I suppose it looks odd that many of the “6.x” features I’ve blogged about are now “5.4″ features. Sorry about the surprise. In mitigation I observe that this means some things are now scheduled a bit quicker, and some are a lot better than expected. Sometimes it’s hard to know till tests are in.

The current server 5.4 download is here:
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.4.html.
It does not have all the features yet that we have announced as 5.4.

The features in the current 5.4 download are:

* Scalability, that is, it works faster if you add cores or processors.
A lot of the work for this happened outside the MySQL group per se, it’s lovely to have bunches of performance experts from elsewhere in Sun Microsystems, also known as Sun Classic, doing the tweaks for us. Tests show that 5.4 is faster than any variant, whether genuine MySQL or not.

There’s a …

Today I moved from using Mercurial to using bzr on Launchpad for libmemcached.

Why BZR?

I use Launchpad for pretty much all of my projects at this point. I have been really happy with it, and I have found that bzr works well for Linux/Windows/Mac. Drizzle, Gearman and others are already there so this just simplifies my daily workflow.

This should help with me being able to take patches a bit more quickly (and for that matter do reviews). Having contributors push their patches to their own trees, allows me to easily pull patches and do reviews. With Drizzle we keep a "staging" tree just so that we can regression test any code before it goes to trunk. Since code in Drizzle goes through several people before I see it, we each …

Well, this looks pretty darn interesting. I don't have a lot of time to play with this, but SchemaBank, if it delivers on its promise, looks like a very useful ERD tool at a pretty reasonable price point.

You can export a SQL dump from MySQL or PostgreSQL, import this into SchemaBank, and start going. Or you can start with a fresh schema. You can do visual data modeling, versioning, branching, diffing - in other words, both modeling and change control for your schema.

The UI looks sweet, although I'd be curious how it handles super-large schemas, always the bane of ER tools. It does have "Bird's View" which is a good sign they're thinking in the large.

Yesterday, The Pythian Group issued a press release about my book, Pythian’s partnership with Sun, and our new “MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package”. I am not a marketing guru, but I can tell you what we the package means in terms of new work that the MySQL teams have been doing.

Basically, the MySQL Adoption Accelerator Package combines customized training with a comprehensive audit of systems. The name “Adoption Accelerator” makes it sound like it’s only for new applications that are almost ready to go live. What the program actually does is have us evaluate your systems, and intensively train you in the areas you want and need. The program is designed to suit all your needs, whether it’s teaching you about one topic (say, query optimization) or an entire range of topics, from Architecture to ZFS (special issues with running MySQL on ZFS, that is, but that did not fit a cute …

This is a first entry on my new blog. Maybe the first statement can be just “First post!!!”, but I want to tell my potential readers why this blog was founded, what’s its purpose and what you can hopefully find here in the future.

The original reason to create this blog was to have some place where I can post my ideas about my work. I’m currently working as a package maintainer in SuSE and sometimes I’m facing some things that I think people should know about. But who reads mailing lists nowadays? If I’ll be good at blogging, I’ll be googleable and therefore these idea may actually find some audience. Well, other thing is that my first goal is to get aggregated on Planet SuSE, once this site will be finished enough.

While I was thinking about this stuff, I realized that this may be a good opportunity to create some personal pages about myself too. Well, everyone wants a little bit of attention and I’ll probably want …

About three weeks from now, Rickard Falkvinge (founder of the Pirate Party) will be kicking off the Vancouver Open Web Conference. He’ll be presenting a keynote on how, in just three years, a party with an odd name organized around a narrow electronic frontier platform has become the fourth largest political party in Sweden. It’s an amazing story that makes a good parable about how the world is changing and is a fitting start for a conference that we’ve (meaning mostly Jeff Griffiths, Malcolm van Delst, Mike Cantelon and Tim Whiteway) worked hard to make a careful balance of accessible, …

I’m pleased to announce version 0.6 of the Gearman C server and library. The major new feature of this release is a pluggable persistent queue for the job server. It comes bundled with a libdrizzle module (so your queue can live in Drizzle or MySQL), but Brian has already written a libmemcached module and there is a flat-file module in the works as well. The persistent queue allows background jobs to be stored via the pluggable module, so if the job server crashes or is shutdown, the queue module can repopulate the job server with any jobs that were not yet complete. This is just the first version of the queue support, so expect more modules and features in the future!

On a related note, James Luedke has also released version 0.3 of the …

The quality of MySQL 5.4.0 is very high for a beta product.
Four weeks after we released it as beta we have not had
any real serious bugs reported yet. There are some issues
due to deprecation of features, version numbers and a
bug in the SHOW INNODB STATUS printout and some concerns
with the new defaults when running on low-end machines.
It's also important as usual to read the documentation
before upgrading, it contains some instructions needed to
make an upgrade successful. The upgrade issue comes from
changing the defaults of the InnoDB log file sizes.

For those of you who want to know more about MySQL 5.4.0
and it's characteristics and why you should use it, please
join this webinar where Allan Packer will explain what
has been done in MySQL 5.4.0.

I’ve been to the Chicago MySQL meetups a few times at Uncommon Ground near Wriggly Field. Honestly I don’t think I gained much out of it. The few times I was there, the group was small, which is not necessarily bad. (In fact, a small group can even be a good thing.) But the thing got me was that there was too much talk, not enough action. I haven’t been to its meetings for a few years so I cannot comment on its state after I left.

When I think a user group, I think about fans getting together hacking stuff: demonstrating cool tips and techniques, dissecting a new technology such as MySQL proxy by a user who have done that and learned some hard lessons along the way with no marketing talk, discussing solutions to problems a user has, providing pointers and efficient scripts, etc. In such a setting, each member of the group takes turns providing his/her expertise. The presenter does not necessarily needs talking slides, but must prepare …

A software-based distributed caching system such as memcached is an important piece of today's largest Internet sites that support millions of concurrent users and deliver user-friendly response times. The distributed nature of memcached design transforms 1000s of servers into one large caching pool with gigabytes of memory per node. This blog entry explores single-instance memcached scalability for a few usage patterns.

Table below shows out-of-the-box (no custom OS rewrites or networking tuning required) performance with 10G networking hardware and one single-socket UltraSPARC T2-based server with 8 cores and 8 threads per core (64 threads on a chip). All runs are done with a single memcached instance and 40 worker threads so that about 3 cores (24 threads) are used for the critical networking stack that is also heavily parallelized. 40+24 threads is a nice balance for this …