Performance Tuning is a big and exciting task for any MySQL DBA. Sometimes the most difficult thing to decide in a given scenario is where to "dive in!" There are so many areas to consider application-level, query optimization, hardware optimization, software tweaks, MySQL configuration tuning, etc. The list goes on and on...

Many times when a DBA begins to look at performance tuning for a client, the general assumption is that all of the query traffic coming into the database is essential. Unfortunately, that is not always the case!

Recently, our team was profiling a heavily loaded server running thousands of queries per second. This poor server was really taxed! It's load was consistently approaching 20.0 on the Linux server and increasing week by week at a phenomenal rate. Slaves were regularly falling behind with the heavy traffic.

We knew the obvious place to look was at the queries themselves. We …

I wanted to let everyone know that we are releasing Waffle Grid 0.5 code named Cream. This release fixes the nasty secondary index bug that plagued the butter release. I have been running tests on this code base for about a week straight with no errors. While I think this release is much more stable I would remind everyone this is still not a fully GA release. This release includes the ability to choose the mode of Waffle grid. By setting innodb_memcached_enable to 1, we will push pages to memcached when a disk read is done or when a page write is done, setting this to 2 will enable the classic LRU mode. If you decide to set this to 1 ( non-lru) I would recommend using the standard memcached, as with previous versions the LRU mode works better with our slightly altered memcached ( expire from memcached on get ). I will be posting benchmarks and more details within the next couple of days. Right now you can grab the patch on …

There is an article with a cute title that is gaining popularity:
Do Androids Count Electric Sheep with DB2 or MySQL?
Allegedly, DB2 is demonstrated as incredibly faster than MySQL, with a benchmark that repeats the same COUNT query 100 times.

This is a naive (at best) benchmark that doesn’t tell me nothing about the database potential. But anyway, if you enable the query cache in MySQL, the repetition of 100 queries is at least three times faster than DB2.

Try
set global query_cache_size=1024*1024;
and repeat that test.

Moreover: the table structure doesn’t correspond to the data from the freebase project.

CREATE TABLE `people` (
 `id` int(11) DEFAULT NULL auto_increment PRIMARY KEY,
 `name` varchar(255) NOT …

Always looking at new toolsI've been looking for a better tool to work in a MySQL environment when I want to demo relationships between data models, physical tables, data and SQL code. It has to be a tool that the students can pick up easily without spending a lot of time understanding how it works. It's always an investment to learn another tool. So I've downloaded the MySQL Workbench 5.2

Sun Microsystems today announced the results of a regional survey that shows 44 percent of all large and medium-sized companies in the Nordic and Benelux countries are using open source software (OSS). The survey was conducted by the international market research company TNS Gallup, on behalf of Sun.

Why was Teradata able to become the leader of data warehousing at the super high-end (e.g. greater than 25 TB’s)?  Why was Netezza only the second pure-play data warehousing company to go public by focusing on the 10 – 25 TB range of opportunities?  Why did Oracle after so many years of denial finally announce a joint hardware / software product for data warehousing with HP, the Exadata data warehouse server?  Why did Microsoft acquire DATAllegro, one of the earlier data warehousing appliances? Why are there now dozens of data warehouse appliances available on the market today, and – more importantly – how should a customer choose which one to purchase? 

In all these cases, the vendors have listened to the market and concluded that the most optimal way to serve the customer is through a true data warehouse appliance.  Given that there are so many flavors of appliances, though, here are some things to …

OSCON moves this year from Portland to San Jose.

As one the community panel for Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem I also have a speaker discount which you can combine with O’Reilly having also extended early bird registration until June 23.

Be sure to add the os09fos code for an additional 20% off, and be sure to shout me a drink there.

We’ve got two Yahoo! related news items today.

The first is that we’ve launched a Yahoo! 360 importer (listed in your admin screens under Tools → Import) to make migration from 360 to WordPress.com super easy. Just upload the Yahoo! 360 export ZIP file, and we’ll do the rest. Yahoo! will be shutting down their 360 service soon, so if you have any friends over there feel free to give them a little help and encouragement to head over to WordPress.com

Second is the release of our WordPress.com QuickPress Yahoo! Application. You can post posts and read and moderate your most recent comments straight from My Yahoo!. (Note to any self-hosted WordPress.org folks out there: the app currently only works on WordPress.com. We’re working on making it .com/.org universal.)

Thanks to Yahoo! for …

I’ve been a bit slack about writing my MySQL thoughts of late. This would be caused by the fact that, as I write this, I’m now one week into a 12 month leave of absence from MySQL.

Having given it much careful consideration, I’ve decided that the wisest way to survive the current economic problems is by blowing my savings on a year long holiday in Italy. Wait, did I say holiday? Not really. I’m still a Sun employee, and I’m still going to be active in the MySQL community. My dear support customers just won’t be seeing me around for a while.

I’m looking forward to having time to write more extensively about some of the cool things we’re doing, and what’s going on in the community at large. If there’s anything you’d like to hear about (either expanding on my previous posts, or a completely new topic), please let me know.

Another thing …

Lenz Grimmer recently wrote two blogs about password security on MySQL. Both are worth reading in detail. You’ll find them in Basic MySQL Security: Providing passwords on the command line and More on MySQL password security.

Although I wrote a comment on the latter one, there is one point I thought was worth its own blog.

GRANT … IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD…

You can work around having to specify the password in the open following these steps:

1. Use a local or non-public instance (for example using MySQL Sandbox) to define the user / password combination you need:

   CREATE USER 'name'@'host' IDENTIFIED BY 'secret';

2. Use SHOW GRANTS to …