I’ve been noticing an undeniable trend in my consulting engagements in the last year or so, and when I vocalized this today, heads nodded all around me. Everyone sees a growth in the number of cases where otherwise well-optimized systems are artificially limited by InnoDB contention problems. A year ago, I simply wasn’t seeing the need for analysis of GDB backtraces en masse. These days, I’m writing custom tools to gather and analyze backtraces.

This month will see the release of the book Expert PHP and MySQL which I was a co-author of. Initially this will be available for purchase in PDF format from the Wrox website and I am hopeful this will be available in print format for the MySQL Users Conference.

More then just your standard PHP and MySQL there is detailed content on technologies including Memcached, Sphinx, Gearman, MySQL UDFs and PHP extensions. We will be posting more information at www.ExpertPhpandMySQL.com. You can download a PDF version of Chapter 1 Techniques Every Expert Programmer Needs to Know.

The book includes the following content:

I’ve heard about the innodb_plugin but not had time to put it to the test.

Recently though due to some problems I’ve been having with the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (Merlin) I’ve had to try a few changes and had the opportunity to try out the innodb plugin.

I have been using Merlin for some time and like it a lot. It is not perfect but does a good job for me.  However, since upgrading to version 2.1 I have been having some database load problems. I long ago split the merlin server into a front- and back-end server with the backend running a standard MySQL 5.1 Advanced package. That has been working fine.

I have been monitoring more and more mysqld servers and recently the database backend could not cope. Basically the writes of …

One of Profile Technology Ltd.’s most popular applications is their Advanced Search function for Facebook. Find out how TokuDB v3.0 dramatically increased their insertion speed performance in our new Case Study.

(originally posted at the Gear6 corporate blog: MySQL+Memcached is still the workhorse.  Please comment there.)

Because I'm becoming known as someone who knows something about "this whole NoSQL thing", people have started asking me to take a look at some of their systems or ideas, and tell them which NoSQL technology they should use.

To be fair, it is a confusing space right now, there are a LOT of NoSQL technologies showing up, and there is a lot of buzz from the tech press, and in blogs and on twitter.  Most of that buzz is, frankly, ignorant and uninformed, and is being written by people who do not have enough experience running live systems.

A couple of times already, someone has described an application or concept to me, and asked "So, should I use Cassandra, or CouchDB, or what?"

And I look …

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Fedora 12

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Fedora 12 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

• kirkland to publish tentative bugzapping roadmap: Done, will be updated.

Beta1 status review

ttx informed everyone that we are at the beginning of the beta1 subcycle… but not very far from the end of it. Thursday next week is Beta1Freeze, a hard freeze before the Beta1 release, so most uploads should be made before that date. For reference, the beta1-targeted blueprints are tracked at http://people.canonical.com/~pitti/workitems/canonical-server-ubuntu-10.04-beta-1.html

smoser reported …

One of my colleagues, Ryan Lowe, has just heard that his session on PCI compliance with MySQL has been accepted at the upcoming MySQL conference. Ryan is highly qualified to present this topic, and not many people can say that; I certainly can’t claim that title myself. If you’re looking to learn how to make your MySQL installation PCI-compliant, there’s also not a lot of trustworthy information online. Personally — and really, no bias just because he’s my colleague — I think this is a great session for the MySQL conference, which I sometimes thought didn’t have enough diversity of topics in past years. We need more stuff like this to give people a reason to return after they’ve gone for 2 or 3 years in a …

In Oracle the default transaction isolation is READ_COMMITTED. In MySQL the default is REPEATABLE_READ. Because MySQL also has READ_COMMITTED I have seen in more then one production MySQL environment a transaction isolation of READ_COMMITTED. The explanation and ultimately incorrect assumption is the default in Oracle is READ_COMMITTED so we made that the default in MySQL.

I’m not going to discuss the specific differences of these isolation levels (see reference lines below) except to say it that READ_COMMITTED in Oracle more closely relates to the MySQL default of REPEATABLE_READ and not READ_COMMITTED. Just because the same term for a common feature exists, don’t assume the underlying functionality is the same or that either or both actually conform to the SQL ANSI standard.

While switching your MySQL environment to READ_COMMITTED is possible, there is still conjucture if this actually provides any performance improvement. …

Its times like this, I want to hear from the greater community – the ones that are reading say, Planet MySQL or Planet MariaDB.

MySQL to me, and many others is an ecosystem. We’ve had for the longest time, complementary technology talks, like for memcached (which have been popular, filled rooms). NoSQL is becoming quite popular, and there are complementary technologies sitting around. To get an idea, if terms like the following turn you on: Hadoop, Redis, Pig, NDB (yes, MySQL Cluster is largely NoSQL before NoSQL became popular), Tokyo Tyrant, StormCloud (formerly Waffle Grid).

Now, do you want to see these kinds of talks at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010?

Check out the …