One of the cool things about talking about MySQL performance with ZFS is that there is not much tuning to be done Tuning with ZFS is considered evil, but a necessity at times. In this blog I will describe some of the tunings that you can apply to get better performance with ZFS as well as point out performance bugs which when fixed will nullify the need for some of these tunings.

For the impatient, here is the summary. See below for the reasoning behind these recommendations and some gotchas.

1. Match ZFS recordsize with Innodb page size (16KB for Innodb Datafiles, and 128KB for Innodb log files).
2. If you have a write heavy workload, use a Seperate ZFS Intent Log.
3. If your database working set size does not fit in memory, …

Solaris Cluster comes bundled with rich support for numerous software applications.

Follow the link to see a list of all the Solaris Cluster Agents available in the latest release of  Solaris Cluster  - SC 3.2 01/09.
For most of these applications the latest versions are supported.  In this blog I specifically want to highlight the latest support
for the SAP NetWeaver stack and highlight some key features provided by Solaris Cluster to make SAP highly available on
Solaris.

Solaris Cluster 3.2 HA SAP Web Application Server agents now support SAP 7.1 on S10 SPARC and X64. You will need
patch# 126062-06 or later for S10 SPARC or patch# 126063-07 or later for S10 X64. This patch is required for the following
Resource Types (RTs) - SUNW.sapenq, SUNW.saprepl, SUNW.sapscs, …

Since the Sun acquisition was announced I continue to get questions on how it will impact MySQL. This seems to be mainly as a result of the close affinity between PHP and MySQL. I must admit that while I had a lot of immediate thoughts when the IBM/Sun rumor was floating around, I have had a bit of a harder time figuring out what the Oracle/Sun acquisition means for the various pieces of Sun's business including MySQL.

Like many I believe that Oracle would not want to kill MySQL and that steering it more towards the SQL Server market as opposed to Oracle DB could make a lot of sense for Oracle. After all, MySQL definitely competes with SQL Server on ease-of-use and some of the mainstream relational DB features, while for the very high-end features, Oracle is still way ahead (Real Application Clusters, Database Resident Connection Pooling, Backup & …

If you missed Gearman or Drizzle at the MySQL Conference, have no fear, a number of folks will be at OSCON too! There will be a many opportunities to learn more or get involved with the two projects:

• 3-Hour Gearman Tutorial - Learn about the latest developments and participate in hands-on demos to help build your own Gearman-powered applications.
• 45-Minute Gearman Session - Get a more concise glimpse about what Gearman is and how to use it.
• 45-Minute Drizzle Panel - Get an update and ask questions about …

Brian Miezejewski will be presenting at the North Texas MySQL Users Group on June 1st on performance tuning on your system. Brian is a top-level tuning guru and this is your chance to get an expert to examine your system.

So on your system, run the following:

mysqladmin -u -p va >varis.txt


Then during your peak usage time (if possible):

mysqladmin -u -p ex -i 15 -r >stats.txt


Let it run for 10 minutes before hitting ctrl-c to kill it. Bring in the varis.txt and the stats.txt files for tuning and review.


Meeting: June 1st
7:00 PM
Sun Offices
Suite 700
16000 Dallas Tollway
Dallas


NorthTexasMySQL.org

As part of integration with Sun Learning, MySQL Certification will be moving from using Pearson VUE to Prometric as our testing partner. July 31st, 2009 will be the last day that candidates will be able to take exams or use MySQl exam vouchers at a Pearson VUE test center. Those with outstanding exam vouchers that they can not use by July 31st, 2009 should contact certification@sun.com for an exchange.

I had the pleasure to sit on the Performance Panel at the recent Percona Performance Conference. While the panel contained a number of usual MySQL suspects, one person was not familiar, that being Cary Millsap from Method R.

An expert in optimizing Oracle performance, Cary also gave an session on Day 2 that I attended. While he opened professing not to be an expert in MySQL, his talk provided valuable foundation knowledge irrespective of whether you use MySQL or another database product.

Having come myself from 7 straight years in system architecture and performance tuning in Ingres, then a further 6 years in Oracle again heavily involved in system architecture and performance tuning, a lot of my …

1. Flare -- dynamically partitioning and reconstructing key-value server. Currently built on Tokyo Cabinet, but backend is theoretically pluggable. (via joshua on delicious)
2. Implantable Device Offers Continuous Cancer Monitoring -- the sensor network begins to extend into our bodies. The cylindrical, 5-millimeter implant contains magnetic nanoparticles coated with antibodies specific to the target molecules. Target molecules enter the implant through a semipermeable membrane, bind to the particles and cause them to clump together. That clumping can be detected by MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). The device is made of a polymer called polyethylene, which is commonly used in orthopedic …

One of the better kept secrets about MySQL Cluster appears to be the flexibility available when setting up replication. Rather than being constrained to implementing a single replication scheme, you can mix and match approaches.

Just about every Cluster deployment will use synchronous replication between the data nodes within a node group to implement High Availability (HA) by making sure that at the point a transaction is committed, the new data is stored in at least 2 physical hosts. Given that MySQL Cluster is usually used to store the data in main memory rather than on disk, this is pretty much mandatory (note that the data changes are still written to disk but that’s done asynchronously to avoid slowing down the database).

MySQL Cluster Replication

MySQL asynchronous replication is often used for …

Following the launch of the Open Database Alliance a number of interesting reports were published that examined its role in establishing MariaDB as an alternative development branch for MySQL and as a vendor-neutral open source database collective.

I had a few questions myself, which Monty Widenius and Peter Zaitsev, CEO of Percona, were good enough to answer for me via email. They also agreed for the exchange to be published here. This is what they had to say:

Q: Monty has stated that the intention is to open up the Alliance to include other open source database projects - any indication of how this would be done given the diverse …