Ronald asked me if I could present at ODTUG’s Kaleidoscope conference, which is only a couple hours from me, but I’ll be at the Netways OSDC that week. Matt Yonkovit will be there representing Percona. I wish I could go: I would really like to mingle with more Oracle users and developers, and I think that participation is the key to building relationships between MySQL and Oracle users – two groups of people who are going to be overlapping more in the future.

I frequently encounter MySQL servers with intermittent problems that don’t happen when I’m watching the server. Gathering good diagnostic data when the problem happens is a must. Aspersa includes two utilities to make this easier. The first is called ‘stalk’. It would be called ‘watch’ but that’s already a name of a standard Unix utility. It simply watches for a condition to happen and fires off the second utility. This second utility does most of the work.

I’ve been back on Chrome pretty much full-time, especially since I figured out some proxy stuff, so the new After the Deadline checker for Google Chrome is a lifesaver. See also: Download Squad.

Open Source Bridge, the “conference for open source citizens,” is right around the corner! The sessions were just announced and it’s going to be packed with quite a variety of really interesting talks. From open cloud computing topics to hardware hacking to language hacks (like HipHop from Facebook), I’m really looking forward to being there (I’m helping organize the event, but hopefully I’ll have time to attend sessions as well).

I wanted to point out a few of the great database talks:

• State of MariaDB – Monty Widenius
• Cassandra: Strategies for Distributed Data Storage – Kelvin …

At the recent O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, the nice folk at O’Reilly Media got to speak to Kurt von Finck, Chief Community and Communications Officer for Monty Program Ab, about how we handle releases, why we are a superset of MySQL and more. Watch the 7 minute video, and do give us some feedback here in the comments.

Dear Kettle fans,

A few weeks ago, when I was stuck in the US after the MySQL User Conference, a new book was published by Packt Publishing.

That all by itself is something that is not too remarkable.  However, this time it’s a book about my brainchild Kettle. That makes this book very special to me. The full title is Pentaho 3.2 Data Integration : Beginner’s Guide (Amazon, Packt).  The title all by itself explains the purpose of this book: give the reader a quick-start when it comes to Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).

The author María Carina Roldán ( …

The amount of memory Innodb will require for its data dictionary depends on amount of tables you have as well as number of fields and indexes. Innodb allocates this memory once table is accessed and keeps until server is shut down. In XtraDB we have an option to restrict that limit.

So how much memory can it really take ? Here is some production stats from real system:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM INNODB_SYS_TABLES;
2. +----------+
3. | count(*) |
4. +----------+
5. |    48246 |
6. +----------+
7. 1 row IN SET (8.04 sec)
8.  
9. mysql> SELECT count(*) FROM INNODB_SYS_INDEXES;
10. +----------+
11. | count(*) |
…

Let's take a quick look at installing and running InfiniDB on EC2. The short list of commands are listed to create a m1.xlarge instance, install InfiniDB, create a 4 disk raid set, create an InfiniDB instance, and connect to the database.  A more detailed description follows that shows a bulk load example, joins, and new subqueries.

 ec2-run-instances ami-86db39ef -k gsg-keypair -g calpont2 -t m1....

The May release of Maatkit included a new feature in mk-query-digest. This allows you to process queries in many pieces, write out intermediate results, and then combine the pieces in a separate step. Maybe it’s not exactly map-reduce, but it makes a good headline.

The purpose is to enable query analysis across an arbitrarily large group of servers. Process queries on all of them, ship the results to a central place, and then combine them together. Pre-processing the results has some nice benefits, such as reduced bandwidth requirements, speeding up processing by doing it in parallel, and reducing the workload on the central aggregator. One Percona customer with many MySQL instances is trying this out.

The --save-results option on mk-query-digest saves the digested results to a file, stopping just before the final stages of the query event pipeline. There is a tool in Subversion trunk, tentatively called …

TO_DAYS() prunes two partitions instead of one
If you are partitioning by date, chances are that you are using TO_DAYS(). And depending on how you have partitioned your table, your queries are as fast as you expect them to be. However, there are cases where your query takes twice as long as it should, and of course this will not make you happy.

For example, in a table partitioned by month, when …