The Idea.

For the past month I have been exploring options and building a perfect Home Theater PC for my 50” Vizio plasma. Besides the obvious, it has to play movies, youtube videos, etc, I had a few concrete goals in mind. Here they are:

• it absolutely had to handle 1080P h264, specifically movies encoded using x264. An average movie size for this format is between 8.5 and 13 GB. There were 2 problems to overcome: the CPU had to be able to handle the decoding (my desktop dual core Conroe barely kept up) and the network had to be fast enough to stream in real time from my storage PC a floor away.
• I needed to have the easiest control over the whole thing. VNC wasn’t good enough, because I don’t always have a laptop lying around.
• It had to support 7.1 sound.
• It had to have excellent picture quality on the TV, preferably during both movies and regular browsing/reading, etc. HDMI/DVI was …

In case anyone is interested in a copy of my slides for the two lightning talks I gave at the Open Source Days 2008 conference, I have made them available here:

• "Optimizing Large Databases Using InnoDB Clustered Indexes:" HTML and PDF.
• "Profiling with OProfile and Intel Core 2 performance counters:" HTML and PDF.

I waqs quite pleased with the benchmark that I prepared for the InnoDB mini-talk, where I measure the performance …

We have finished the next release of MySQL Workbench 5.0 GA, 5.0.27. It features a number of bugs fixed, especially in the synchronization code, a huge improvement in terms of memory usage and an updated layer-pane, listing all objects on a diagram-canvas - now including conections too (this allows easy selection of hidden objects). Use the Update-function from the help menu or head over to the download pages to get your copy:

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.0.html

Please let us know if bigger models now load faster and if you are seeing an improved performance of the canvas.

Bazaar branches of libmallocfail

Simple LD_PRELOAD library that will take parameters via environment variables and cause malloc() to occationally fail.

Aim was to use this to test bits of MySQL/Drizzle although since their libtool based stuf, the binary in tree is a libtool shell script, and I haven’t found a way to LD_PRELOAD only for mysqld and not the shell script and the other processes spawned by it.

I have found a bug in libc though :)

Presentation Abstract
More and more MySQL databases are sneaking their way into the Oracle environment.  If you’re being asked to
managing these new databases, you may not know where to start.

We’ll give and overview of MySQL specifically for Oracle DBAs.  Since you already have the requisite conceptual
framework as an Oracle DBA, a quickstart will help you get up to speed with how things are done in the MySQL
world.

Outline

Introduction
1. Installation
2. User Management, Authentication + Privileges
3. Backup and Recovery
4. Replication Solutions Compared to DataGuard
5. Transactions, Query Optimization + Profiling
6. Views and Partitioning
7. Server Tuning and Optimization
Conclusions

Learning Objective 1
Bring Oracle DBAs up to speed with MySQL

…

We have finally found the time to update out presentation pages - we've added the presentation on MySQL Scaling by Sharding and Replication as well as Russian Language presentations I've given at HighLoad++ conference back in October.
Innodb Scalability and New Features (Russian),
Scaling MySQL-powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication (Russian),
…

Here is a small library with various helpful Lua functions for scripts and plugins for Workbench, making it easier to write your own plugins for exporting to some external format, generating reports etc. The library is meant for Workbench 5.0, but it will be ported to 5.1 as well, which should make transitioning plugins from one to the other somewhat easier in the future. Currently, most functions are meant for iterating through various objects so you can, but new functions will be added every once in a while and contributions, bug fixes and comments are welcome. To “install” the library, place the file in your equivalent for C:\Documents and Settings\user\Program data\MySQL\Workbench\librariesQuick list of places to get useful information for plugin writing:

• the Structs list will list the available GRT object types and …

Welcome to the 122nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s start with MySQL. As you probably know, the Americans were at the polls this week. In keeping with this, Keith Murphy is polling for opinion on the question: MySQL on Debian or Ubuntu? The conversation is here; the poll is on Keith’s Diamond Notes.

A quick note by Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz on how, with the outcome of those other polls, change has come to America, in the form of its new president and his …

A busy week for Sun includes new product releases and an annual shareholders’ meeting. Microsoft tries to unseat open source with BizSpark for entrepreneurs. Who is making money from open source? Obama: Open source President? And more.

Press releases
IBM, Sun Microsystems Launch ODF Toolkit Union To Grow Adoption, Community and Software Innovation Sun Microsystems

Sun Unveils New Systems And Storage Solutions For MySQL Sun Microsystems

Microsoft Jump-Starts Global Entrepreneurs With BizSpark Microsoft

…

Occasionally there is a need to see what queries reach MySQL. The database provides several ways to share that information with you. One is called general log activated with --log (or --general-log in MySQL 5.1+) start-up parameter. The log writes any query being executed by MySQL to a file with limited amount of additional information. The other is slow log enabled by --log-slow-queries parameter (MySQL 5.1 requires also --slow-query-log), which was designed to store poorly performing queries that run at least 2 seconds. Percona actually extended the slow log to, among others, include any query regardless of the execution time.

The problem is that for both you need to prepare earlier either by enabling the logging before starting the database instance or, even more work, by applying the patch and rebuilding the entire database from sources.

I know that many …