What can open source companies learn from Mark Benioff? Plenty. READ MORE

Interpreting the output of the MySQL EXPLAIN command can be tricky. From all the information you get, some of the most important information is:

• Full table scans
• High join size product
• Using filesorts
• Using temporary tables

This can be hard to see in the raw output. Example query:

EXPLAIN SELECT b.item_id, b.bidder_id, u.username, MAX(price) AS price FROM bid b JOIN user u ON (b.bidder_id = u.user_id) WHERE b.item_id = '1' GROUP BY b.bidder_id ORDER BY price DESC

The explain outputs:

id, select_type, table, type, possible_keys, key, key_len, ref, rows, Extra
1, SIMPLE, b, ALL, null, null, 0, null, 22660, Using where; Using temporary; Using filesort
1, SIMPLE, u, eq_ref, PRIMARY, PRIMARY, 4, heavybidder.b.bidder_id, 1,

We've been experimenting how to visualize the output of …

Happy birthday to Giuseppe Maxia, a wonderful community organizer for MySQL.

And happy birthday to Leslie Hawthorn, Google’s geek herder.

Thank you for making life better for open source volunteers like me!

It is widely acknowledged that Barack Obama put together the best minds and team together to run his campaign. One of the proof points is that his website www.barackobama.com was driven by MySQL! 

From Jonathan's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

" On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com. "

It is widely acknowledged that Barack Obama put together the best minds and team together to run his campaign. One of the proof points is that his website www.barackobama.com was driven by MySQL! 

From Jonathan's blog:
http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/

" On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com. "

I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Juanjo Hierro from the Morfeo Project, a Spanish community of open source communities set up to speed up the development of Service Oriented Architectures-related software standards and create business opportunities for local suppliers.

Hierro explained that the Morfeo Project is based on “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Christensen’s law has also been used by Tim O’Reilly …

Introduction to the Innodb IO subsystem

Basics When a client connects to MySQL, it creates a thread to handle it. This thread executes SQL queries and interacts with the storage engine (for simplicity, lets call them user threads). Innodb uses a four (4) additional threads to implement asynchronous io1. Although Innodb has an option innodb_file_io_threads to control the number of IO handler threads, it has no effect on how many IO handler threads are actually created. These IO handler threads wait and process events in a loop. Each IO handler thread processes different kinds of events. (Insert buffer writes, log writes, datafile writes, and read-ahead or prefetch) Let us now see how different types of IO are handled by Innodb.

Reads Using a simple sysbench read-only test, we notice that all user threads issue reads (pread(2)) to the data files. We can verify …

Jonathan puts it in slighty different words, and doesn’t gaurantee The White House to everybody.

I do wonder when we’ll get a Drizzle or NDB using president though….

...and Senator Barack Obama! May the force be with you!

If you are a MySQL 5.x/6.0 InnoDB replication user, right now you take a significant performance hit on the replication master simply by turning on the binlog. The good news is that we've taken a big step toward eliminating that performance gap. I'll describe the problem, how I was able to track down the root cause, and point to a patch that fixes the problem. Since the changes are in the InnoDB code, right now we're waiting on Oracle/Innobase to review the fix and formally commit it. Once that happens, you should see it show up in binary releases. In the meantime, if you build your own binaries you can test the prototype patch yourself.

One of the things I have been working on quite a bit over the past several months is scalability of the nodes within a MySQL scale-out replication environment.  The reason being that there has been a rapid …