We had a great meetup last night with Andrew Aksyonoff, Giuseppe Maxia and Sheeri Cabral. It was special to have so many top speakers all in one night. Here are the photos. Sheeri filmed the meetup and will have the … Continue reading →

23 days
2 provinces, 7 states
3000+ miles, 5000+ km
86+ hours in busses and trains
14 universities
400+ students, professors and sun employees

Our crack team of Giuseppe and Sheeri meanwhile accomplished the following spectacular numbers in southern California

4 universities + 1 meetup
180+ students and attendees

Well there you go. When we started this, it was ostensibly for me to meet students and professors. I was going to spread the word of MySQL to universities. Instead I think I learned more from my audiences than perhaps what students learned from us.

We talked about why I think MySQL is a phenomenon, how important MySQL is to the world and why I thought MySQL was the best thing since sliced bread. I'm hopng the students I left behind felt my passion for MySQL!

In Northern California, I'd like to thank the following people and …

Whether you come to Monday’s Tutorial or the Workbench Workshops on Tuesday-Thursday I strongly recommend you bring a laptop. We’ll be doing a lot of hands-on in both and you’ll be missing out on a lot of the content if you don’t have a copy of MySQL Workbench in front of you (we’ll supply the copy of Workbench, in fact you get the SE edition free for a year just for attending).

You should also act now to register for a Workshop if you haven’t already as Tuesday is already “sold out”. Admission is free but we only have 40 seats in each daily workshop.

For those choosing between tutorial and workshop, I’ll say upfront that we’ll feature the same content in both the …

One last reminder, we ( Yves and I ) will be appearing all over the place at the UC. Here is a quick run down of our schedule:

• Tuesday 10:50 am - 11:35 pm (Free MySQL Camp) I will be presenting “Learning from others’ MySQL Performance Mistakes” … a journey into the sometimes silly things we all end up doing.

• Tuesday 2-3pm Yves and I are co-presenting “Distributed Innodb Caching with memcached” … this will be an intro into the Waffle Grid project, what it’s about and what it means to you.

• Tuesday 4:25 pm - 5:10 pm (Free MySQL Camp) Yves will be presenting “NBD (MySQL Cluster) performance tuning and pitfalls”

• Wednesday 2-3pm I will be presenting: “SAN Performance on a Internal Disk Budget: The Coming Solid State Disk Revolution” … the title sounded better when I submitted it, because the fact is SSD’s are here! But the big question is what does it …

SELECT Field0[,Field1,Field2,...] FROM TABLE PROCEDURE ANALYSE() is a nice tool to find out more about your table’s columns. Still, it could be improved in a lot of ways, and the stored procedure below is a starting point. It makes use of procedure analyse (though with ‘SELECT * FROM’), and modifies it’s output to include the […]

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Big events today, and the MySQL User Conference is all abuzz with news, speculation, and even some concern. Oracle has acquired Sun, which again brings the light of Apollo to Mount Parnassus.

Of course, this raises all kinds of questions about the whys and hows. I’m happy to publicly speculate, as I am not in an insider’s position with either Sun or Oracle. Of course, I do work for Monty Program Ab, which makes me somewhat less than a wholly dispassionate bystander. And please, before you read my humble musings on the subject, please read my boss’ thoughts.

Without further ado, here some possible reasons I can see for this move by Oracle:

- Oracle now has a hardware business, something I think they have craved for a very long time.

- Oracle now has their …

"Oh no", you say, "it's ODBC! That horrible, slow and buggy database API! Who in their right mind would use that!"

And I am afraid that I have a slightly different opinion on ODBC than that. I actually think ODBC is pretty good as an API. As far as implementation of the ODBC driver has been for MySQL in particular, well let's be honest and admit that there has been ups and downs, but what is available right now is good and solid, and this has been that case for a while, due to the great team working on MySQL Connector/ODBC right now.

And if you don't know or use ODBC, let me tell you a few facts about it and tell you about some myths:

• ODBC isn't "slow" or "fast" or "buggy". ODBC is just a specification for an API. The implementation may be slow or fast or buggy or all of those things, but that is a different …

Memcached is the de-facto distributed caching server used to scale many web2.0 sites today. With the requirement to support a very large number of users as sites grow, memcached aids scalability by effectively cutting down on MySQL traffic and improving response times.

Memcached is a very light-weight server but is known not to scale beyond 4-6 threads. Some scalability improvements have gone into the 1.3 release (still in beta). With the new Intel Nehalem based systems improved hyper-threading providing twice as much performance as current systems, we were curious to see how memcached would perform on these systems. So we ran some tests, the results of which are shown below :

memcached 1.3.2 does scale slightly better than 1.2.5 after 4 threads. However, both versions reach their …

Working on server-based index analysis I once again recalled a topic I wanted to write about for many times. The topic is redundant “Using where” in query plans. Suppose we have a table like this:

mysql> show create table t1 \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
Table: t1
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `t1` (
`a` int(11) NOT NULL DEFAULT ‘0′,
`b` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
PRIMARY KEY (`a`,`b`)
) ENGINE=PBXT AUTO_INCREMENT=25651 DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1
1 row in set (0.02 sec)

now let’s try to analyse 2 simple queries with EXPLAIN SELECT:

1. SELECT a FROM t1 WHERE a>1;
2. SELECT a FROM t1 WHERE a>1 AND b>1;

mysql> explain select * from t1 where a>1 \G
*************************** 1. row ***********
id: 1
select_type: SIMPLE
table: t1
type: range
…