We've launched: open source alpha available now at infinidb.org

   See www.infinidb.org for details.

The intention will be to post information specific to InifiniDB performance, scalability, or features on that site. Topics here may be more general in nature, i.e. comparisons of column versus row for different use cases that may apply to any column architecture dbms.

So, MySQL 6.0 was ditched, and a few weeks ago 5.4 was also – its features to be added in other (earlier) versions (I’m told 5.2 but not sure). I reckon that’s good news, regardless of the version number. There was also an announcement about a change in the release mechanism at Sun/MySQL.

Now for practicals. If I look on Launchpad, the 5.1 branch is the only active one (next to 5.0 fixes, of course). 5.4 was last updated 15 weeks ago. There is no 5.2 on there that I can find. Wasn’t looking for it really, just happened to notice its absence while I was trying to find 5.5. And the reason for that was that Miguel closed a bug I was following, noting it was no longer reproducible in 5.5. He pastes some code that reports mysql as 5.5, so it’s not a typo.

So, in addition to the above list of …

We have servers that run with innodb_log_file_size=256M and some of these servers do a lot of disk writes per second. I want to know whether performance will improve with a larger value for innodb_log_file_size and setup two test servers that used 256M and 512M for it and then ran a mirror of the production workload on them.

The results are interesting. The benefit varies from significant to not much depending on how you measure. With this change the write rate was reduced:

• 4.5% as measured by iostat w/s
• 13% as measured by iostat wsec/s
• 18% as measured by Innodb pages written.

I then added the my.cnf variable innodb_flush_neighbors_on_checkpoint to MySQL. There are several conditions under which InnoDB writes dirty pages. One reason for pages to be flushed …

I was working on a server today that was not hooked up to our usual monitoring systems for one reason or another and I needed to generate a database tuning report. Typically I use Matthew Montgomery’s ‘tuning-primer.sh’ script for this since it’s command line based, simple to use, and generates a number of useful items for tuning recommendations. It’s a great starting point before delving into the deeper aspects of MySQL and the OS.

I ran into an issue with it on this server that was running the MySQL 5.0.77-percona-highperf-b13-log x86_64 build. The error was:
./tuning-primer.sh.1: line 517: 5.000000: syntax error in expression (error token is ".000000")

There were three options to fix this issue

1. Dive into the code and modify it cowboy style
2. Use our typical monitoring against the client’s wishes
3. Contact the developer to get a fix

I hopped on …

Just a reminder to all of those users that are enjoying Kontrollbase – if you get a minute in your day please go to the MySQL Forge site and put your vote in on Kontrollbase. It’s a simple star based vote on the right side of the page located here: http://forge.mysql.com/projects/project.php?id=318

Amazon.com's fork of the MySQL database suggests that competition is alive and well, regardless of Oracle's desire to buy Sun or of the European Commission.

Dear LazyWeb,

I'm looking for a usable C++ IDE for Linux and I'm wondering if you've seen one. Before you start giving the normal suggestions (Ecliipse, NetBeans, just-use-vi) let start off by saying that I've tried Eclipse, Netbeans and Code::Blocks and KDevelop several times, and that I normally hack in some combination of vi and emacs. (yes yes, I know I'm supposed to religiously pick one and be rude to the other... consider me a postmodern hacker)

For it to be usable by me, it must be able to:

1. Handle the fact that my build is run with autoconf/automake.
2. Properly rename a method and have that show up throughout the codebase.
3. Properly encapsulate a variable with getter/setting methods.
4. Correctly answer the question "where is this method being used"
5. Run without consuming all of my RAM and CPU resources.
6. Quickly and easily open a new project/branch (I have …

One of the things I found missing when I came to MySQL from other databases was a good SQL tracing utility that helped me understand exactly what a long running SQL statement was doing. The inclusion of the SQL Profiler in post 5.0 versions of MySQL helped, but I always felt more could be done.

With InfiniDB, you have some new SQL diagnostic and tracing tools that you can use to get more performance data from SQL statements that don’t seem to be running well.  Let me give yoRead More...

I‘ll be giving a webinar version of a well-received presentation from last year‘s Users Conference tomorrow (November 5th) at 10:00 AM Pacific that covers how to configure MySQL Connector/J to deliver the best performance for your Java application running on MySQL. The session is interactive, and we‘ll be answering questions, so bring those along!

Come spend your morning/afternoon break with me and learn a few new tricks for making your applications fly. The information to sign up is at https://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/web-seminars/display-460.html. Hope to see you there!

This week, I am working on putting together test cases which validate the Drizzle transaction log’s handling of BLOB columns.

I ran into an interesting set of problems and am wondering how to go about handling them. Perhaps the LazyWeb will have some solutions.

The problem, in short, is inconsistency in the way that the NUL character is escaped (or not escaped) in both the MySQL/Drizzle protocol and the MySQL/Drizzle client tools. And, by client tools, I mean both everyone’s favourite little mysql command-line client, but also the mysqltest client, which provides infrastructure and runtime services for the MySQL and Drizzle test suites.

Even within the server and client protocol, there appears to be some inconsistency in how and when things are escaped. Take a look at this interesting output from …