Now, I must admit, I happen to like trains. I can now also strongly recommend taking the train from Denver to San Francisco to anyone who has a couple days to spare and a lot of patience. There's nothing like rocking to sleep on a train and certainly nothing like doing a bit of python programming while you watch the mountains and desert just fly past you (yes the rooms come with plug outlets for your computer). Do remember however that the room barely fits me and my backpack!

I'm adding a couple of photos, but first a MySQL Campus Tour update.

I'm in San Francisco, I have ten universities under my belt. I've crossed the nation to discover that we need to do more with students and databases, I've met wonderful people and now I am not alone!

As of tomorrow, Colin Charles will join me, as will Frank Mashraqi for Berkeley (April 15) and Stanford (April 16 -- actually at Stanford you will get Colin and Frank, …

I wrote previously about what I’m looking forward to at the upcoming MySQL Conference (next week!). Now I want to write about the free, community-organized unconference being held concurrently, MySQL Camp 2009. It runs from Sunday through Thursday of next week, which is even longer than the MySQL conference. It starts Sunday with a day of games, then there are really good sessions throughout the week. In fact, I daresay the schedule is at times more interesting than the main MySQL conference:

Thanks to Days of Wonder the company I work for, I’m proud to release in Free Software (GPL):

mysql-snmp – monitor a MySQL server with SNMP History

At Days of Wonder, we’re using MySQL for almost everything since the beginning of the company. We were initially monitoring all our infrastructure with mon and Cricket, including our MySQL servers. Nine months ago I migrated the monitoring infrastructure to OpenNMS, and at the same we lost the Cricket MySQL monitoring (which was done with direct SQL SHOW STATUS LIKE commands).

I had to find another way, and since OpenNMS excels at SNMP, it was natural to monitor MySQL through SNMP. My browsing …

Take a look here:

  Response Time (s)
 Transaction      %    Average :    90th %        Total        Rollbacks      %
------------  -----  ---------------------  -----------  ---------------  -----
    Delivery   3.98      0.211 :     0.266       274829                0   0.00
   New Order  44.78      0.157 :     0.187      3090951            30925   1.00
Order Status   3.99      0.149 :     0.179       275357                0   0.00
     Payment  42.76      0.150 :     0.180      2951361                0   0.00
 Stock Level   3.99      0.152 :     0.182       275564            92070  33.41

50606.82 new-order transactions per minute (NOTPM)
60.5 minute duration
0 total unknown errors
31 second(s) ramping up

If you know what this output is from, and you know what 50K TPM means… your probably curious about these #’s. I am probably tantalizing you right now in fact. But I am not going to tell you more, not yet. So go ahead and guess. Better yet come …

There are several tasks that depend on WL#2360 Performance Schema. They’re all public now, so you can find the description of the whole set on forge.mysql.com.

WL#2333 SHOW ENGINE … LOCK STATUS
WL#2360 Performance Schema
WL#2515 Performance statements
WL#3249 SHOW PROCESSLIST should show memory
WL#4674 PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA Setup For Actors
WL#4678 PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA Instrumenting File IO
…

This is an issue that keeps rearing its ugly head over and over again, and since it greatly affects performance, it is most important that DBAs of any DMBS running on Linux come to grips with it. So I decided to do some research and try different settings on my notebook. Here are my findings.

What can you find on the web?

A Wikipedia search for the word swappiness will come up empty (any volunteers out there want to write an article?). A Google search will show some pretty old material—the best article I found is from 2004: Linux: Tuning Swappiness. This article includes a detailed discussion with some interesting remarks by Andrew Morton, a Linux kernel maintainer.

So, what is swappiness?

Towards the end of the email thread quoted in the article, you’ll find this definition (sort of):

> I’ve read the source for where …

The last open keynote slot in the MySQL Conference, Thursday 10:00am, is now filled with the keynoter we had in mind all the time: Sun co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim.

Andy’s bio is one of the longest and most impressive of MySQL Conference keynoters ever:

• Sun co-founder, employee number one
• invented the “Stanford University Network workstation” that eventually became the Sun-1 Workstation
• was instrumental in launching other successful Sun products, including the SparcStation 1
• now works with Sun’s Systems Group to help drive next generation X64 and storage servers product architecture as well as HPC opportunities
• left Sun in 1994 and rejoined 2005 through Sun acquiring his company Kealia
• was one of the first investors in Google

What will Andy talk about? “The Solid State Storage …