So it’s been a while since I’ve hit my blog, but I feel compelled to respond to Baron’s post, and many of the other (perhaps short sighted) criticisms out there against this new functionality that we’ve been working on for so long.

Everybody seems to be saying that this functionality should be implemented in the server, or that the better way to do this is to use these patches which add functionality to the logging that MySQL already provides. Well guess what people - what does that give you, other than some more details on you queries?

More I/O.

What’s bad on a database server?

More I/O.

Query Analyzer, whilst it does currently use a proxy to collect the statistics, doesn’t hit your disk at all. Everything is collected and aggregated in memory, it …

I know the architect of the new Sun/MySQL query analyser, Mark Matthews, very well. Even though the tool is not OSS (and thus does not benefit from an OSS development model with early feedback in the design/development cycle, from many eyes) I know that Mark organises his designs and team in such a way that the resulting quality (barring interference) will always be very good. Anyone who uses Connector/J will surely attest to that. So I'd personally trust the result, based on my knowledge of the person who led the team. That's still a form of semi-blind trust though, OSS development makes that unnecessary which is why I'd say an OSS dev model is preferred for most things. And the new tool is, of course, bundled with the MySQL Enterprise subscription model. You have to subscribe to that service to have access to the tool.

But back to the query analyser itself. I'm really fairly pleased with Sun/MySQL launching this, because it does …

MySQL Query Analyzer is Sun's latest addition to the MySQL Enterprise tools suite. Here is the press release.

A simple architectural overview of the product is at http://www.mysql.com/common/images/enterprise/queryanalyzeragent_350.jpg

MySQL Query Analyzer is Sun's latest addition to the MySQL Enterprise tools suite. Here is the press release.

A simple architectural overview of the product is at http://www.mysql.com/common/images/enterprise/queryanalyzeragent_350.jpg

MySQL just released their new MySQL Query Analyzer (link to a trial), and recently wrote up an interview with Mark Matthews about it. If you haven’t read that article, go ahead and do it. I have not used this software, but I fully believe its functionality is quite nice.

But there is at least [...]

Currently I'm working hard to find and remove scalability
bottlenecks in the MySQL Server. MySQL was acquired by Sun
10 months ago by now. Many people have in blogs wondered what
the impact has been from this acquisition. My personal
experience is that I now have a chance to work with Sun
experts in DBMS performance. As usual it takes time when
working on new challenges before the flow of inspiration
starts flowing. However I've seen this flow of inspiration
starting to come now, so the fruit of our joint work is
starting to bear fruit. I now have a much better understanding
of MySQL Server performance than I used to have. I know fairly
well where the bottlenecks are and I've started looking
into how they can be resolved.

Another interesting thing with Sun is the innovations they have
done in a number of areas. One such area is DTrace. This is a …

I see that Sun prominently quoted one of our Engineers in their recent press release for Query Analyzer (Quan).  He’s a bit embarrassed by the attention, but his quote is spot on… Quan is a really solid and useful product.

Of course, there is nothing there that you can’t get by combining various tools like mysqlsla, innotop, mysqlreport and spending some time in analysis.  What Quan adds is making the information readily available, and letting someone without expert level …

Many of the prominent folks on Planet MySQL have encountered issues with mysql and linux going into swap (example 1,2,3).  None of the easy solutions (sysctl -w swappiness=0, innodb_flush_method       =O_DIRECT) have solved this problem for our configuration and I just deal by using a smaller innodb buffer pool than I’d like, and then occasionally using swapoff/swapon to temporarily bring things back to balance.

I did make one observation though, which may be a red herring but still interesting to me.  In one particular case I am using nested replication in …

Imagine eating meze in Ankara with a Turkish Member of the Parliament, and member of the Turkish EU Harmonisation Committee. That’s not the basic reason I joined MySQL AB back in 2001, but it’s one of the most interesting outcomes of my decision. Bottom line: The honourable Mr Osman Co

Lately planetmysql.com has shown an increasing amount of commercial promotion for Sun products. Many recent articles included in this supposedly MySQL-related feed aggregator have nothing to do with MySQL.Now I see an article included in the feed from ComputerWorld, about database researcher David Dewitt getting a job at Microsoft. Not only is this non-MySQL-related content, but more than half