The release of the MySQL 5.4 contains patches which
increases the scalability of the MySQL Server. I am planning to blog
about those changes in some detail over the next few days. This blog
will give an introduction and show what the overall results we have
achieved are.

The changes we have done in MySQL 5.4 to improve scalability and
the ability to monitor the MySQL Server are:

1) Google SMP patch
2) Google IO patches
3) Update of many antiquated defaults in the MySQL Server
4) New InnoDB Thread Concurrency algorithm
5) Improved Spinloop in InnoDB mutexes and RW-locks
6) A couple of performance fixes backported from 6.0
7) Operating system specific optimisations
8) Ported the Google SMP patch to Solaris x86 and SPARC and work
underway for Windows and Intel compiler as well
9) Introducing DTrace probes in the MySQL Server …

As recently reported on my blog we have managed to get MySQL Cluster CGE 6.3 to scale linearly with the addition of more nodes into the system.
In MySQL Cluster CGE 6.3 each node has a single thread handling most of
the work together with a set of file system threads.

In MySQL Cluster 7.0 the data nodes are now multithreaded. The design in
7.0 follows the very efficient design of 6.3 where each thread has absolutely no lock contention with other threads. All communication
between threads happens through messages. This means that scalability
of the data nodes is excellent. The single thread have been split into
up to four local data threads, one transaction handling threads,
and one socket communication thread plus the already existing file
system threads. With this set-up each data node can process 4.6X more
DBT2 transactions compared to 6.3.

This means …

The work started when MySQL was acquired by Sun has now started to bear
fruit. Very soon after the acquisition a Sun team was formed to assist
the MySQL performance team on improving the scalability of the MySQL
server. At the same time also Google have been very active in improving
scalability of InnoDB. MySQL 5.4 scalability improvements is very much
the result of the efforts from the MySQL Performance team, the Sun
performance team and the Google efforts.

It's extremely fruitful to work with such a competent set of people. The
Sun team has experience from scaling Oracle, DB2, Informix and so forth
and knows extremely well how the interaction of software and hardware
affects performance. The Google patches have shown themselves to be of
excellent quality. From our internal testing we found two bugs in the
early testing and both those had already been …

All the sessions for all the MySQL Camp days can be seen at, but here is today’s schedule in a nutshell (all sessions in Bayshore, on the mezzanine level of the hotel):

Tuesday 10:50 am - 11:35 pm

Matt Yonkovit (Sun/MySQL, Waffle Grid, Big DBA Head, [blog]) presents Learning from others’ MySQL Performance Mistakes. Matt has spent the last couple of years helping customers who are all dealing with the same MySQL related problems over and over again. During this session he will give you some of the most common issues in MySQL deployments he sees on a day to day basis, and how to fix or avoid them. These include:

* More is not always better
* Text Fields are not cool
* Data Size does matter
* Fun with Data Conversions
* Its all about IO
* Left join love
* Self Induced fragmentations
* MySQL is not Oracle

and more!!!! …

The information schema in MySQL is a great tool for obtaining just about any type of meta-data about your MySQL server. It is a schema consisting of views that provide just about any information you would want to know about your MySQL installation. For instance, you can find out status and system variables, process listing, database object listing - schemas, tables, triggers, stored procedures and their organization within MySQL, user privileges. .

Originally, people would use SHOW commands to obtain this information. For instance, to see all the schemas (databases) within your MySQL instance:

mysql> show databases;
+--------------------+
| Database           |
+--------------------+
| information_schema |
| admin              |
| aps                |
| contacts_db        |
| fed                |
| memc               |
| metatalk           |
| myschema           |
| mysql              |
| sakila             |
| syscp              |
| …

Jetlagged from transatlantic travel, I woke up in the middle of the Californian night thinking about what has changed since I arrived at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara on Sunday evening. I was pondering all the questions MySQL users and Sun colleagues were asking at the event, and what the user base was thinking out loud on Twitter yesterday.

What has changed is obviously that Sun Microsystems and Oracle announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun.

What further changes we will see as a result of that is a different story. Evidently, I don’t sit in with a crystal ball predicting what will happen next. Nor do I have insight into Oracle’s plans for MySQL, …

Spring is here! Spirits are lifted and it is time to enjoy fun in the sun, and share colorful postcards all over the web! This is why we have launched our second Gandi SiteMaker competition with the theme: Vacation getaways!

Is there a special place where you dream of spending your vacation more than anywhere else in the world? Do you want to share it with everyone so that they too can have a wonderful time?

Create a website about this dream location using Gandi SiteMaker and you might win a EPC Inspiron Mini9 offered by our partner, Dell, as well as a free year's subscription to Gandi SiteMaker Pro.

To enter you simply need to create a Free Gandi SiteMaker site. We will only accept sites made using the free version of Gandi SiteMaker, so that everyone has the same chances of winning. If you would like a quick example of one, …

Today Sun announced the availability of MySQL 5.4, which contains a number of performance and scalability enhancements to the base MySQL 5.1 code. For the full run down on all of the enhancements, and the resulting scalability improvements, check out these blogs from Mikael Ronstrom and Allan Packer. You can also read Neelakanth Nadgir's blog, where he describes some performance fixes that were tried but rejected. As he says, sometimes you can learn a lot from the things that don't work out!

This release contains a range of improvements, both from the community (especially Google) and from work that has taken place in the MySQL performance team. As you can guess, we aren't stopping here, and there are a number of additional enhancements in the pipeline for …

Today Sun announced the availability of MySQL 5.4, which contains a number of performance and scalability enhancements to the base MySQL 5.1 code. For the full run down on all of the enhancements, and the resulting scalability improvements, check out these blogs from Mikael Ronstrom and Allan Packer. You can also read Neelakanth Nadgir's blog, where he describes some performance fixes that were tried but rejected. As he says, sometimes you can learn a lot from the things that don't work out!

This release contains a range of improvements, both from the community (especially Google) and from work that has taken place in the MySQL performance team. As you can guess, we aren't stopping here, and there are a number of additional enhancements in the pipeline for …

Over the last year there has been alot of work done to instrument MySQL with static dtrace probes. The mysql provider first became available in MySQL 6.0.8 but required a build with the --enable-dtrace flag to enable it. Starting with MySQL 5.4 the mysql provider and it's static probes are now enabled by default and ready to be used on Solaris 10, OpenSolaris and Mac OS X.

The static probes in MySQL 5.4 have been designed to follow the execution path of a query

with the level getting deeper as the query execution proceeds. However the probes are implemented so that you don't have to traverse the entire hierarchy to get the information you want.

They are also implemented in sets. The -start probe exposes pertinent information such as the query text. The -done probe returns the status of the probe operation. With probe sets time spent within an operation can be captured.

Check out MC Brown's …