Augusto Bott and myself had a wonderful time at April’s MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California, and also at the coinciding MySQL Camp and Percona Performance Conference.

We presented two sessions at the conference, and we wanted to share the slides with you. The first one is called Proactive Operational Measures.

The second one is called 8 Simple Rules to Design Secure Applications.

Augusto and I promised that we would make the slides available online, so we’re sorry for the slight delay in getting them published. Enjoy!

Do you like having to constantly tune your database to get the best performance out of queries?  Are you tired of having to outsmart the optimizer?

I’ve been a DBA for a long time now.  My personal mantra is “tuning is the mind killer.”  Sure, it can be fun at times to dig into an explain plan.  You sit down.  You have some coffee, and after awhile you emerge from your cubicle triumphant over your familiar nemesis, the MySQL query optimizer.   Unless you are waiting hours while building a new index, that is.  In general, tuning is tedious and boring especially if it is what consumes most of your day.

Getting to the point, as a DBA I can tune MySQL to get pretty good results, but I don’t have to like it.  I’m going to show you how you could tune the demo query to get better results on MyISAM, but those results are still many times slower than Kickfire.

The …

Travelling to Hongkong and Taipei has made such an impression on me, that I couldn’t help but add two new blogs to my homepage kaj.arno.fi:

• http://blogs.arno.fi/guanxi/ is (or pretends to be) in Simplified Chinese, written on the Chinese mainland
• http://blogs.arno.fi/yilingyi/ is (or pretends to be) in Traditional Chinese, written here in Taiwan

Guanxi means “relations”, as in “Community Relations”. It’s also a very common word describing how to get things done in China. It even has its own English language Wikipedia entry.

Yi-ling-yi means one-oh-one, as in Taipei 101. …

So, I was pointed to a post by Dean Ellis saying that MySQL needs a mothership which was written in response to another post by Baron Schwartz saying a mothership might not be the best thing for MySQL. Selena Decklemann recently posted about the issue of not having a company behind the software in the Postgres world.

Baron’s first post was spurned by someone saying:
you know, you guys really need Sun/MySQL, because without the mother ship, things will fall apart and your own business will fail.

Dean thinks this may be have been a conversation he had, and states:
What I actually said …

A couple of notes:

1) I have already shared these thoughts with the Innodb team (and received some encouraging thoughts).
2) I wrote this about a week ago. Drizzle/Memcached/Gearman keep me busy so I only got to spend a couple of weekend days to look over the Innobase Embedded Engine. I wish I had more time to go in depth.
3) Innodb has a forum for the engine here where you can get more answers: http://forums.innodb.com/list.php?8
4) You can download the technology from here: http://www.innodb.com/products/embedded-innodb/
5) I'd love to see someone take the embedded engine and port it directly to the Drizzle Engine Interface. I think that the interface they have done would make a much better starting point for integration then what we have today.

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A few years back when being engaged in a new position, we were wondering what backup method would be used. We assumed we would be using something like Zmanda to manage backups centrally for all servers. Boy, were we in for a surprise! The enterprise company was using EMC's BCV solution! None of us were quite sure how this would integrate with MySQL!

After doing some research and talking with the "BCV guy" we learned that BCV has to establish a "pair" with a drive of the exact same size. It is a sort of running mirror of the drive for those of you who are not familiar with it. Then once the backup and the data are synced, you "break the mirror." Pretty simple idea, but how do we guarantee consistency? That was the problem!

We talked with MySQL and asked if they had support for BCV and the technician acted kind of surprised as well and informed us they didn't. Now what? We had to create a custom solution!

…

Have you ever tried to start a server like MySQL and been amazed to see an error that the port is already in use? You rack your brain and try to figure out what it would be to no avail. Sometimes you do a "ps" in Linux and don't even see anything that you think would be using the port. Well, forutantely, there are some tricks to help you find out without doing a reboot. If it is a production server, a reboot may not be an option anyway!

Below are some methods to help. We will start by looking at the "fuser" utility provided with many Linux distros:

fuser -n tcp 80
80/tcp:               1029  1030  1824  1838  1839  1840  1841 13972 14136 14137 14712

This example shows a simple check of everything using port 80. What you see above is a list of PIDs that are using that port. Now we could probably just do a simple "ps" to figure out what it is. You might also want to get more info by doing something like the …

Just wanted to call everyone’s attention to a couple of new articles I’ve recently written that you may be interested in.  The “A Quick Look at MySQL 5.4” article has seen a lot of hits as has the download link for MySQL 5.4.  If you haven’t tried MySQL 5.4 yet, please do and let us know what you think.  One question I’ve gotten quite frequently is “Besides the InnoDB scalability fixes, where are the other enhancements in 5.4 you talk about?”  The answer is they aren’t included right now, and are expected later.  I mention that fact at the bottom of the article, but I apologize that I didn’t make that fact prominent enough.

Another article you might find interesting is “ …

Many of us at Valcora were "fortunate" to start our tech careers in a small web development shop where we were expected to be "jack-of-all-trades." We say "fortunate" because at the time, it doesn't seem so great. Looking back, however, it is clear that we got a lot of experience that was invaluable that way.

We were expected to be Linux System Administrators, handle user accounts, Linux installs, manage DNS, install/configure/manage Apache, do custom PHP programming, MySQL Database Administrator, search engine optimization, and on and on...

As we have worked with various companies over the years, we all have realized that not everyone else grew up in that kind of environment. The normal that we have encountered is highly specialized individuals who know one thing and know it fairly well. While there is absolutely nothing wrong with that in many cases, it can be a crutch and a short-coming for anyone wanting to be a …

and i created a new DataBuffer2, which has pool-type as template argument.
it was "impossible" to alter DataBuffer to do this...it was simply to hard-wired to ArrayPool. too bad.

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so now everything in Dbspj can/will be using the ArenaAllocator...
rationale for ArenaAllocator is really not to have a "quick" release (the code still releases each object individually...to reset magic values) but that it's a kind of variable length allocation strategy that provide great locality of data...

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also pushed infrastructure for "result-set correlation".
Dbspj will (at least for now) when joining only return rows once so in the case of a 2-way join, a SQL result set will return the rows from the first table one time *for each* match in second table.
Dbspj will not...(but ha_ndbcluster will have to do this...when presenting things for mysqld) and since it will not, …