fun technologies (Xen, Gentoo, Virtualization, TPM, Vt-X, and Vt-D. Researching ways to measure how resilient the security of a computer system is.

I've also learned how to dance recently.

This blog started out as a way to report my progress on Google Summer of Code.
I worked on adding memcache support to MySQL's query cache.
Since then I've completed my Masters in Computer Science and am pursuing my Phd.

If you’re like me, you’ve gotten tired of writing endless test cases for parsers that can understand the thousands of variations of text output by SHOW INNODB STATUS. I’ve decided to solve this issue once and for all by patching MySQL and InnoDB to output XML, the universal markup format, so tools can understand and manipulate it easily. Here’s a sample snippet:

<status><![CDATA[
=====================================
100320 15:46:24 INNODB MONITOR OUTPUT
=====================================
... text omitted, but you get the idea ...
]]>
</status>

PS: Yes, this is a late April Fool’s joke.

Related posts:

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2. …

Welcome to my new Production DBA blog, through this blog I aim to fully explore and understand some of the common tasks undertaken when administering MySQL in a production environment.  I’ll be looking at options for backups, high availability, scalability, and monitoring, as well as various other general administration tasks in between.

I’ve recently had the pleasure of reading “Python Testing: An easy and convenient approach to testing your python projects” from Packt Publishing. It’s been a quick read but a solid set of instructions on the different methods for the subject.

The book starts out very quickly with details about the various methods that are available, the means of automation for testing, and of course the environment you’d want to be in for working on the subjects that the book covers. It then, in the second chapter, moves into the guts of testing by describing the basics of doctest via syntax and some simple examples, and then moves on to a real world example via the AVL tree. It’s all very basic testing until chapter three where the author gets into unit testing, …