By popular demand, we are now offering an on-line incarnation of our DRBD Total training sessions, normally taught in a 4-day on-site course. The next such training commences on May 18 (next Monday), and we still have a few seats left — so if you’re interested, grab one while you still can!

What’s covered in this course?

Here is an overview of the course highlights:

• Introduction to High Availability Clustering & DRBD
• Setting up a DRBD resource and common failure scenarios
• Configuring and running the Heartbeat/Pacemaker cluster stack
• Highly available NFS, MySQL, and virtualization
• DRBD performance tuning and optimization
• DRBD integration with Red Hat Cluster Suite
• Recent and future DRBD development

Every course attendee gets a virtual cluster to play with and practice on. It doesn’t get much more hands-on than this.

Last week we were busy to align XtraDB performance with 5.4, now we have some results. Currently it is available as "hacks" to XtraDB (available on Lauchpad lp:~percona-dev/percona-xtradb/hacks-porting-tune if you are interested). Basically we took improvements from 5.4 and backported ones performance related to XtraDB.

Here are results for tpcc-like workload, 100W (~10GB) ( raw results and parameters are available here
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=rxUEhM2dqbX0uAfq9j6WQ_w ). Box Dell PowerEdge R900 (Does Dell have referral program ? ), with RAID10 (8 disks) on ext3, 32GB of RAM.

As you see there almost no difference and you may say what's the reason in XtraDB ? The most interesting reason is XtraDB based on InnoDB-plugin and contains its nice features like FAST INDEX CREATION and dynamic pages. And XtraDB has some …

Well, it took us a little while (we’ve been busy !), but we’ve now posted our presentations on InnoDB from the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. You can download these presentations by Heikki Tuuri, Ken Jacobs and Calvin Sun from the InnoDB website, as follows:

• Ken and Heikki: InnoDB: Innovative Technologies for Performance and Data Protection
• Heikki: Crash Recovery and Media Recovery in InnoDB
…

If you have been using opentaps 0.9 or 1.0, you should find the new screens for creating purchase orders in the upcoming version 1.4 much easier to use.

First, the screen for initializing purchase orders has been streamlined. Instead of having to go through two screens to select a supplier and agreements, there is now one screen to do both:Second, when you're adding items to your purchase order, there is now an auto completion which it to prompt you for a product based on either the product ID or a portion of the product name


If the product has not been set up already with a supplier entry in the catalog manager, opentaps 1.4 will let you …

I see this post in MySQL internals: http://lists.mysql.com/internals/36630

It states that "Starting from January 2009" there's a re-engineering effort to improve the modularity of the code base, reduce the number of bugs introduced with new features and a better pluggable architecture to make it easier for third-parties to implement plugins.

Hey, this sounds great! However, I have some questions:

1. This sounds a bit like Drizzle
2. Why the announcement now, in May, when this effort was started in January? If this is all about openness, should not there have been some sort of pre-announcement to the community to solicit opinions?
3. How pervasive will this be? A re-architecture or a gradual direction of development?
4. Where's the code? Where are the plans? Other forks/branches, there is code to show. Is this an …

Have you ever wanted to fire off a post from your phone, Blackberry, Outlook at work…? Following on from Comment Reply Via Email we’re introducing our latest feature to make it even easier to publish to your blog: Post by Email.

Maybe you’re on holiday and want to show your journey. Maybe you’ve captured something with your cell phone that you just have to share. Maybe you’re at work and should be doing something else. With Post by Email you can keep everyone up-to-date without even opening a browser.

Post by Email is super simple to use. From the new My Blogs menu you can generate special email addresses:

You can create as many email addresses as you need, one for each blog you have access to.

Now for the fun part – send an email!

You can send email …

When benchmarking MySQL with InnoDB we quickly discovered
that using InnoDB Thread Concurrency set to 0 was an
improvement to performance since the implementation of
InnoDB Thread Concurrency used a mutex which in itself was
a scalability bottleneck.

Given that InnoDB Thread Concurrency is a nice feature that
ensures that one gets good performance also on an overloaded
server I was hoping to find a way to make the implementation
of this more scalable.

I tried out many different techniques using a combination of
mutexes and atomic variables. However every technique fell to
the ground and was less performant than setting it to 0 and not
using the InnoDB Thread Concurrency implementation. So I was
ready to give up the effort and move on to other ideas.

However after sleeping on it an inspirational idea came up.
Why use a mutex …

About 10 days ago I did a post on Meetup.com expirations and trying to find out what was going on. I have to apologize that I didn't update since then while I contacted Meetup.com and we negotiated what was to happen. Yesterday we blogged about the future of our MySQL User Groups. Yes, if you hadn't heard, we're suggesting that those that wish to continue to have free MySQL User Group management, they should migrate to Facebook. My colleague Colin Charles has produced a guide.

Let me tell you frankly that this is not what we …

On my non-MySQL blog, I just wrote a blog post called “Photo Manager: How do you keep track of your pictures?“. I’m looking for Open Source Software that helps me keep track of my 100,000+ digital pictures. I wrote specs on dreamt-up software called “Robfat” (for rename, order, backup, find, archive, tag) as I want to remove excess fat from my HDs (and CD/DVD cabinets).

And then I thought this may have a MySQL dimension:

What if we had an “EXIF Storage Engine”? What if we could update EXIF tags directly from the MySQL command line, with UPDATE statements, and SELECT picture file names based on tags and other file …

Several people commented on our last blog post or contacted us via our Twitter account, asking questions and raising concerns about migrating the MySQL user group organization to FaceBook. It seems like there is some confusion that we would like to address: you are not required to move to FaceBook. This was just a recommendation, you are of course free to choose whatever service you prefer to manage your MySQL user group. In fact, you are of course welcome to continue using Meetup.com for this! However, be advised that you will have to take care of any occurring fees by yourself from now on, as the sponsorship agreement between MySQL and Meetup.com was not renewed.

And if Facebook is not your cup of tea, there are other services that provide similar functionality. We've tried …