There are few terms you need to have a good understanding if you're working with high volume systems. I commonly see these mixed and people not understanding the difference between them.

Performance - The performance comes down to performing up to users expectations (or expectations of your boss) which drills down to two important metrics - response time also sometimes called latency and throughput also called capacity. Response time applies to even single user and mostly critical in applications when a complex task needs to be performed such as report generation or search. It is just unacceptable if search takes a minute even if system has a capacity running for 100 of them at the same time. The response time is the most important aspect of performance because when we define system capacity we also define conditions on response time. For example system can handle 100 transactions a second …

You open the letterbox. Inside are four interesting links covering politics, mobile business, Javascript, and MySQL:

1. The Minimal Compact (Adam Greenfield) -- a manifesto on "open source constitutions for post-national entities". Sample: "Of interest are alternatives that are designed from the beginning to: Ensure the greatest freedom for the greatest number, without simultaneously abridging the freedoms of others; Permit individuals with common goals and beliefs to act in their own interest at the global level and with all the privileges afforded nation states, even when those individuals are separated by distance; Provide robust resistance to attempts to concentrate power, and other abuses of same."
2. …

Tuning queries for MySQL NDB cluster is way trickier than tuning for any other storage engines. This is especially true for highly normalized schema. Look at the following query trying to retrieve all male account from a given city. Since a city is not unique, we also need to specify the state.

If you look at how the query will be executed with NDB, you realize that many hops over the network will be needed, at least one per table. If you push the cluster a lot, these extra hops will limit the performance. Since tables like Cities, States and especially Gender are …

A comment to the last article:

"I had trouble implementing something like this using mysql-proxy + lua. Basically I wanted a way to force the developers, when using dev systems by console, every query they execute also follow up with an EXPLAIN. The exact mechanics of it I still need to work out, but having an explain run after testing a query I thought would be a great idea, or at least, if lua could detect a table scan and flag it as a warning or similar. One day I hope to give it another try." — Bradley Falzon

Just check the current mysql-shell branch on launchpad.net.

Here's what the script in the background does:

• execute the query
• get warnings, if there are any
• execute SHOW STATUS
• if this was a table-scan and a Com_select, run EXPLAIN …

A lot of people are into the whole cloud computing scenario these days. However, no one has talked about offering DBA-like services in the cloud, all automated, so that startups don’t have to get their own DBAs.

Enter FathomDB. They are poised to offer databases as a service (maybe they’ll charge per database - so you can in theory run both WordPress and Mediawiki, if you prefix wp_ and mw_ in your table creation, for example). They are using MySQL. They’ve also taken the worry of running a database out - they will backup, they will setup (so you don’t have to issue GRANT commands :P), and they will also monitor your databases for you.

But what really takes the cake? The fact that they will also offer performance advisors. This totally reminds me of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (aka …

After a minor coding blitz I have created 3 patches for mysqlbinlog (one is more of an enhancement of a previous patch):

• Compression support (patch here)
• SSL support (patch here)
• RAW mode (updated patch here) - See update below for updated patch
  

The compression support patch adds the --compress parameter adds support for compression when retrieving data from a remote MySQL server, much in the same way that other mysql clients do.  Basic tests indicate it compresses data up to 10x for SBR statements.

The SSL support patch adds the …

This Thursday (March 5th, 14:00 UTC), Konstantin Osipov will give a MySQL University session on Good Coding Style. Konstantin is the lead of the server runtime environment team, and has been around at MySQL since 2003.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL University sessions are recorded, that is, slides and voice can be viewed as a Flash movie (.flv). You can find those …

As part of Sun's university relations, seven Sun engineers- Vadiraj, Varun, Blessen, Lawrence, Nirmal, Gautham and yours truly went to Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore during the past weekend for a multi-track technology talks on Java ME, GlassFish, MySQL, JavaFX, Open Solaris Virtualization technologies.

There were three parallel tracks:

• J2ME, GlassFish, MySQL- which form a nice combination of Client, Middleware and Database technologies and our (Vadiraj, Varun and Me) idea was to give hints here and there to the students how to bring all the three technolgies to develop applications and how each fits into the holistic idea. My MySQL slides are available here.
• JavaFX
…

As part of Sun's university relations, seven Sun engineers- Vadiraj, Varun, Blessen, Lawrence, Nirmal, Gautham and yours truly went to Vellore Institute of Technology, Vellore during the past weekend for a multi-track technology talks on Java ME, GlassFish, MySQL, JavaFX, Open Solaris Virtualization technologies.

There were three parallel tracks:

• J2ME, GlassFish, MySQL- which form a nice combination of Client, Middleware and Database technologies and our (Vadiraj, Varun and Me) idea was to give hints here and there to the students how to bring all the three technolgies to develop applications and how each fits into the holistic idea. My MySQL slides are available here.
• JavaFX …