So, I mentioned earlier that I was looking at Infobright's Brighthouse technology as a storage backend for heaps and heaps of traffic and user data from Habbo. Turns out it works fine (now that it's in V3 and supports more of the SQL semantics), and we took it into use. Been pretty happy with that, and I expect to talk more about the challenge and our solution at the next MySQL Conference in April 2009.

However, our DWH team needs extra help. If you're interested in solving business analytics problems by processing lots of data and the idea of working in a company that leads the virtual worlds industry excites you, …

There were a lot of great stories and sessions at the Sun CEC 2008 conference. The MySQL sessions were some of the most popular sessions of the conference. My focus was on delivering sessions that would teach Sun engineers and partners why MySQL is exploding in the market place. Additional sessions developed specific MySQL DBA skills for Sun engineers. More details can be found at:http://

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

Finally managed to upload the photos from Open SQL Camp to Flickr... btw below is the photo of a very bashful Baron receiving his surprise signed shirt from the gathering for all his hard work in helping it come together. I also want to note some thanks to everyone else who contributed in making it a success. Very impressive, very useful, very fun.

I've always been intrigued by the FIRST_ROWS hint, so I paid special attention when we reached it in the 11g SQL Tuning class. But I'm still puzzled.The course notes said that although you shouldn't be using hints generally, when you do, FIRST_ROWS is the most useful of the hints (in the form FIRST_ROWS(n) where you specify how many rows to optimize for). Also that it's not effective when the

Yang's departure opens the door for improved execution. Any takers? READ MORE

I've now been playing with MySQL Enterprise Monitor in its latest guise (which includes the Query Analyzer) for a number of days. To be honest, this is pretty amazing stuff.

Once installed, all you have to do is point your applications to port 4040 on the database server instead of the default of port 3306 and in a few minutes you'll start to see the queries being logged in the Query Analyzer tab. You can sort them by database, by execution time, by execution count, or any of the other table headings in the output. You can also filter by partial query as well as a variety of other filters.

"Ho hum" I hear you say? Yes you could probably just take a look at the processlist on your db server to see what it is doing now, but the statistics Query Analyzer provides can be extremely powerful. Two examples:

#1 - Badly performing query

I installed Quan (Query Analyzer) and within about 20 minutes it became clear I …

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A few months ago I was at dinner with Yves Trudeau discussing what all consultants discuss in the late hours after a long day of hard work… how to improve performance and scalability.  I brought up an idea to him to utilize memcached as an L2 cache for innodb.  At first he was skeptical, but as we talked he was more and more intrigued by the idea.  The idea was simple, add a set to memcached when something hit the LRU…  then issue a get from memcached when you do not find the data locally stored in the buffer pool but before you read from disk.  Starting from that point, you can work out any of the issues that would be sure to follow.   So Yves continued emailing me asking me questions…  then he sent me a note that he had made huge progress with the idea. Huge progress means that he wrote version 0.1 and had it working.    That’s when the Idea really turned into a project.

We called …

While it took some time to get things sorta out with building MySQL 5.1 with the right parameters to get partitioning support working, I finally was able to get a working install and had some time to play around with this new intriguing MySQL 5.1 feature hands on. The results were mixed I think. For an initial release, things are pretty solid, save for a few non-trivial oddities.

One of the problems I was trying to tackle was splitting up a logs table up by a date range. It seems like this would be a popular use for partitions since it replicates some of the functionality of the MERGE storage engine, only in most cases, does so better. The problem, however, I ran into was that it did not seem quite as trivial as I thought to partition by year and month. Partitioning by year seems easy - just use the year() function, but partitioning by year and month is far less …