OmniTI’s Surge conference is looking really good — and I’m going to be speaking there. The CfP just closed, so the list of speakers is still growing, but it already includes impressive names such as Neil J. Gunther. So far, this speaker list has zero fluff, and reminds me of the Percona Performance Conference. I’ll be talking about how not to shard your systems. Sharding is no fun and it’s costly. If you don’t have to do it — and many applications don’t need to, with orders-of-magnitude performance improvements in MySQL — you should not.

Related posts:

1. …

One of the hot topics here at the Community Leadership Summit in Portland is "what is an open source company ?". Simon Phipps has a got a lot of good points on this in his blog about Open Source Business.

We have companies like SugarCRM and Eucalyptus marketing themselves as "open source companies", even while not all of their code is available under an open source license.

To me it's clear that just because some of your product(s) is available under an open source license, you can't claim to be an open source company, as that would make the term meaningless. Under such a definition even Microsoft would be an open source …

My wife – a good web designer with 6 years of experience with web design, HTML and CSS is looking for a job. Here is some information about her:

• Her web site (of course she is the one who designed it)
• Her portfolio
• Her resume
• Her LinkedIn profile

We’re physically located in Toronto, Canada, but she has a great experience of working remotely too. So, if you need a web designer or a junior web designer, feel free to contact Tanya.

…

Other the last few years I’ve read quite a lot about IPv6 but not really done a lot about it. The theory is easy but when you actually look to try to set it up you suddenly find that most hardware does not really support it.

• My ISP (Jazztel) have told me they don’t provide an IPv6 service.
• My Draytek 2820n ADSL router does not support IPv6. Draytek seem to be just starting to look at this in their Vigor 2130 series, but my ADSL router is not covered.
• My Thecus N5200 Pro NAS device does run Linux underneath so it can be configured to support IPv6. I’ve recently upgraded to firmware version …

I pushed more patches to the Facebook patch for MySQL 5.1. I still have to write the release notes -- sorry. On the bright side another person has joined our team and is working on a tool to do online schema changes using triggers. Failover is not required.

The updates include:

• 
  
• Improve peak QPS and IOPs from InnoDB by making BUF_READ_AHEAD constant, reducing the use of fcntl and reducing the overhead of finding free InnoDB pages.
  
• Fix the …

We’re at OSCON and today has been fabulous – I’ve just been connecting with old friends, and making new friends, and all this is what makes the travel experience completely worthwhile. If you’re at OSCON, why not come to a couple of BoF’s:

1. MariaDB: The Community Fork of MySQL at 8pm on Monday 19/07/2010. Great for a general overview of MariaDB, for beginners to the advanced folk to come to.
2. MariaDB: Features In-depth at 9pm on Wednesday 21/07/2010. Great if you’re a more intermediate to advanced user of MySQL/MariaDB and want to know more about the additional features MariaDB has to offer, and what else it might offer in the near future (i.e. what are you …

Oracle distributes a series of 12 RPM packages that make up the MySQL Cluster product. Lately I've been getting a lot of questions asking which of these dozen RPM packages should be installed onto which nodes.

An overview of the contents of each RPM package is provided in the documentation at http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/linux-rpm.html and http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysql-cluster-multi-install.html. I think this section of the documentation is a bit messy so I'll give a short description of each here:

MySQL-Cluster-gpl-client
This package contains the standard MySQL clients and administration tools.
Contains: mysql, mysqladmin, mysqlcheck, mysqldump, etc...
This package should be installed …

A big shoutout to the openSUSE team: openSUSE 11.3 has been released! And with it comes a choice for the database users out there – you can now choose between MySQL or MariaDB.

I wrote in February 2010 that MariaDB was in the unstable repository for openSUSE, and was informed by Michal that it would be included a little while ago. The version that is shipping is …

I recently did a quick analysis of the distribution of writes to InnoDB's log files. On a high-traffic commodity MySQL server running Percona XtraDB for a gaming workload (mostly inserts to the "moves" table), I used strace to gather statistics about how the log file writes are distributed in terms of write size. InnoDB writes to the log files in multiples of 512 bytes. Mark Callaghan explained this and some of its performance implications here. How many big writes does InnoDB do, and how many small writes?

First, I found out the file descriptor numbers of the log files:

# lsof -p $(pidof mysqld) | grep ib_log
mysqld  29772 mysql    8uW  REG                8,2   268435456   7143989 /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile0
mysqld  29772 mysql    9uW  REG                8,2   268435456   7143993 /var/lib/mysql/ib_logfile1

The …

A short post marks Pythian’s 195th edition of Log Buffer, a blog of blogs encapsulating what’s going on in the world of database administration.

Remember if you find a link or interesting blog post that you think Log Buffer should mention, send a note to the editor at Log Buffer and be sure to include the link, and a short note on why you think that others will want to read it too.

Now on to Log Buffer #195. Alex Gorbachev starts us off with his suggested readings and funnily enough, …