I have had a wish for a few years. I wanted to find a way to put together the valuable information that the community produces about MySQL, a way that would let me easily find the interesting content that I may have missed when on vacation, or when busy with a conference, a company meeting, or a long stream of coding.

That wish started to take shape last year, when I was traveling with Dups during the East Coast tour. I drove, he took notes. He drove, I took more notes. During meals and walking breaks we discussed and refined the idea. When we went back home, a plan was ready. Dups started coding in January.

At first, his changes were completely invisible. He was refactoring the Planet MySQL code to integrate it with the advanced features that had been developed for the main site. After a series of secondary changes, there came the substantial one. The voting …

The Percona team has kept on expanding. We are very pleased to announce the addition of Morgan Tocker and Matt Yonkovit!

Morgan has been with us for a while. Before joining Percona, Morgan worked as a Technical Instructor for MySQL (and then Sun Microsystems) in Canada where he taught courses on High Availability, Performance Tuning and Database …

The MySQL 5.4 “Azalea” version was scheduled for a feature freeze last week. Thus it’s getting clearer what will come with the next milestone in a few months. The following is not official information but it is what I can actually see.

What’s not in

Some features, which I expected and predicted would be in, are not in.
* WL#2360 Performance Schema. We’re now in the fifth month of the first code review.
* WL#2649 Number-to-string conversions. We’re still using VARBINARY a lot.
* WL#1326, WL#2377 GIS
* WL#4803 Pluggable Query Cache module
* WL#1213 Supplementary Characters. This feature works great but could disrupt upgrades.

I apologize if I got anyone’s hopes up. The tasks are not cancelled and I’m hopeful about the next milestone releases.

What’s in

BACKUP and RESTORE are in, provided you start the server with mysqld –new. Some people say the …

I’ll be talking about the latest features in Gearman along with covering a few Gearman-powered applications tomorrow, July 14th, at 10AM Pacific time. Follow this link for details on how to sign up: Gearman: New Features and Applications for Distributed Job Queuing

Brian Aker and I will also be talking about Gearman at the PostgreSQL pgDay San Jose on Sunday, July 19th, and at OSCON the week after. See the Gearman presentations page for more information.

It may be tested again! Reason for the new version are two new releases of the main components of XAMPP: PHP and MySQL.

New in the XAMPP versions: MySQL (5.1.36), PHP (5.3.0), and phpMyAdmin (3.2.0.1).

Go to XAMPP BETA download area

XAMPP BETA versions are always for testing purposes only. There will be no upgrade packages from and to beta versions. To all testers: Many thanks in advance!!

Recently new performance builds were made by our MySQL Team, and it seems to me reaching now a new milestone with the build #45 - within this single build Mikael joined several previously tested performance builds showed a positive performance improvement. So, how well it's comparing now to the default 5.4 ?..

Here are my results obtained on M5000 (quad-cores)/ Solaris10 update7 and db_STRESS.

Solaris 10 update7

Special note about update7: I was pleasantly surprised the kernel locks issue was gone! CPU Spinlocks within a similar workload are devided by 4(!) - very positive improvement, and seems the things will be even better with update8!

Read-Only Workload

For my big surprise there was no difference (or very few) between …

A couple of  weeks ago I got an unhappy email from my web hosting provider telling me I was in violation of their Terms of Service. Of course I called them immediately and was told that there was a “phishing page” hidden in one of my web directories. My blog had been hacked, so I immediately started doing some house cleaning.

After the initial once over and deletion of any suspicious files I went looking for advice on how to “harden my installation”. Here’s what I found:

• Wordpress.org Codex Hardening Wordpress - Lots of good information here on hardening Wordpress including a general overview of Wordpress security considerations.
• …

We had 12 projects, and by the time we’ve hit mid-terms, we’ve decided to cull 2 project so far, leaving us with 10 projects.

This year, the MySQL project can really divide itself into three groups – those hacking on MySQL, Drizzle, or phpMyAdmin. Next year, will we see others? I certainly hope so…

Drizzle – Padraig O’Sullivan is doing an excellent job at working on a new implementation of the INFORMATION_SCHEMA. Nathan Williams is doing great work at code cleanup for Drizzle, and making it conform to C++ standards. Jiangfeng Peng is hacking on batch nested loop join’s in Drizzle.

phpMyAdmin – Derek Schaefer is adding import improvements to phpMyAdmin, while Tomas Srnka is working on adding MySQL Replication support for phpMyAdmin (and impressing his mentor!). Zahra Naeem is working on change tracking of data/structures, and you’d expect some more work after the mid-term, once some problems are worked …

The question "what problems will I have when migrating to the cloud" gets asked often enough. If by cloud you mean Amazon EC2, then from a technical perspective there isn't much that changes. The biggest thing that changes is just how you pay your bill.

Having said that, there's still a few potential gotchas:

1. There are no Virtual IP addresses. Most High Availability tools (like MMM or DRBD+Heartbeat)
   work on the principal of having a floating IP address which is used for the application to connect to the current master. With EC2, you can't do this.
2. There's no customization of the memory. The maximum amount of memory you can have is 15GB, so some users with larger working sets may find this a limitation. If you look at the Dell online store, it costs $2094 to upgrade an R900 from 4G memory to 64G (or $4378 to upgrade to 128G) which …

I have had a wish for a few years. I wanted to find a way to put together the valuable information that the community produces about MySQL, a way that would let me easily find the interesting content that I may have missed when on vacation, or when busy with a conference, a company meeting, or a long stream of coding.

That wish started to take shape last year, when I was traveling with Dups during the East Coast tour. I drove, he took notes. He drove, I took more notes. During meals and walking breaks we discussed and refined the idea. When we went back home, a plan was ready. Dups started coding in January.

At first, his changes were completely invisible. He was refactoring the Planet MySQL code to integrate it with the advanced features that had been developed for the main site. After a series of secondary changes, there came the substantial one. The voting …