I recently joined Tag1 Consulting full time. My main project since I joined was building up our monitoring infrastructure. My personal goal being world domination, but first the best monitoring system I can build. Baby steps...baby steps. For quite awhile now, I've used the monitoring system we built at the Open Source Lab to detect and diagnose problems with drupal.org, apache.org, kerneltrap.org and many more Free Software projects hosted at the lab. These experiences convinced me of the absolute necessity of a robust monitoring system.

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Not to rehash an old argument, but I am watching a recent  video on performance work being done by Sun hosted by Allan Packer (a recorded MySQL University session) and one of his bullet points was “Scale out when it makes sense, rather than just because there is no alternative”. That is what they are working on in his group at Sun.

You mean I will be able to buy 8 and 16 cores boxes and be able to use all the cores?

Hallelujah and Amen brother

Allan, thanks to you and all other who are working on this both inside and outside Sun.

This is #7 in a series of blog postings about MySQL Performance Schema.

Seven is enough for now, I’ll try to wrap up this series of blog postings by replying to some of the questions and comments that I’ve seen recently.

Q: Will the same instrumentation be in all storage engines?

A: It’s too early to say. We have lots of instruments in Maria and MyISAM, a few in Falcon. A developer for another storage engine has shown interest. But technical issues exist and we’ll have to negotiate.

Q: Is instrumentation available for more than mutex and disk access events?

A: No. WL#2360 mentions other event categories but makes it clear that they are properly part of a subsequent worklog task. We are only guaranteeing that what is in WL#2360 will be available with first public release.

Q: When is first public release?

A: April 20 2009. This is the first day of the MySQL User Conference in …

Yes, if compared to code in Java or C#. For example, this overly simple code took 284 seconds.

CREATE PROCEDURE CountTest()
begin
    declare counter int default 0;
    select now();
    repeat
        set counter = counter + 1;
    until counter > 120000000
    end repeat;
    select counter;
    select now();
end

Ignoring my off by one error, here is equivalent code in C# (the language I’m currently learning).  It took 419 milliseconds, or MySQL took 677 times longer to execute. From my experience, Java isn’t going to be any slower.

 int counter = 0;
while (counter < 120000000)
{
    counter++;
}

Slow stored procedure …

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft all announced support for a so-called canonical url's, allowing us developers to avoid duplication in search engines.

Great feature, but it seems that we already had a standard for it.

One of the most important features of MySQL is the support for pluggable storage engines. Since users use MySQL in different ways, one storage engine may not fit everyone 's needs. There are lots of engines for a user/application to choose from. Applications (and users) access MySQL using a uniform interface irrespective of what kind of storage engine is being used. As with any kind of software layering, it is possible to lose optimization opportunities as we cross layer boundaries. In this blog I will discuss one such lost opportunity.

Internally MySQL uses the PSAPI (public storage engine api) to communicate with the storage engines. The MySQL server uses a fixed row format. Storage engines are free to use whatever row format they choose (for ex, InnoDB uses a different row format). The advantage of using a different row format is that specialized storage engines could store rows optimally. For example, a storage engine for DSS could store …

Welcome to the 135th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

How about a little DB2 news to whet the palette? On IT, Life, DB2 pureXML, House Construction, Henrik Loeser Friedrichshafen has an item about Organic Food and pureXML. Completely unrelated! In the on-topic second part of this duo, Henrik relates the news: “I am happy to tell you that the so far separately priced pureXML feature will now be included in the core DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows.” And relevant links are included in this blog.

On the DB2PORTAL Blog, Craig Mullins admonishes, …

Have you prepared yourself?

mysql> select 1234567890 - unix_timestamp();
+-------------------------------+
| 1234567890 - unix_timestamp() |
+-------------------------------+
|                         25091 | 
+-------------------------------+

Not much longer now!

The demos include Load Balancer Visualization for SailFin, SailFin Communicator application (with MySQL cluster career grade server as the back-end …

For the ones who are interested, there will be a webinar on WaffleGrid next Tuesday, February the 17th at 10:00 am PST (1:00 pm EST, 18:00 GMT). Matt will present benchmarks he did with Dbt2 and Sysbench using GbE, Dolphin, SSD while, for my part, I will present the WaffleGrid concepts, status and roadmap. I will also be a good way to learn how to get started with WaffleGrid if you want to start experimenting!

Registration is free!