Some months ago, Google released a patch for InnoDB that boosts performance on multi-core servers. We decided to incorporate the change into the InnoDB Plugin to make everybody happy: users of InnoDB don’t have to apply the patch, and Google no longer has to maintain the patch for new versions of InnoDB. And it makes us at Innobase happy because it improves our product (as you can in this post about InnoDB Plugin release 1.0.3).

However, there are always technical and business issues to address. Given the low-level changes in the patch, was it technically sound? Was the patch stable and as rock solid as is the rest of InnoDB? Although it was written for the built-in InnoDB in MySQL 5.0.37, we needed to adapt it to the InnoDB Plugin. Could we …

Many InnoDB scalability problems seem fixed in InnoDB-plugin-1.0.3 and I expect InnoDB-plugin will run fine on 16-24 cores boxes for many workloads. And now it is time to look on systems with 32GB+ of RAM which are not rare nowadays. Working with real customer systems I have wish-list of features I would like to see soon:

• Fast recovery. Both recovery after crash and recovery from backup can take unacceptable long time, especially if you crashed with full 32GB buffer_pool. There is reported bug http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=29847, with ETA MySQL-6.0
• Preload table / index into buffer_pool. You can use custom queries by primary / secondary key to "warm up" part of table, but this solution is ugly and may be slow due to random logical I/O. Implementing preload of full .ibd file with sequential read would be much better solution. This is actually more …

The annual MySQL Conference & Expo will be held in this year on April 20-23 in Santa Clara, California with a double twist.

Not one, but *two* FREE additional MySQL Conferences are running at the same time, in the same hotel. If you on the west coast you can effectively get a free conference with many MySQL experts speaking at them. I am speaking at all three on three different topics.

The first announcement was the 2009 MySQL Camp organized by Sheeri K. Cabral - The She-BA in line with the O’Reilly approach of having a smaller un-conference within a conference such as with Web 2.0 NY last year.

However the big news was the …

The MyQl 5.1 DAB exam is series of tasks. The material was divided into a mandatory section and an optional section. The mandatory section is a test of core MySQL DBA skills and you must pass all five. The option section, to be detailed in the next post, is made up of ten tasks and the candidate must past at least five of them. This may sound simple but try cramming a full day of DBA work into two hours and you will have a good idea of what taking this new exam is like.

The Mandatory Tasks

1. 
   
2. Account maintenance
   

• 
  
• Add, delete and modify accounts using the mysql database.
  
• Assign privileges for a user on a table and column basis.
  
• Reset passwords
  
• Locate 'anonymous' accounts (where password AND user are both = '')
  

Index management

The #mysql-dev irc channel on freenode was created with the idea of getting the community people more involved in active discussion about mysql internals and development. When the channel was first created this happened for a few weeks and I was pretty happy to be able to observe and participate in the discussion. Now it’s mostly idle.

It seems that some people at Sun think there is still active discussion or internal developers paying attention to the channel because the GSoC web page directs people to #mysql-dev as a point of contact. The problem is there isn’t anyone there answering questions. I’ve seen quite a few people over the past few weeks ask questions that have gone unanswered. I think it’s time to restart the movement to open development and using #mysql-dev for discussion.

I’m excited to announce that Paul Vallée, Pythian Founder and Executive Chairman, will be on-the-air online this week with a free webinar — Database Platform Migration: when is it strategically appropriate to migrate existing applications to an open-source platform? It’s based on our 10+ years experience supporting proprietary databases, such as Oracle and SQL Server, and open-source MySQL databases on the other hand and what we learned on the numerous migrations.

One of the recent projects completed with one of our Australian clients — 1 TB Oracle RDB on OpenVMS migrated to MySQL on Linux with Heartbeat cluster for high availability.

On the other hand, one telco client in Sydney, which we provide Oracle support for, notified me that they recently migrated a MySQL database to Oracle because they couldn’t find high quality enterprise level support for it. I wish we were engaged with them earlier but they seem to be …

This week, I'm finishing up my book "Developing Web Applications using Perl, memcached, MySQL and Apache". I just finished up Chapter 1, which is the first chapter where I discuss several things such as how much things have changed in the last ten years with web development and Open Source in general. This lead me to write a small section about the future. I was pondering -- where are we going to be in ten years from now? What projects will be popular? This lead me even to a more specific question, and one that I would ask here: what is to become with the development of MySQL? What will be the official development branch of MySQL, and where is all the energy and excitement going to be around?

There is now one fork and one major branch of MySQL now that I will mention, both are exciting projects-- and neither of them is coming from official MySQL/Sun:

(The order of these is strictly alphabetic and not priority!)
…

It’s always the little things in life. One of the things that has been a very “little thing” that causes a lot of frustration while writing The MySQL Administrator’s Bible is the prompt. Specifically, the fact that you can only change the first line of the prompt, but not the subsequent lines.

The default prompt that appears on the first line of the prompt is:
mysql>
The default (and unchangeable) second line of the prompt is four spaces followed by an ASCII arrow:

    ->

The second line of the prompt is hard-coded to match up very nicely with the first line in a fixed-width font:

mysql> SELECT
    -> 1+2;

However, you can change the prompt, which is pretty handy:

mysql> prompt \d:
PROMPT set to '\d: '
(none): use test;
Database …

One of the things that has made MySQL grow a lot is the easy setup of replication on Internet sites. This has allowed them to grow from one database server to many reasonably easily. Configuration of replication is quite simple and replication itself is extremely fast. That makes it ideal for most people.

However at a point in time you begin to notice some of the weaknesses in the current design. Here are a few comments providing ideas on what I would like to see in MySQL replication and why they are features which are important to anyone who’s database requirements grow outside of a single database instance.

My list of current issues is as follows:

1. MySQL only allows replication from 1 to N servers.
2. Some important aspects of MySQL Configuration are not dynamic.
3. Replication is part of the mysqld server, not a separate process.
4. It’s not easy to configure table replication (config …

We added some new features to our backup tool, namely:

• Now we can handle log file taken during backup with size exceeding 4GB, it may happen if backup takes too long and you have a lot of updates on InnoDB tables
• Progress meter during recovery step, now you can see what percentage of log file was handled

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 1316 3688693248 (34 %)
2. ...
3. InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 1316 4113366528 (68 %)
4. InnoDB: Doing recovery: scanned up to log sequence number 1316 4117548544 (68 %)

Also we did extensive testing and fixed bugs, so now we consider current state as feature complete and with beta-release stability.

You can …