This video has been going around for some time now, but I think its worth the post for those that have yet to see it.

Video Source: The Web Site is Down

MySQL is undergoing some organisational changes as part of Sun. Mårten Mickos (MySQL AB’s CEO 2001-2008 and SVP at Sun 2008-) is moving on in his life, outside Sun. This is independent of Michael “Monty” Widenius’ recent departure.

I’ve worked for Mårten ever since joining MySQL in 2001, in various capacities (VP Training, VP Consulting, VP Services, VP Engineering, CIO, and since 2005 VP Community Relations). I will obviously miss working with him. At the same time, I can understand and respect his decision to move on to something else, and wish him all the best, whatever his upcoming pursuits will be.

I owe Mårten much of what I’ve achieved in business during this century. I’ve known him since 1981, and counted him as a close friend ever …

A while back, Ted Ts’o asked for a incremental backup solution that used a database. It reminded me of the talk at the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo, titled Build your own MySQL time machine.

Chuck and Mats will talk about the backup and replication code, and will show off a web interface, that allows you to go back in time, similar to Apple’s Time Machine in Mac OS X. Its a talk that I most certainly want to attend, as an avid Time Machine user.

Register for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 before February 16, and you’ll get an early bird discount (saving $200). April …

I ran across this great experiment Kingpin tried testing how far one could go not signing your signature properly when making credit card purchases. He’s definitely proven a point and made a hilarious experience. A must read I must say.

Source: Drunk Republic: When Your Credit Card Signature Fun Backfires

In many cases I speculate how things should work based on what they do and in number of cases this lead me forming too good impression about technology and when running in completely unanticipated bug or performance bottleneck. This is exactly the case with LVM

Number of customers have reported the LVM gives very high penalty when snapshots are enabled (leave along if you try to run backup at this time) and so I decided to look into it.

I used sysbench fileio test as our concern is general IO performance in this case - it is not something MySQL related.

I tested things on RHEL5, RAID10 volume with 6 hard drives (BBU disabled) though the problem can be seen on variety of other systems too (I just do not have all comparable numbers)

O_DIRECT RUN

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

As Peter Gulutzan just announced - we’re opening up a “new” worklog that we’ve been working on, Worklog #2360. PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA.

In fact - it’s not “new”, it’s something that has been in the worklog system for a long time, and has had much much much discussion internally between some of the brightest engineers in the group.

The astute among you out there that read my post on the benchmark with Maria for the the tokutek challenge, may have noted this in the configure line that I used:

./configure –prefix=/usr/local/mysql –localstatedir=/data0/mysqldata \
–without-query-cache –with-extra-charsets=complex –with-pic …

We (Percona) just announced our Percona Performance Conference, and I wanted to tell you a little more about what we hope to accomplish with this conference. Let me show you some simple math that anyone can do. There’s a handy iCal download of the conference schedule on the conference website. iCal is a plain text format that is easy to parse with a scripting language. I downloaded this year’s and last year’s schedules, and aggregated the number of times each company and speaker is listed as presenting a session.

So far this year I’ve been totally silent about the MySQL Conference and Expo 2009. In the past I’ve been a vocal advocate of going to the conference and sending your employees to the conference. So my silence was conspicuous to me, if not to you. I’ve always considered myself a strong MySQL supporter and I still do. Why wasn’t I telling people to go to this year’s conference? Simple: I can’t in good conscience tell people to attend an event from which I’ve been excluded (oh, the irony).

Today we’re taking the wraps off the best MySQL feature of 2009:
Performance Schema. It monitors multitudinous low-level server
events and provides them in tables inside a new “database”
called, surprisingly, PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA. So far …

* It instruments mutex and disk io calls in the server and
in one of the storage engines.
* It times precisely (to the nearest cycle or nanosecond or
microsecond or tick depending on user choice).
* It has tables for “current event” by thread
(what the job is waiting for if it’s blocked).
* It has tables for “history of events” by thread
(what were the last N mutex or file io activities, and where).
* It has summaries by thread
(how many fractoseconds did this job spend on io since it started).
* It has summaries by object
(how many times has somebody read from file X).

On any operating …