GNUnify is one of the major annual FOSS events here in India. Organised by the students of Symbiosis Institute for Computer Science & Research and the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), GNUnify is an event of consequence in the Indian FOSS ecosystem. This year, the conefrence took place on Feb 19th and 20th in the wonderful city of Pune. I submitted two papers on MySQL and fortunately both of them were selected. Thanks to the organising team, who were helpful enough to schedule both sessions on the second day on request, since I would not have been able to make it on the first day. But more of that later. Let me recount the experience of …

This Thursday (March 4th, 15:00 UTC - slightly later than usual), Robin Schumacher will present MySQL Column Databases. If you're doing Data Warehouse with your databases this is a must-attend, but it's also interesting to learn what typical other scenarios there are for using column-based storage engines, and how column databases work in the first place.

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 don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, …

This Thursday (March 4th, 15:00 UTC - slightly later than usual), Robin Schumacher will present MySQL Column Databases. If you're doing Data Warehouse with your databases this is a must-attend, but it's also interesting to learn what typical other scenarios there are for using column-based storage engines, and how column databases work in the first place.

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 don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Spider storage engine version 2.14(beta).
Spider is a Storage Engine for database sharding.
http://spiderformysql.com/

The main changes in this version are following.
- Add table parameter "bulk_update_mode" and "bulk_update_size".
- Add server parameter "spider_bulk_update_mode" and "spider_bulk_update_size".
This parameters are for performance improvement.
Please examine to use "spider_direct_dup_insert", if "REPLACE" and "INSERT IGNORE" are slow.
Please examine to use "spider_bulk_update_mode", if "UPDATE" and "DELETE" are slow.

Please see "99_change_logs.txt" in the download documents for checking other changes.

Enjoy!

InnoDB plugin offers an adaptative compression that is very interesting for performance.
This compression works at a table level. Like most optimization techniques it is not black or white.
You have to decide depending on IO patterns / CPU usage / Memory usage / disks constraints what tables are good candidates for compression.
I was trying to define a methodology to help decide which tables to compress to reach performance gains.
I thought I could use MySQL "show status" command or information_schema tables. Unfortunately MySQL does not offer any per tables IO statistics.
[...]

Baron makes an excellent point in Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio — ratio is not the same as rate. Furthermore, rate is [often] the important thing to look at.

This is something that, at Pythian, we internalized a long time ago when thinking about MySQL tuning. In fact, mysqltuner 2.0 takes this into account, and the default configuration includes looking at both ratios and rates.

If I told you that your database had a ratio of temporary tables written to disk of 20%, you might think “aha, my database is slow because of a lot of file I/O caused by writing temporary tables to disk!”. However, that 20% ratio may actually mean a rate of 2 per hour — which is most likely …

I recently granted ALTER access in MySQL so a user could run the ALTER TABLE command . However after I granted the necessary privileges, the user was still not able to perform the tasks needed. Reproducing the issue using a test instance, I granted a test user the required privileges and MySQL reported no errors or warnings when the ALTER TABLE was run:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 15
Server version: 5.1.41-log MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> grant alter,create,insert on *.* to 'test'@localhost;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)

mysql> show warnings;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql> show errors;
Empty set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

The reason I granted the addition CREATE and INSERT privileges is that according to the MySQL documentation ( …

There’s been a fair amount of attention – both positive and negative – on dual licensing in recent weeks. A few days ago Brian Aker wrote: “The fact is, there are few, and growing fewer, opportunities to make money on dual licensing.”

It is a sweeping statement, but one that is worth further consideration, especially since, as Stephen O’Grady noted it is directly contradicted by Gartner’s prediction that: “By 2012, at least 70% of the revenue from commercial OSS will come from vendor-centric projects with dual-license business models.”

Success?

I remember reading this prediction back in December but dismissing it as …

Shortly after I posted my last summary of MySQL releases, our son Mats was born and I went on a 2.5-week vacation. Our developers did not rest in the meanwhile and I'd like to give you a quick update of what's new since then:

MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.0

• Visual Studio 2010 RC support
• Nested transaction scope support

MySQL Workbench 5.2.16 Beta 6

• Fixed 67 bugs
• Saving your profile/connection passwords in OSX keychain, gnome-keyring or in an encrypted password-vault-file.
• New rapid development features for generating complete SQL …

Hello everybody,

One month earlier than planned we have the great pleasure to announce you that the company called FromDual goes operational today!

We are excited about this step and it is an new era in our personal evolution to get back in full-contact with customers and solve their real life day-to-day MySQL problems.

So we are happy hearing from you and to help you solving your individual MySQL problems...

You can find us at FromDual or you can drop us a line.

Regards,
Oli Sennhauser (aka Shinguz)
Senior MySQL Consultant at FromDual

About FromDualFromDual provides neutral and vendor independent MySQL consulting, training and other services around MySQL and its derivatives. The company …