One of the frustrations of of working in Certification is that so little time is spent creating exam questions. There are million other things from expense reports to mandatory training that need to be take care of before delving back into things like InnoDB buffer pools or scaling Falcon databases. The good news is that new exam questions are ready for the next generation of DBA Certification and I will soon be begging the folks who helped me in the past for one last look before we shrink wrap the exams.

I attended the CEdMA Conference this week and was able to network with other certification folks. One of the items of discussion was what goes into a certification package. In tight economic times, training and certification departments need to cut costs. Many certification entities are simply sending out PDF certificates via email. Others are concerned about rising costs for shipping t-shirts, pens, wallet-sized cards, certificates, …

Selling valuable products (not support) shows that Red Hat/JBoss won't let purists get in the way of evolving the open source business model. READ MORE

The 118th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs, has been published on Ward Pond’s SQL Server blog.

Log Buffer is the only platform-neutral, distributed, human-edited article on database blogs. It receives several thousand views each week, and publishing an edition on your own blog brings those views to you. Hosting an edition of LB also introduces you and your blog to your colleagues in the DB blogosphere. Write me an email and I’ll get you started.

Now, here’s Ward Pond’s Log Buffer …

SetupWe have one InnoDB file per table on our database, which was set with the following option: innodb_file_per_table.This allows me to portably transport Innodb files on a system level with minimal hassle, and is much faster than mysqldump, as these tables are several GB each.ProblemWhen transporting an .idb file from one server to another, I ran into the following error:ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got

So, I installed one of those math question anti-spam plugins for WordPress comments. It stopped the spam! Unfortunately it also stopped all valid comments when the answer was right, although it did work when I first set it up. So if you tried leaving a comment (I see a few were denied) for one of the recent Drizzle or MySQL related posts (like the New libdrizzle), please try again. :)

Anyone have a suggestion for a good anti-spam plugin for WordPress comments? I’ve looked a bit but nothing really stands out.

What does that mean? Should we wait two …

So, I recently ran into one of those situations where a customer complains that his MySQL database is slow, and “it worked great until about two weeks ago”. The first thing I look at in these situations is not the queries or any code, but the indexes. Once I determined that the indexes were almost nonsensical, I had a look at the queries themselves, which proved that the indexes were, in fact, nonsensical. Running the queries as written in the code, from a mysql shell, with EXPLAIN, I was able to further confirm that the indexes (most of them, anyway) were never used.

Easy right? Just reindex the table!

NOTE: I’m going to skip the talk about all of the database design issues on this gig and just go straight to solving the immediate problem at hand. Just know that I had nothing to do with the design.

But, supposing this table has 15 million rows and is running on a machine with 2GB of RAM and only …

I’ve created a set of Cacti templates for graphing stats about MySQL. While these were based on several other people’s work, there are many improvements. One of them in particular I want to bring up, and I’ll go so far as to say it ought to be a “best practice” for graphing. [...]

I presented these at an internal MySQL professional services meeting about a month ago… its mostly a hodge podge of various benchmarks… but enjoy! The big difference in these benchmarks vs the other benchmarks is I am testing on the memoright GT drive, which is supposed to be one of the fastest SLC drives out their currently. Lets get right too it:

Looking at sysbench Random read/write iops:

A lot of my clients are in a position where their database performance is deteriorating but they are not “big enough” (or not willing/able to) explore sharding all of their data structures. They’re too big for the solution to be adding another read slave, but too small to justify the resources for re-designing their [...]