Have you ever wondered how optimized your Memcached installation is? There is a common misconception that one doesn't have to think too deeply about Memcached performance, but that is not true. If your setup is inefficient, you could:

• Burn Memory
• Waste Network Round-Trips
• Store Keys That Never Get Retrieved
• Have a Low Cache Hit Ratio (i.e. query MySQL too much)
• Suffer a fate too horrible to contemplate.

Percona does a lot of consulting around Memcached, so we try to take a quantitative, scientific approach to measuring memcached performance, just like everything else we do.

memcached is basically a key-value in-memory database, so it works well to analyze its traffic with Maatkit's mk-query-digest tool. You can now use …

At OSCON in 2006, I followed sessions that discussed how open source companies would fare when big corporations come in. Back then there were only a handful of examples of big companies purchasing small open source companies. Three years later, we've witnessed MySQL AB get swallowed by Sun, only to have Sun be swallowed by Oracle. Now there are more open questions than ever and at least three versions of MySQL that are jockeying to continue the MySQL blood-line. Yesterday I attended talks by two of these groups and I have to wonder how the MySQL game will play itself out over time.

The first talk I attended was: "Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem" where a number of Drizzle developers shared their thoughts about this project. …

The new Open Source Database Podcast is a companion to the Open Source Database Magazine. Episode one has now been posted and is available for download. For now I am including the show notes below. I will post these notes on the website soon along with all future show notes.

The feed for the podcast is at http://www.osdbzine.net/podcast/osdbpodcast.xml and a direct download of the episode is available here.

Episode Summary

This is the first episode of Open Source Database Podcast. This pod cast is about both open source database servers and the people who develop and use them. The plan is for most episodes to be centered around interviews with various people in the open source community. Kicking …

TheITJobBoard published a report for 18 different types of IT jobs and what salaries they can expect in different part of the UK
I made my own analysis for DBAs using the pandora software inside google spreadsheets
(Please note, that DBAs positions in this survey include Oracle, MS SQL and MySQL DBAs)
DBA Salaries in the UKView more documents from JonathanL.

Original:

The IT Job Board Salary SurveyView more documents from TheITJobBoard.

Today, we’re ready to announce RethinkDB — a new kind of database. It’s been a winding road. For two years, Mike, Leif, and I have been thinking independently on how to bring a breath of fresh air to the database world. Three months ago, we came together to form a company and bring our ideas to reality. In these three months, we’ve raised seed funding from Y Combinator, moved to California, and built a MySQL plugin that implements the core of our vision — a storage engine redesigned for the modern world. With the exception of storage technology, database design has always been beautiful. Now, with dropping costs of storage, the advent of solid state drives, and advances in functional data structures theory, we can finally replace that last messy component of database management systems with an elegant, beautiful solution. …

Important note when upgrading from versions before 3.1:
* MONyog now requires a registration code.
* Do not forget to replace the MONyog.lua script if you use the Query Analyzer with proxy-based sniffing.
* RPM users must uninstall pre-3.1 versions before installing this one.
Please read 3.1 release notes for details.

Changes as compared to 3.11 include:

Features:
* All charts displayed by MONyog can now be exported as PDF/JPG/PNG (from chart context menu).
* Query Analyzer will now sort in descending order as default first time (before it was ascending).

Bug fixes:
* Validation of connection details was not proper when saving.
* In Query Analyzer options that do not apply for sniffer and log files are …

Today, we're ready to announce RethinkDB -- a new kind of database. It's been a winding road. For two years, Mike, Leif, and I have been thinking independently on how to bring a breath of fresh air to the database world. Three months ago, we came together to form a company and bring our ideas to reality. In these three months, we've raised seed funding from Y Combinator, moved to California, and built a MySQL plugin that implements the core of our vision -- a storage engine redesigned for the modern world. With the exception of storage technology, database design has always been beautiful. Now, with dropping costs of storage, the advent of solid state drives, and advances in functional data structures theory, we can finally replace that last messy component of database management systems with an elegant, beautiful solution.

Much …

Sysbench is a open source product that enables you to perform various system benchmarks including databases. Drizzles performs regression testing of every trunk revision with a branched version of sysbench within Drizzle Automation.

A pending branch https://code.launchpad.net/~elambert/sysbench/trunk_drizzle_merge by Eric Lambert now enables side by side testing with MySQL and Drizzle. On a system running MySQL and Drizzle I was able install this sysbench branch with the following commands.

cd bzr
bzr branch lp:~elambert/sysbench/trunk_drizzle_merge
cd trunk_drizzle_merge/
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Running the default lua tests supplied required me to ensure …

If your compiling a product that includes a dependency of MySQL, you can easily get the error

configure: error: mysql_config executable not found

I generally don’t see this problem, because I use MySQL binary tar files, however if you use MySQL packages, such as Ubuntu, you can easily miss the required dependency.

My currently installed MySQL packages on this Ubuntu machine are:

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql
ii  libdbd-mysql                               0.8.2-1-4.1                               MySQL database server driver for libdbi
ii  libdbd-mysql-perl                          4.008-1                                   A Perl5 database interface to the MySQL data
ii  libmysqlclient15off                        5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2            MySQL database client library
ii  libmysqlclient16                           5.1.31-1ubuntu2                           MySQL database client library
ii  libqt4-sql-mysql …

What do you do when you're in a situation where you REALLY need your favorite Maatkit tools, but are not allowed to load software on the server running MySQL, AND you're not allowed to install software on the provided workstation, especially a workstation that's running software from a large corporation in Redmond? Portable Maatkit to the rescue!

DISCLAIMER: I've only tested a few maatkit tools, namely mk-find and mk-query-digest, but not completely. Some features and some tools may not function, such as mk-audit. Use your best judgment. I'm not responsible if your workstation or server looses all your data, your USB key bursts into flames, or your significant other leaves you. YMMV, use at YOUR OWN RISK!

Strawberry Perl has been out for some time now, and recently, a portable version of Strawberry Perl has been available. Download the the latest 5.10 version of …