Yesterday, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and this time, it’s Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

My starting point is the same: “Everyone else” among colleagues and friends was there long before me, and I feel like a latecomer. I want to go in, do what seems to be the right thing, and share the observations I had. And everything within the time constraint of not being able to do a full evaluation, as I obviously have other things to do as well.

Unlike Dopplr, starting with Picasa Web never required invitations. My first exposure to Picasa was through …

Kaj wrote about using Dopplr to keep track of where colegues and friends are traveling and finding out about accidental meetups. (I even use it to track where one of the Inuits collegues work plans)
Now I have never met Giuseppe , but we shared slides before so I'd love to meet him one day .. connecting to him via Dopplr gives me that opportunity .. who knows one day Dopplr will tell me we have matching travel schedules.

Earlier this week LinkedIn announced Tripit as one of their first integrated applications, I was a bit dissapointed I use Tripit to let Dopplr learn about …

I am happy to announce Yasufumi Kinoshita joins our team as Performance Engineer. Yasufumi is known as InnoDB hacking expert, and there is bunch of patches he made we include in our releases: innodb buffer pool scalability fix, innodb rw_lock fix, control InnoDB IO etc. Actually there is one more patch -
"adaptive flush" in InnoDB, which makes flushing process more uniform and predictable. Yasufumi will post about this patch soon.

Yasufumi also had talk on MySQL Conference & Expo 2007
InnoDB Performance Potential in High-end Environments

Yasufumi's primary tasks as you can guess will be InnoDB performance and scalability fixes, InnoDB improvements and related question, however we are not going to restrict his activity only to InnoDB area but for all MySQL related problems.

So expect more and better patches in near …

Last week when I commented on Directions in Database Technology and mentioned " Column stores will continue to evolve". I received a number of comments via IM, Twitter, and email from folks who wanted to know more about column stores (both in how they relate to Drizzle and their usage in general).

Very early on when we started work on Drizzle the plan was to focus web applications. When we looked at cutting features, one of the criteria was "is this needed for web deployment". In many cases we have leaned toward keeping functionality when it was clearly well designed and had a general usefulness. To give an example, ROLLUP for instance is not typically used for web applications, but it is a well written feature that provides us with functionality that we find is handy.

Rollup though is a …

Hi, all. This is tentative. You know draft. But here is the list of things we're thinking of doing around database tooling for the next release of NetBeans.

Don't expect anything more than what is listed in the "P2" section. The P3 section is an unordered list of other ideas, and if we have time, we'll pick some of them off. If there are specific things that you really want, please let me know. And of course, any other feedback you have is always much appreciated.

The two main themes are: add more SQL integration with the PHP editor, and improve our overall UI experience.

We also would like to produce a plugin for a visual E/R tool (what I am calling a Visual Database Explorer to distinguish it from a full E/R tool like MySQL Workbench). We want people to test drive …

When running InnoDB you are able to dig into the engine internals, look at various gauges and counters, see past deadlocks and the list of all open transactions. This is in your reach with one simple command -- SHOW ENGINE InnoDB STATUS. On most occasions it works beautifully. The problems appear when you have a large spike in number of connections to MySQL, which often happens when several transactions kill the database performance resulting in very long execution times for even simplest queries, or a huge deadlock.

In such rare cases SHOW ENGINE InnoDB STATUS often fails to provide the necessary information. The reason is that its output is limited to 64000 bytes, so a long list of transactions or a large deadlock dump may easily exhaust the limit. MySQL in such situation truncates the output so it fits the required size and obviously this is not good since you may lose some valuable information from your sight. …

MySQL powers many of the social networks of Web 2.0. While it’s great that we constitute one of the tools of Web 2.0, we should also ourselves utilise the tools Web 2.0 provides for social networking. Comparing myself to colleagues, I feel like a slow follower in this discipline. “Everybody else” is already on Twitter, has hundreds and hundreds of contacts on LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook, puts their pics on Picasa and Flickr, bookmarks their pages on del.icio.us, and has fancy blogs that are registered everywhere. Myself, I have been half-heartedly entering contacts into LinkedIn, I have mismanaged my …

Seeing my recent love affair with solid state drives I thought I would test drive one of the latest greatest drives out their the 80GB intel x-25m80GB.  Like a child on Christmas morning, I felt true excitement as the generic UPS envelop arrived on my porch today.

While it did not show up until late in the day, I can’t just let it sit their without starting to test it can I?

Benchmarks are running as I write this and I will provide the full breakdown of the drives performance as I finish up the tests.

But to wet your appetite, check this out:

50-50 read/write sysbench test:  1899 IO requests per second!!!  Thats huge!!!

Thats compare to the 284 IOPS I got on the memoright GT, a performance improvement of 6.6x, with a higher capacity 80GB -vs- 32GB, and a Lower cost $773 -vs- $680…  outstanding!!!

Here are the first unverified sysbench test runs:

Thanks a ton to Xarb who reminded me of pipes in his blog post about filtering out fluffy planet mysql authors.

I should remember Pipes, since I work at Yahoo and I was called in to help out with their DB that first full day they were launched and couldn't handle the traffic, but hey, sometimes things just don't come to mind.

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Inspired by the Arctic Dolphin's scary movies, I dug out some reading advice that I made during the MySQL Developers meeting in Riga.

Jack Kerouac, On The RoadMap, a fictionalized autobiography of a senior engineer on a cross country bohemian odyssey after failing to deliver 5.1 GA for the fifth time.

Ken Kesey, One flew over the cuckoo's nested query. A story of love and madness involving a quiet Engineering department. When Jeffrey McMurphy, a convicted felon who's faking insanity to escape a prison sentence, is sent to the Database Group asylum, life changes instantly for the other guests.
A subtle tragedy involving a marketing planner, a virgin junior engineer, and a swordfish develops inexorably, leaving the …