While going about my day, I stumbled upon John Allspaw’s tweet about his experience with MySQL 5.0.51 versus Percona’s 5.0.83 highperf Percona build. For those that don’t remember John from the MySQL Conference & Expo’s, he’s the guy managing operations at Flickr, and he recently even wrote a book about webops.

Click on the photo above, to see when the upgrade happened. Amazed?

Haven’t tested this out myself, though I’m curious to see how this stacks up against MySQL 5.4, which is also aimed at being a high performance release. In another note, it seems like the mysql-cacti-templates could use a bit more verbose …

I wrote a while ago about how mext works — it runs “mysqladmin extended-status” and formats it nicely. But what if you want to use it to format saved output that you’ve put into a file? It’s actually very easy. You can tell it what command-line to run to generate its input. By default you are probably going to tell it to run “mysqladmin ext -ri10″ or something like that, but you can just as easily make it run “cat my-saved-output”.

Let’s see how this can be useful. Imagine I have a server that stalls every now and then, and I’ve set up mk-loadavg to watch for this and capture information about system activity with a script that contains

$ mysqladmin ext -c 30 -i1 > mysqladmin-output.txt

That’ll gather 30 samples one second apart. Now I’ll format it:

$ wget -q …

Thanks to a suggestion from Mohammad Lahlouh, all deleted comments are restored. Thanks!

I was able to do this with the mysql binlog, which is a binary log containing all statements executed on the server. If you face a similar problem, here are the steps to restore the DB:

1. See if you're actually storing binlogs. For me this happened to be the case, although I never actually payed attention (My friend Jens Meijer is so kind to provide hosting for me). In my case they were stored in /var/log/mysql.
2. Grab your latest backup. In my case it was from October 2008.
3. Make sure you also create a new backup, just in case this process goes wrong.
4. Restore your old back.
5. Find the binlog that corresponds to the date of your backup. I did a simple copy of the ~300 binlogs to a different directory.
6. Run the binlog through 'mysqlbinlog' and pipe into a new file. I had to append the …

We have lots of things on the go right now (over and above the normal process of keeping things up to date), and one of the main projects for me is to do a complete rebuild of the installation chapter (Installing and Upgrading MySQL). I’ll be starting with the 5.1 manual, then the 5.4 manual. Any future manuals should be based on these so we should be up to date for future generations. What I’m doing:

• Re-structuring the chapter to make it easier to follow on a platform basis. The old structure mixed content for different binary and source types, and different platforms, across a number of sections, making it very difficult to follow the instructions for your chosen platform.
• Make some things generic. There are sections which are generic and apply to all (or at least many) different installation types.
• Make some things …

I'm pleased to announce the release of Vertical Partitioning storage engine version 0.6(alpha).
Vertical Partitioning is a Storage Engine for vertical partitioning for a table.
http://launchpad.net/vpformysql

The main changes in this version are following.
- Add UDF "vp_copy_tables".
  This UDF is used for syncronizing Vertical Partitioning's child table data from old child tables to new added child tables.

- Add table parameter "choose_ignore_table_list", "choose_ignore_table_list_for_lock" and "zero_record_update_mode".
  This parameters are used for avoiding to use new added child tables at searching operation and separating child tables for searching with lock and without lock.

- Add server parameter "vp_udf_ct_bulk_insert_interval" and "vp_udf_ct_bulk_insert_rows".
…

Welcome to the metronome, every two weeks we drop a release of Drizzle.

Which makes it sort of boring to blog about each release since they are consistent :)

But no two releases are really the same, and this last one had a bit of fun in it:

drizzle> CREATE TABLE A (a int) ENGINE=Archive;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0 sec)

drizzle> create table B like A ENGINE=innodb;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0 sec)

drizzle> show create table B;
+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| Table | Create Table                                              |
+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
| B     | CREATE TABLE `b` (
   `a` int DEFAULT NULL
) ENGINE=InnoDB |
+-------+-----------------------------------------------------------+
1 row in set (0 sec)

Being able to specify an engine when doing a CREATE TABLE LIKE has been long on …

Larry Ellison promises funds for MySQL, commits to community. The “open source vendor” debate in a nutshell. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Larry Ellison promised MySQL will receive more money for development and research, while Oracle maintained that it is committed to Java and open source developer communities.

# GroundWork raised $5m series D funding from Canaan Partners, Mayfield, JAFCO Ventures and SAP Ventures.

# InformationWeek reported that Motorola has vacated …

I did not mean to stir up a hornets nest!

I received a lot of feedback on the last blog entry on shutting down the old MySQL system and that included the lists of certified candidates. Yes, I know how valuable these lists are. But you might want to check this out ORACLE UNIVERSITY LAUNCHES CERTVIEW. I will see if I can get some details the next time we speak to the fine Oracle Certification folks.

The certification industry have started initiatives like the ITCC to allow you to have your certifications listed for viewing by a potential employers or the world at large. So do not worry that we are taking some draconian action and the …

In response to Eric Day's post on "Eventually Consistent Relational Database?"... I started posting a comment there, but I realized I have my own blog for this sort of thing. :)

I've been thinking the same thing, it's nice to hear I'm not the only one. This is a neglected area of "cloud" development, mostly because it's a big scary problem. Everyone says "use NoSQL", but if we had strategies/systems to give us EC RDBMS solutions, nobody would use key/value storage (except where it actually made sense). NoSQL is a big golden hammer nowadays. It works, but it sure takes a lot of effort to code stuff the storage layer should be able to handle (joins, etc.).

read more

We have lots of things on the go right now (over and above the normal process of keeping things up to date), and one of the main projects for me is to do a complete rebuild of the installation chapter (Installing and Upgrading MySQL). I’ll be starting with the 5.1 manual, then the 5.4 manual. Any future manuals should be based on these so we should be up to date for future generations.

What I’m doing:

• Re-structuring the chapter to make it easier to follow on a platform basis. The old structure mixed content for different binary and source types, and different platforms, across a number of sections, making it very difficult to follow the instructions for your chosen platform.
• Make some things generic. There are sections which are generic and apply to all (or at least many) different installation types.
• Make …