I want to keep a record of the configuration of the MySQL servers I manage. The configuration of some servers differs from others and over time the configuration may vary, partly as a result of upgrades in the mysql version or the use of the particular mysql instance, so tracking this is important.

Configuration items in MySQL can be thought of in 2 separate parts: the static configuration files which determine the behaviour of the server when it starts up (my.cnf) and the running configuration of the server in question. The latter information is usually obtained by running SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES and SHOW SLAVE STATUS if the server is a slave.

I’d also like to compare the 2 sets of configuration so I can see if a local change has been made to the running server which is not reflected in its configuration file. I might want to correct this, or at least be aware of it.

However, collecting and …

I am looking for a few more unique examples to add to the final chapter of my upcoming book on MySQL Backup & Recovery. If you would like to share your fun experience, receive a mention and a free copy please let me know via comment. If you would like to share but not have your comment published, please note at top of your feedback.

Thanks for helping to contribute to a detailed list of what could go wrong and how to be prepared for a MySQL disaster.

Oracle has announced an open source product for the NoSQL space, the Oracle NoSQL Database. Unlike other popular products including Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra, Voldermort and many others, Oracle has set a benchmark on the features that are truly necessary for highly available data systems.

Many products in the NoSQL space have told you that consistency is not needed, eventual consistency is good enough, that transactions are not performant enough to include as a feature. No standards exists, there is no common interface for communication, or key features that products aim to meet or better. With this product, features including transactions, replicated data and failover which are built in, are features other open source NoSQL products will need to match.

Oracle NoSQL Database is a key value store, supporting a major/minor key for …

At Oracle Open World 2011 there has been a large number of MySQL presentations. You can download the slides of my two presentations at Explaining the MySQL Explain and Improving Performance with Better Indexes.

You can find additional supporting information for these presentations in the Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements book.

Announced on Sunday at Oracle Open World 2011 is the release of the Effective MySQL book series starting with the “Optimizing SQL Statements” title. The goal of the Effective MySQL series is a highly practical, concise and topic specific reference providing applicable knowledge to use on each page. A feedback comment provided today was “no fluff” which is great comment to re-enforce the practical nature of the series.

Details on the Effective MySQL Optimizing SQL Statements page include a sample chapter, code downloads and purchase links for print and e-books at …

I will be joining a stellar class of speakers at the Insight Out DB Showcase in Tokyo from Oct 19-21, 2011. This event covers several RDBMS technologies including MySQL.

My topics are:

• Better MySQL Security and Administration
• Mastering MySQL Performance Tuning

On several occasions it may be necessary to do some tasks around the process of starting or stopping a MySQL server such as:

• Perform a warmup of the database using custom scripts and external information that the init_file configuration may not have access to.
• Change configuration settings such as innodb_log_file_size and adjust the on disk files that this needs.
• Change configuration settings such as log_bin (I try to use a relative paths to ensure that different instances use a common setting even if datadir is different, and changing from an absolute to relative path often requires adjusting the binlog index file).
• Shutting down MySQL may need to be delayed if the SQL thread has open temporary tables or open transactions are still being processed.
• etc…

You may have others and many of these are likely to be site …

This week, after 3 months in the works, we’ve finally released version 1.7.0 of DbCharmer ruby gem – Rails plugin that significantly extends ActiveRecord’s ability to work with multiple databases and/or database servers by adding features like multiple databases support, master/slave topologies support, sharding, etc.

New features in this release:

• Rails 3.0 support. We’ve worked really hard to bring all the features we supported in Rails 2.X to the new version of Rails and now I’m proud that we’ve implemented them all and the implementation looks much cleaner and more universal (all kinds of relations in rails 3 work in exactly the same way and we do not need to implement connection switching for all kinds of weird corner-cases in ActiveRecord).
• Forced Slave Reads functionality. Now …

Would you like to work with the biggest websites and social networks in the world? Do you want to support large enterprises with their database initiatives? Would you like to assist ISVs and OEMs providing the technology that powers their products?

In the MySQL Sales Consulting organization we do just that.

You’ll support MySQL partners, customers and prospects across EMEA, evangelize our products, assist marketing and cooperate with product management to shape the future of MySQL.

Sounds interesting? We're actively looking for senior professionals to join the team!
Feel free to reach me on LinkedIn for more information or have a look at the links below:

• …

This comment is in regard to this InnoDB blog page. Trying to post a message says you need to be logged in, but there’s no register/login page I could see…

Anyway the page talks about a new feature which allows you to save on shutdown an InnoDB buffer pool and to load this on startup, this ensuring that once loaded the database will perform with this “hot” cache.

That sounds interesting as I have seen on numerous occasions that if the buffer pool is not warm then performance can be a magnitude worse.

This looks like a very welcome feature. However, a couple of things are not clear to me.

1. Having some example benchmark times of using this process and comparing it to trying to warm up the buffer pool by hand would be useful.  While this may heavily dependent on database …