Quite commonly I get a question similar to this - "My Innodb Buffer Pool is already 90% full, should I be thinking about upgrading memory already?"
This is a wrong way to put the question. Unless you have very small database (read as database which is less than innodb_buffer_pool_size) You will have all buffer pool busy sooner or later.
How to figure out if it is time for upgrade when ?

Look at number of misses per second Check number of innodb file reads and writes per second and see how high are these. Decent drive can do some 150-200 IOs/sec this is how you can guess about the load. If you just get couple of reads per second your working set fits to the memory very well if it is hundreds you're likely to be IO bound or becoming one.

Look at Iowait iostat -dx 10 will show disk utilization. Low (less than 50%) means there are rarely anyone waiting from disk …

I saw some MySQL UDF code recently that uses the current_thd macro to get a THD object pointing to the current thread.

I was under the impression that this was not safe to do from a UDF? Am I wrong? Is a critical section needed to read or modify it?

The new MySQL 6.0 replacement API for the UDF interface looks like it specifically gives access to a THD object, similar to native functions. Is this just to make the interfaces more similar? Or is this because the current UDF interface (<=5.1) doesn't provide a safe way to access the current THD?

Ok, here’s your chance to make a recommendation on the front page layout for relationalnews.com , the new website that features news for all of the major relational database systems. Check out the three options below and leave a comment or email me with your own solution. If selected you will be credited one the site for your influence. 

The question is: we’re getting just over 1000 new articles per week from the feeds, and the current front page displays the title and summary of the latest 10 articles. This means lots of pagination clicking to see even the approximate 150 new articles for the current day. 

Option 1: display only the headlines, no article summaries, for the past 24 hours with links to the full article from the archive. Sorted by published date, limited to the past 24 hours …

At my current gig, we're trying to make a custom storage engine do something rather out of the ordinary.

Which isn't really a surprise, all new storage engines try to do something "out of the ordinary". If you need "ordinary", just use MyISAM or InnoDB. (Those two engines are, themselves, rather extraordinary...)

But in the process of trying to hunt one particular thing down, I am wishing again for a storage engine that is completely utterly blandly ordinary.

An example storage engine that has no tricks, no performance hacks, no elegant data structures, no clever code, and yet actually works, able to insert, update, delete, and select real data.

My "piggy engine" would be perfect, if I ever get around to finishing it.

I just got back from vacation and noticed that two patchsets have been released that greatly improve Innodb performance! Maybe I need to take more breaks

Yasufumi Kinoshita's patches Percona recently released a patch which includes performance fixes developed by Yasufumi Kinoshita from NTT Comware. This helps diskbound applications quite significantly. Details at Bug #29413 Maximum performance of OLTP benchmark is not so scalable on multi-cpu. It looks like the bulk of performance improvements come from breaking up the lock guarding the buffer pool structures, and improvements in the IO code path. The "buf_pool->mutex" also gets quite hot when concurrency is not limited (via innodb_thread_concurrency) and …

GreenSQL is a database firewall used to protect database from SQL injection attacks. New release fixes a number of critical bugs. We recommend all users to update.

This release includes a number of pre-build packages of popular operating systems.
We supply packages for: CentOS, openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian.

List of changes:
1. GreenSQL can automatically build whitelist if the system is in the learning mode.
2. After learning period is over, GreenSQL automatically blocks all new queries.
3. Added simulation mode to test risk matrix calculation.
4. A number of risk matrix calculation bugs were fixed.
5. Code optimization patches.
6. Log timestamps patch applied (thanks to jgarcia).
7. Fixed Fedora 9 compilation errors.
8. Risk matrix enhancement - added detection of db content bruteforce attacks.

We have updated GreenSQL configuration database. You will have to …

The article is an practical introduction to Bazaar's advanced features. After the basics, magnificently covered by Daniel Fischer a few weeks ago, this article explains how to perform high level development operations with Bazaar.
Bravo Guilhem! …

The best performer at the workshop will be awarded a very appropriate prize. A copy of …

I just made an investment into the Finnish open source company IT mill.

I was elected to be in the IT mill board to be able to efficiently help with the companies business and community strategies. I have also introduced IT mill to Ralf Wahlsten, who will act as an advisor for IT mill's board when needed. Ralf Wahlsten was also an investor in MySQL AB.

IT mill is a still quite small but it has many of the the characteristics of a company that is meant to succeed:

• The company is profitable and has been so for a long time.
• The company knows how to growing organically according to it's profit. (This is very important to know even if one later decides to grow exponentially with the help of …

I have merged the code from the mysql-5.1 launchpad repository which should put this repository up to the recent 5.1.28-rc version. You can examine the source repository here.On a related note, had a brief email exchange with Eric Herman and so I hope that there will be time for him to do some work to complete the support for Java stored routines.