This is not my notes about the MySQL conference that just occurred. These are my thoughts about MySQL conferences in general. Baron wrote in The History of OpenSQL Camp:

After O’Reilly/MySQL co-hosted MySQL Conference and Expo (a large commercial event) that year, there was a bit of dissatisfaction amongst a few people about the increasingly commercial and marketing-oriented nature of that conference. Some people refused to call the conference by its new name (Conference and Expo) and wanted to put pressure on MySQL to keep it a MySQL User’s Conference.

During this year’s conference, I heard a lot of concern about whether or not O’Reilly would have a MySQL conference, and whether or not Oracle would decide to sponsor. I heard all of the following (in no particular order):

* If O’Reilly does not have a …

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 ===================================== .

EAVB_VFZUHIARHI To whom it may concern -

The mysqldump program can be used to make logical database backups. Although the vast majority of people use it to create SQL dumps, it is possible to dump both schema structure and data in XML format. There are a few bugs (#52792, #52793) in this feature, but these are not the topic of this post.XML output from mysqldumpDumping in XML format is done with the --xml or -X option. In addition, you should use the --hex-blob option otherwise the BLOB data will …

The new ndbinfo interface in 7.1 is really useful to assist in tuning MySQL Cluster. Here is an example (more will follow):

I started with one test where I inserted two blobs (1KB + 1KB) in one table.
From 16 threads (colocated with one mysqld, two data nodes, separate computers) and one application driving the load I reached about 6960TPS, and the utilization of the redo buffers (controlled by the parameter RedoBuffer in config.ini) looked like:

mysql< select * from ndbinfo.logbuffers;
+---------+----------+--------+----------+----------+--------+
| node_id | log_type | log_id | log_part | total    | used   |
+---------+----------+--------+----------+----------+--------+
|       3 | REDO     |      0 |        1 | 50331648 | 196608 |
|       3 | REDO     |      0 |        2 | 50331648 | 294912 |
|       3 | REDO     |      0 |        3 | 50331648 | 131072 |
| …

This time last year I obtained a domain called raindb.org which I was intending on using for my storage engine project. RainDB was the project name I had in mind for BlitzDB at the time. Since I now have a different project name, I no longer have any use for this domain.

So, rather than letting it go to waste I’d like to contribute this domain for yet another potential open source database project. Your project can be anything – MySQL Storage Engine, Drizzle Storage Engine, Embedded Library, Stand Alone Server, whatever. RainDB would be a good name for a highly concurrent database since the analogy is – “it can be rained on”.

If you’re interested please feel free to email, tweet, or even just leave a comment on this blog entry.

Last Friday we held the Drizzle Developer Day at the Santa Clara convention center, taking advantage of the fact that many developers and interested contributors were already there for the MySQL Conference & Expo. Minus a few small glitches like wifi and pizza consumption location, I would say it was an overall success. There were a lot of new folks interested in learning about Drizzle and getting the server up and running. The day was organized by splitting folks up into small groups with matching interests, and then switching up groups every hour or so. We had groups focused on replication, documentation, writing plugins, the optimizer, Boots (the new client tool), and a “getting started” group.

The first group I participated in was about Boots, the new command line tool …

Usually I try to avoid the cookbook type of computer books because usually the 'recipies', often messy scripts or pages of obfuscated code, seem only to work for the authors and not for me. So I had a little trepidation when I was asked to review the MySQL Admin Cookbook. Daniel Schneller and Udo Schwedt manage to pack a lot of very solid information into 360 pages of text that would work for novice to intermediate MySQL DBAs and provide some food for thought for seasoned DBAs.

What I liked: The material was presented with the reasons behind the recipe and pointers to useful tools. Yes, all the material is in the manuals but sometimes there are too many trees in the way for a novice so see the trees. In very calm ,concise language, the authors tackle successfully a wide range of DBA chores in a way that is easy to follow.

I would not …

MySQL Backup Script has been around for a long time.  I have used it on and off for years but now I’ve needed to make some  improvements.   This script is based on VER. 2.6 – http://sourceforge.net/projects/automysqlbackup/ Copyright (c) 2002-2003 wipe_out@lycos.co.uk.
I have added my own Copyright (c) 2010 mark@grennan.com – http://www.mysqlfanboy.com/Files/automysqlbackup.sh. But as the code says:  This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,  but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the GNU General Public License for more details.

My improvements include:

# VER 2.6 Beta 5 – MTG – (2010-04-18)
#    …

I get ask, by application developers,  “how do you optimize MySQL”.  I do lots of things that don’t really relate to a developer. I analyze the percent of queries are being pulled from cache for instance.  What a developer can do to optimize the SQL they develop is a different questions.   So here is a quick list of things applications developers should know about MySQL.

Explain will analyze your query.

This example shows the possible indexes (keys) that could be used and the index that was selected.  2,262 rows where selected and then sorted (Using file sorts) and one record was returned (limit 1).

mysql> explain SELECT 5/9*(temp_F-32) as t, 5/9*(dewpt_F-32) as td, speed_mps as spd, dir
 > where stn='KLDM' and date_time<'2010-02-12 18:15' and …