For any production MySQL Database system, running RAID is a given these days. Do you know what RAID your database is? Are you sure?. Ask for quantifiable reproducible output from your systems provider or your System Administrator.

As a consultant I don’t always know the specific tools for the clients deployed H/W, but I ask the question. On more the one occasion the actual result differed from the clients’ perspective or what they were told, and twice I’ve discovered that clients when asked if their RAID was running in a degraded mode, it actually was and they didn’t know.

You can read about various benchmarks at MySQL blogs such as BigDBAHead and MySQL Performance Blog however getting first hand experience of your actually RAID …

I recently purchased two of these drives on recommendation from a friend, but they are really terrifically horrible drives, especially for MySQL. I won't be accepting his recommendations anymore. I have the same problem with BOTH drives, and surprisingly the drives seem to have more problems and perform worse in RAID0 than as JBOD.

The drives lock up during random write, even for small block transfers. The only way to get the drive to respond after it 'locks', is to power cycle it or the computer.

The following tests were done on my Adaptec 5805 Dual Core RAID controller so I'm sure it isn't the controller's fault. Just to make sure, I tested a Highpoint 2320, a 3ware 9650se and onboard NVIDIA raid (as a PC enthusiast, I have a lot of RAID controllers to test) and all performed similarly.

Random write to the …

Just thought it was worth pointing out that Percona Xtrabackup is not just for XtraDB. It works great for InnoDB tables, too.

So if mysqldump can’t handle it anymore, LVM snapshots kill your server and you don’t want to buy proprietary backup software, you might take a look at Xtrabackup.

Related posts:

1. Hindsight on a scalable replacement for InnoDB A while ag
2. Restoring from a mysqldump into tables with triggers This is ac
3. What is the scalable …

This Thursday (June 11th, 14:00 UTC), Tomas Ulin will give a MySQL University session on The New MySQL Release Model. Tomas is the MySQL Server Director, and will explain the new MySQL release model which has just recently been announced.

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, and more.) All MySQL University sessions are recorded, that is, slides and voice can be viewed as a Flash movie (.flv). …

The PHP BBQ Tour starts in exactly one week. The first barbecue will be held in Munich on Monday, 15.06, 19:00 CEST. The tour is an offering and a suggestion to the user group to come together for a barbecue instead of meeting in conference rooms in the middle of the summer, when the days are long. Everybody is invited to join the tour and to visit the PHP user group in his neighbor town. Tour dates: Munich (Monday, 15.06), Frankfurt (Tuesday, 16.06), Karlsruhe (Wednesday, 17.06), Berlin (Thursday, 18.06), Dortmund (Friday, 19.06), Hamburg (Saturday, 20.06) and Kiel (Sunday, 21.06).

Be a pioneer, sail together with the crew of Mayflower (thinkPHP) and the PHP locals into the Hirschgarten park for the first barbecue on the tour. If you consider to come, please add your name to the Wiki page at …

The PHP BBQ Tour starts in exactly one week. The first barbecue will be held in Munich on Monday, 15.06, 19:00 CEST. The tour is an offering and a suggestion to the user group to come together for a barbecue instead of meeting in conference rooms in the middle of the summer, when the days are long. Everybody is invited to join the tour and to visit the PHP user group in his neighbor town. Tour dates: Munich (Monday, 15.06), Frankfurt (Tuesday, 16.06), Karlsruhe (Wednesday, 17.06), Berlin (Thursday, 18.06), Dortmund (Friday, 19.06), Hamburg (Saturday, 20.06) and Kiel (Sunday, 21.06).

Be a pioneer, sail together with the crew of Mayflower (thinkPHP) and the PHP locals into the Hirschgarten park for the first barbecue on the tour. If you consider to come, please add your name to the Wiki page at …

Just thought it was worth pointing out that Percona Xtrabackup is not just for XtraDB. It works great for InnoDB tables, too. So if mysqldump can’t handle it anymore, LVM snapshots kill your server and you don’t want to buy proprietary backup software, you might take a look at Xtrabackup.

"Rick Falkvinge: Today is a good day for epic winnage.11 hours ago" (Facebook status of the Chairman of Swedish Pirate Party.)

The Swedish Pirate Party (the first of the many national Pirate Parties popping up) wins it's first seat (bordering on two, some votes still left to count) in the European Parliament tonight, with 7+ %. In percentages they drive right past 3 long time established parties from the Swedish national parliament.

This is a historical moment in the turns of copyright and even civil liberties movements. I've personally for years supported the EFFish approach (and member of the Finnish equivalent EFFI) of lobbying all political parties with rational arguments about how good copyright, patents and civil liberties legislation will …

In an earlier blog posting “SQL Standards, ANSI committees, and Sun”, I (Peter Gulutzan) talked about our prospects for joining the American committee charged with database standards, which we typically call “ANSI” although that’s not the formal name (and by the way the formal name is about to change, but I’ll chat about organization some other time).

Well, I’m now Sun’s official voting delegate to the committee. There are also three “alternate” delegates from other parts of Sun; I’ll loosely categorize them as advocates from our PostgreSQL-ophile and Java / Java DB interest groupings. Mostly my concern is the MySQL side of things.

The committee holds frequent meetings by telephone conference, and infrequent ones in personal get-togethers. I’ve just finished attending one of the lengthier meetings. I …

As you can probably guess, I’m catching up on reading my blogs. I’ve just read with interest about TokuDB’s multiple clustering indexes. It’s kind of an obvious thought, once someone has pointed it out to you. I’ve only been around products that insist there can be Only One clustered index (and then there’s ScaleDB, who say “think differently already”).

Anyway, we already know that there are quite a few database products that use clustered indexes and to avoid update overhead, require every non-clustered index to store the clustered key as the “pointer” for row lookups. Thus there are “hidden columns” which are present at the leaf nodes, but not the non-leaf nodes, of secondary indexes. Why not take that idea and run with it a little? Here’s what I mean: