I've been using the MonAMI MySQL metrics collection plugin with some minor modifications to collect metrics from MySQL database servers. The plugin collects metrics using "SHOW GLOBAL STATUS" and using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. The MySQL plugin can be used to write the metrics into a MySQL database. My plugin configuration results is a table like the following:

CREATE TABLE metrics
  collected TIMESTAMP NOT NULL DEFAULT CURRENT_TIMESTAMP,
  hostname VARCHAR(50),
  questions BIGINT,
  com_select BIGINT,
  com_insert BIGINT,
  ...
  primary key(collected,hostname), 
  key(hostname)
) ENGINE=INNODB;

The MySQL plugin records the values exactly as collected from the database server. This might seem unimportant, but consider the fact that we are most interested in calculating "per second" type statistics for our servers. In the table, `com_select` increases in …

This Thursday (January 28, 17:00 UTC), we'll be resuming our MySQL University sessions with an Introduction to the Drizzle Microkernel by Brian Aker. Brian is located on the US West coast, so the session will start a bit later – see the information in the list of upcoming sessions. Brian started the Drizzle project and is the mastermind behind Drizzle development.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you …

This Thursday (January 28, 17:00 UTC), we'll be resuming our MySQL University sessions with an Introduction to the Drizzle Microkernel by Brian Aker. Brian is located on the US West coast, so the session will start a bit later – see the information in the list of upcoming sessions. Brian started the Drizzle project and is the mastermind behind Drizzle development.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you …

Disclaimer: This post is based on HEAP/MyISAM’s sourcecode in Drizzle.

Here are my brief notes on investigating how index keys are generated in HEAP and MyISAM. I lurked through these because I’ve started preparing for decent index support in BlitzDB. I also wrote this to assist my biological memory for later grepping (I have terrible memory for names). I’m only going to cover key generation on write in this post. Otherwise this post is going to be massive.

HEAP Engine

The index structure of HEAP can be either BTREE or HASH (in MySQL doc terms). Like other engines HEAP has a structure for keeping Key definition (parts, type, logic and etc). This structure is called HP_KEYDEF and it contains function pointers for write, delete, and getting the length of the key. These function pointers are assigned to at table creation or when the table is opened. The assigned function depends on the data structure …

I’m on the voting committee of the MySQL Conference this year. I was on the same committee in 2008. This year’s submissions are awesome. Much different from previous years, for whatever reason.

Some of the proposals are sales pitches, infomercials, or just generally BS, but there’s a gang of sharp-eyed people on the committee who are digging into who submits the proposals, what their company does, etc. Those sessions are getting shot down with bluntly honest reviews and low votes. I have a pretty good reason to believe those votes will carry a lot of weight. But even if they don’t, there simply aren’t many bad proposals! The overwhelming majority of them are very useful technical proposals from people who really know what they are talking about.

This year I truly agree that this is going to be a “deeply technical” event, as it has been …

Yes, Maatkit’s name was inspired by Ma’at, which has an apostrophe. But there is NO apostrophe in the name of the popular toolkit for MySQL users. I’m just sayin’.

MySQL Proxy 0.8.0 has been released at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/

While it took a while to get it out, it contains a lot of good stuff and will make a few more things possible for the future. First of all, it is the first release with a threaded network-backend allowing to use plenty of CPUs.

The other big infrastructure change is mostly for developers: out-of-tree plugins can now be written. Now you can write plugins for the MySQL Proxy against a installed MySQL Proxy. No need to have the MySQL Proxy's source code around.

ChangeLog

• added a threaded event handling layer
• added support to change the auth-response on the way to the backend
• added timing infrastruture
• added out-of-tree plugins builds and pkg-config support
• fixed handling of broken length encoded data in …

MySQL Proxy 0.8.0 has been released at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql-proxy/

While it took a while to get it out, it contains a lot of good stuff and will make a few more things possible for the future. First of all, it is the first release with a threaded network-backend allowing to use plenty of CPUs.

The other big infrastructure change is mostly for developers: out-of-tree plugins can now be written. Now you can write plugins for the MySQL Proxy against a installed MySQL Proxy. No need to have the MySQL Proxy’s source code around.

ChangeLog

• added a threaded event handling layer
• added support to change the auth-response on the way to the backend
• added timing infrastruture
• added out-of-tree plugins builds and pkg-config support
• fixed handling of broken length encoded data in …

“A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be” -- Wayne Gretzky

Technically speaking the EU did a good job. They recognized that, in its current state, there is little market overlap between MySQL and Oracle products. Sure, there was some overlap and some Oracle customers would use the competitive threat of MySQL to extract lower pricing from Oracle. But looking at what the current installed bases are doing, they are not too competitive. And as the EU points out, Postgres and Ingres provide open source alternatives to Oracle’s high-end products.

Oracle, on the other hand did a great job. They saw where the puck was heading—namely that MySQL had their sights set on the Enterprise market—and Oracle intercepted the pass.

The most telling story was what happened at the MySQL partners meeting at the 2009 MySQL conference in April. Oracle had …

WordPress Foundation formed. Reaction to Oracle-Sun approval. And more.

WordPress Foundation formed
# Matt Mullenwag launched the WordPress Foundation.

Reaction to Oracle-Sun’s EC approval
# In a memo Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz encouraged the company’s employees to emotionally resign from Sun.

# EnterpriseDB and PostgreSQL co-founder Bruce Momjian issued a statement on the EC’s decision to approve Oracle-Sun.

# Mike Hogan …