South Californians, mark your calendars! On February 24th at 7,30pm the Los Angeles Meetup Group will host Chris Schneider, Facebook DBA, who will talk about "Scaling MySQL".

Now, if I talk about scaling MySQL, I will refer to personal experience in my consulting career, when 10 million people connected all at once to my customer's web site. You may be interested in the story or simply yawn. But when a Facebook DBA talks to you about scaling, 10 million connection is low traffic, and scaling takes a completely different meaning.

In this meetup, Chris will talk about different methodologies used at Facebook to deal with their scaling issues. If you are near Los Angeles on February 24th, you don't want to miss this …

South Californians, mark your calendars! On February 24th at 7,30pm the Los Angeles Meetup Group will host Chris Schneider, Facebook DBA, who will talk about "Scaling MySQL".

Now, if I talk about scaling MySQL, I will refer to personal experience in my consulting career, when 10 million people connected all at once to my customer's web site. You may be interested in the story or simply yawn. But when a Facebook DBA talks to you about scaling, 10 million connection is low traffic, and scaling takes a completely different meaning.

In this meetup, Chris will talk about different methodologies used at Facebook to deal with their scaling issues. If you are near Los Angeles on February 24th, you don't want to miss this …

The MySQL Web Team and the MySQL Community Team want to improve your experience with downloading software from MySQL.com. Now, we have many ideas on how to improve things, some subtle, some not so subtle, but we would like to hear from you.

As with all UI improvements, what we want to do is to come up with solutions and features which make the process easier, faster or more reliable. In this case it should be easier to identify what you need, faster to get to the download and more reliable in getting the correct download or your previous downloads.

What pages/sections are we dealing with specifically? We are talking about the downloads of MySQL and MySQL-related software available at the following pages: http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/

Here are some screenshots of some of the pages we are thinking of revamping:

• Main …

When using Oracle, the data dictionary provides us with tons of tables and views, allowing us to fetch information about pretty much anything within the database. We do have information like that in MySQL 5.0 (and up) in the information_schema database, but it’s scattered through several different tables.

Sometimes a client asks us to change the datatype of a column, but forgets to mention the schema name, and sometimes even the table name. As you can imagine, having this kind of information is vital to locate the object and perform the requested action. This kind of behaviour must be related to Murphy’s Law.

In any case, I’d like to share with you a simple stored procedure that has helped us a lot in the past.

CREATE DATABASE IF NOT EXISTS dba;
USE dba;

DROP PROCEDURE IF EXISTS `dba`.`get_objects`;
DELIMITER $$
CREATE …

There has been some discussion on the performance of MySQL Stored Procedures here, last up was Anthony T Curtis in his blog where he writes about Perl stored procedures. Brooks Johnson writes on the SP performance in his blog and concludes that procedures really are slow., in terms of compute intensive operations at least.

As a follow-up to this, I wanted to test what the difference really is when we use database intensive operations. Here. procedures really should be faster, as they run inside MySQL itself. Books has already compared the performance of MySQL Compute intensive operations to MSSQL, and regretable, MySQL came out behind the Redmond thingy.

But now to my really simple database operations performance …

Wow, check out what just came out from Linbit: The DRBD Management Console. Written in Java (so it runs anywhere), completely open source (GPLv3), and allows you to manage DRBD and Heartbeat based clusters. You can install, configure, see your systems graphically, and a lot more. I’m interested to try the beta out, as soon as I get back to my lab (sitting in the airport now). If you know how to use DRBD/Heartbeat, and use it in production for your MySQL setup, it might be a good application to test out, and improve if need be.

From the screenshots, I’m surprised this isn’t a value added extra that Linbit would like to charge for. Kudos, Linbit, for keeping it GPLv3!

…

Just came across this paper:  Optimizing MySQL Database Application Performance with Solaris Dynamic Tracing

Looks useful.

Just came across this paper:  Optimizing MySQL Database Application Performance with Solaris Dynamic Tracing

Looks useful.

How To Add Two-Factor Authentication To phpBB

This document describes how to add WiKID two-factor authentication to phpBB through Apache using mod_auth_xradius. Given the recent attack against phpBB and the exposure of it's users' passwords, we thought two-factor authentication might be timely.

If you send me an email during the rest of February, you are highly unlikely to get an answer. However, I promise not to spam you with an “Out of office” auto reply. I dislike receiving those messages, as they seemingly have little correlation with when the person actually will reply to the email.

My excuse for not responding is that I won’t be around my laptop and that connectivity is bad in rural Tanzania anyway. I will make an attempt at conquering Kilimanjaro, one of the Seven Summits, and to twitter while doing it — to the extent there is sufficient SMS coverage, blood sugar and my fingers aren’t numb.

I also hope to take some pics, which will illustrate a blog hopefully titled “Over 14% of the Seven Summits …