This Thursday (November 12th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia of the MySQL Community Team will present Gearman for MySQL. I got the time wrong in my original announcement, sorry.

When I started analysing the various patches that I had made
for improving the MySQL Server performance I did by mistake
forget to turn cpuspeed off in Linux. This is a feature that
makes it possible to run the CPU's on a much lower frequency
in cases when they aren't so heavily used.

So at first I considered simply turning it on and forgetting the
data I had produced. Then I realised that actually to have
cpuspeed activated is the default behaviour and for many
servers out there in the world it is actually the best mode since
most servers goes from high load to low load frequently.

So I decided that it would be worthwhile to analyse behaviour
both with and without this feature turned on.

The cpuspeed feature was particularly involved when running
sysbench on a different server, so thus using a socket based
communication. In this …

After many unsuccessful attempts to get MySQL to run faster I got
a very simple but effective gdb script courtesy of Intel. The script
is very simple and attaches to the mysqld process and does a
backtrace on all threads in the process and then it gathers
statistics on all stacktraces.

With this script I did some analysis on what goes in sysbench
readonly and sysbench readwrite.

Starting with sysbench readonly I discovered a lot of things I
already knew such that LOCK_open is a major bottleneck.
There were also many other things that popped up such as:
LOCK_alarm, LOCK_threadcount, LOCK_grant,
btr_search_latch and the mutex on the table object which is
used to discover TABLE level locks on the MySQL level. This
last lock is contended mostly because sysbench is only
operating on one table. So most normal benchmarks will
not have any …

This blogs gives some insights into the new SQL syntax added in WL#3352
and WL#4444 and WL#4571 which all have been included in the
mysql-next-mr tree which is the base for the next milestone release
codenamed Betony.

The purpose of these new changes is to enable improved partition pruning, and
also making it possible to partition on strings. Supporting TRUNCATE on
partitions will improve partition management and the ability to use separate
key caches for different partitions makes MyISAM partitioned tables more
useful. Finally we added a new function TO_SECONDS which makes it
possible to get more fine-grained dates for partitions and subpartitions.

This information will soon find its way into documentation but if you want
to get started right away here it comes.

There are 5 additions effectively:
1) The ability to RANGE partition by …

This Thursday (November 12th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia of the MySQL Community Team will present Gearman for MySQL. Gearman is a client/server infrastructure for generic tasks, usable on distributed servers, with little worry about the details. No matter what language you speak, Gearman can meet your needs in C, PHP, Perl, Ruby, shell scripting, and several more. Gearman can also work in conjunction with MySQL, either using UDFs, or simply through its basic architecture. Giuseppe's talk will show examples of how to use Gearman for remote installation and how to call a complicate data warehousing function written in Perl from any other language, with no knowledge of Perl at all.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser …

The latest release of InfiniDB (out this week - 0.9.5.0) contains a new online alter table function that lets you add new columns to existing InfiniDB tables in an online fashion, meaning queries aren't blocked on the table while the alter is running.  You can still use the standard ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN command, which does an offline alter, but if you want to add columns without impacting query activity, you now have that option open to you.

Doing an online column add involvRead More...

The latest release of InfiniDB (out this week - 0.9.5.0) contains a new online alter table function that lets you add new columns to existing InfiniDB tables in an online fashion, meaning queries aren't blocked on the table while the alter is running.  You can still use the standard ALTER TABLE ... ADD COLUMN command, which does an offline alter, but if you want to add columns without impacting query activity, you now have that option open to you.

Doing an online column add involvRead More...

This Thursday (November 12th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia of the MySQL Community Team will present Gearman for MySQL. I got the time wrong in my original announcement, sorry.

This Thursday (November 12th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia of the MySQL Community Team will present Gearman for MySQL. I got the time wrong in my original announcement, sorry.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Like many I was disappointed, yet not surprised, that the EC formally logged their objection to Oracle’s acquisition of Sun on account of MySQL a few days back.  And we also hear today that Oracle will be stating their position in Brussels on the 25th of this month.  To me this case has odd from the onset and as it goes on it is just getting odder.  And of course this all seems to be occuring at immense cost to Sun, Oracle and MySQL themselves.

There are several reasons why this is odd.  One of the key ones is that for some time MySQL has been quite open about their non compete focus with …