My proposal has been accepted, yay!

I'll be speaking on a topic that I feel passionate about: MySQL Server Diagnostics Beyond Monitoring. MySQL has limitations when it comes to monitoring and diagnosing as it has been widely documented in several blogs.

My goal is to share my experience from the last few years and, hopefully, learn from what others have done. If you have a pressing issue, feel free to comment on this blog and I'll do my best to include the case in my talk and/or post a reply if the time allows.

I will also be discussing my future plans on sarsql. I've been silent about this utility mostly because I've been implementing it actively at work. I'll post a road map shortly based on my latest experience.

I'm excited about meeting many old friends (and most now fellow MySQL alumni) …

I’ve submitted a Birds of a Feather session for Maatkit at the upcoming MySQL conference. It’s not on the public schedule yet, but it has been accepted and scheduled for 19:00 on 13 Apr 2010. See you there!

Well, more defections from Oracle, it's clear where the wind is blowing. It's as if all the cool and interesting stuff is quickly shedding itself from Oracle.
Jay Pipes has a good blog post about the announcement and the history behind them ending up at Rackspace.

Interesting quote: "Rackspace is also heavily invested in Cassandra, and sees integration of Drizzle and Cassandra as being a key way to add value to its platforms and therefore for its customers".I look forward to seeing what that's about.

I also liked this from Jay:"I don't know whether Larry understands that cloud computing and infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, and database-as-a-service will eventually put his beloved Oracle cash cow in its place or not. …

I'll be presenting two talks this year:

Faster Than Alter - Less Downtime

"This will be a informative talk about real world problem solving and the powerful yet sometimes overlooked LOAD DATA INFILE command. This talk is for MySQL DBAs who want to expand their
knowledge, improve performance and decrease customer facing downtime"

Get Your Replication On: Advanced Techniques, Tips and Tricks

Co-speaking with Sarah Sproehnle for this one! We have lots of interesting uses for replication and some best practices up our
sleeves. Warning: we won't be covering how to set up basic replication
- that's a prerequisite for this talk!

Hope to see you there!

I've written quite a few tools over time to connect to many mysql servers and run queries. Most of these have been pretty specific to a small set of tasks such as running an alter across many servers. Any sysadmin that is in charge of many servers is probably familiar with dsh, and as I was using recently I realized how all those specific tools I've written for mysql could be generalized into a dsh like tool. Thus, Qsh.pl was born! (download at launchpad)

Usage should be familiar to anyone who has used dsh before, it even will read group files made for dsh in /etc/dsh/group/or /usr/local/etc/group/.

Here's an example where this tool was quite useful. I was getting a query error for SHOW GLOBAL STATUS. This was a curious result since we're running mysql 5.0 everywhere. So what better way to find out which machines are complaining than just run it everywhere:
…

Dear Lazy Web,

What should the result of the SELECT be below? Assume InnoDB for all storage engines.

CREATE TABLE t1 (a int, b int);
INSERT INTO t1 VALUES (1,1),(1,2);
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE t2 (a int, b int, primary key (a));
BEGIN;
INSERT INTO t2 VALUES (100,100);
CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE IF NOT EXISTS t2 (PRIMARY KEY (a)) SELECT * FROM t1;
 
# The above statement will correctly produce an ERROR 23000: Duplicate entry '1' for key 'PRIMARY'
# What should the below result be?

SELECT * FROM t2;
COMMIT;

If you do not know what International Women’s Day is: http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

Start planning your blog posts for Ada Lovelace day now (March 24th, http://findingada.com/ Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.)

To that end, I would like to point out all the women currently in science and tech fields that I admire and think are doing great things. I think it would be great if everyone, male or female, made a list like this:

The women that have taught me science/tech along the way:

High School:
Mary Lou Ciavarra (Physics)
Maria Petretti (Pre-Algebra, and Academic Decathlon)
Reneé Fishman (Biology)
Lisa Acquaire …

MySQL is a constantly moving target and keeping up on the latest changes can be a difficult chore. A lot of folks seeking certification are often swamped by evolutions in the MySQL product. On Tuesday there is a FREE web seminar where MySQL Professional Services experts will walk you through best practices for achieving performance and scalability improvements using MySQL 5.1 and the new InnoDB Plugin. This is part two of the series and you do not have to have seen part one to join.

List of Web Seminars

MySQL has a number of global buffers, i.e. your SGA. There are also a number of per session/thread buffers that combined with other memory usage constitutes an unbounded PGA. One of the most common errors in mis-configured MySQL environments is the setting of the 4 primary per session buffers thinking they are global buffers.

Global buffers include:

• • key_buffer_size – For MyISAM Indexes (note you can define multiple key_buffer’s The MyISAM Key Cache)
  • innodb_buffer_pool_size – For Innodb …

It took a while, but here they are. We have posted only the slides from Sun/MySQL, since the other material is copyright by Infobright and Talend.