An often overlooked and way underrated component to any site is the collection and reporting of solid historical performance metrics.   Don’t get me wrong, everyone collects some sort of web page stats, has access to mysql status variables, and uses top to check cpu and process stats ( what else does anyone need right?).    But the metrics I am talking about are not your simple # of pages,# of users, apache log metrics that everyone has in their web server, nor are they point in time cpu stats, or cumulative row accessed counters.  No, we  are talking about true performance stats, gathered over a long period of time.  These stats can be used for troubleshooting, trending, and make great art and conversation pieces ( have seen my one of a kind CPU graph).

Think of it this way,  someone complains your site is slow.  They say when they hit the first page it just seems sluggish.  What does …

This is one of the largest issues so far.  In addition, it has some of the best content we have ever had. The articles are all in-depth with some exciting new information:

• Introduction to XtraDB: an overview of the new XtraDB storage engine along with benchmarks and information about planned future improvements
• Changes in the MySQL DBA and Developer Exams for Version 5.1: what’s coming in the new exams covering MySQL Server 5.1
• Covering Indexes in MySQL: how to create indexes that optimize query execution
• PBXT’s Coder’s Guide: going in-depth on how you can work with the code for the new PBXT storage engine
• Coding Corner: Peter’s regular column continues his look at transaction time validity

It is available for download, along with all …

After a discussion with Adam Dixon over ways to retrieve binlogs from remote servers we came to the conclusion that mysqlbinlog should have a way to retrieve binlogs direct from a remote mysql server and save them in raw binlog format.

So after a little bit of tinkering I came up with a small prototype patch to do this, to use this simply do:

mysqlbinlog --raw --result-file=out.bin -t -R --host=192.168.1.101 mysqld-bin.000001

This can probably be extended to wait for more data rather than ending when it hits the end of the log, but this is just a proof of concept for now.

This new patch against MySQL 5.1.31 can be found here.

I've been following the info from Kaj's info/feedback session at FOSDEM. I was going to write my thoughts as a comment, but I think it can benefit from being a post by itself.

What strikes me is that the items raised and "voted on by hand" are all existing and actually long-standing issues., most even pre-date MySQL's acquisition by Sun. Given this, why would raising the same issues once more have a different result this time? Doing the same thing again tends to yield similar results, but changing other parameters may change the outcome. Which parameters, specifically, are to be changed?

The good intentions of those involved are not in question. However, it just doesn't appear to deliver. Announcements are not cool. Ongoing statements "we want a shorter release cycle"... sorry guys, that's old news; I fully trust …

I covered this one before .. but as it struck twiced today .. I think it's worth repeating. Both my collegue Karl and Trent ran into the same problem , within hours hours of eachother, a missing or failing reverse dns mapping that caused performance issues .. and a lot of log entries..

Karl denies having a second life in Perth but I`m not really sure about that ...

But I guess they both have to agree... Everything is a fscking DNS problem.
(I noticed other people using that spelling this weekend, on stage in the Janson)

Technorati Tags: dns dns problem …

Building on top of my last post, the PHP extension for the new client and protocol library is ready as well! You can download the tarball on the Launchpad download page. The PHP extension exposes the same set of client functions that the C library provides currently, and is mostly just a wrapper to provide the PHP specific handling. To install, you’ll need the PHP development packages installed (if you have ‘phpize’ command you’re all set). After extracting the tarball, just run:

phpize
./configure
make
make install

And then add the following line to your php.ini:

extension=”drizzle.so”

I realize there is no documentation at this point, we’re working on that (please get in …

This is #4 in a series of blog postings about MySQL Performance Schema.

What does the new PERFORMANCE SCHEMA cost?

In my last three postings, I’ve shown shown lots of monitoring / diagnostic new features, and made it obvious there’s a lot more. At this point any wise viewer will wonder whether such a marvel can really be free. Well, it is, in the two senses of the word: “free like GPL” and “free like borshch”.

The “free like GPL” sense is easy to explain. Anybody can download the source as soon as we put it in the public trees, i.e. “soon”. Naturally Enterprise people can expect far more besides the server code (more about that later), but everybody gets the server code.

The “free like borshch” phrase evokes an East European beet soup (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borscht) which is cheap enough that a cook can just throw it in with the rest of the dinner for no visible extra charge. …

I’m happy to announce the first release of the new libdrizzle. This is a complete rewrite of the protocol and client interface for the Drizzle project and provides new functionality that the old library based on MySQL code did not offer. Oh, and this new library supports both Drizzle and MySQL protocols, so you can use it with MySQL servers as well!

So, what’s different?

• BSD License.
• Complete non-blocking I/O support.
• Concurrent query interface, letting you run multiple queries at the same time on any number of servers.
• Improved buffering support. Instead of just result and row buffering, you can also buffer per field, or not at all (reading fields in chunks). This can be very useful for streaming large blobs through your client.
• Complete server …

Last week, I was at the NetApp office in North Sydney for the presentation on NetApp SnapManager for Oracle. It was good opportunity to learn more about NetApp snapshots while working on a project for one of our clients in Sydney. It was an especially interesting topic as I have some experience using Veritas Checkpoints (see my presentation on test systems refreshes), and it was interesting to see what’s different and new in the NetApp implementation. But I digress.

I learned that NetApp can provide access to the same LUNs via either Fiber-Channel (FC) or iSCSI. And this is when the interesting argument surfaced. Apparently, some companies aim to have the technology stack on their …

About a week ago, Nat posted Open Source NG Databases on O'Reilly Radar. That caught my interest because I'm playing with some "alternative" databases for some of our data at Craigslist. Don't get me wrong, MySQL is great. But MySQL isn't well suited to every use case out there either. (I'll talk more about this at the MySQL Conference.)

Meanwhile, I left a comment on that posting about CouchDB and have been playing with it a bit more since then--mostly loading in test data, figuring out the data footprint, performance, etc.

Overall, I'm impressed and encouraged. I agree with what …