Ever since Peter over at Percona wrote about MySQL and swap, I’ve been meaning to write this post. But after I saw Dathan Pattishall’s post on the subject, I knew I’d better actually do it.

There’s a nasty problem with Linux 2.6 even when you have a ton of RAM. No matter what you do, including setting /proc/sys/vm/swappiness = 0, your OS is going to prefer swapping stuff out rather than freeing up system cache. On a single-use machine, where the application is better at utilizing RAM than the system is, this is incredibly stupid. Our MySQL boxes are a perfect example – they run only MySQL and we want InnoDB to have a lot of RAM (32-64GB …

If you’re waiting for High Performance MySQL Second Edition to hit the shelf, you’re not the only one. I am too! I can’t wait to actually hold it in my hands. But you don’t have to wait idly. No, not at all! You can pre-order it and then you’ll get it as soon as possible. Plus your pre-order will help them figure out how much demand there is, so it doesn’t sell out and make you wait for your own copy.

Zack Urlocker says MySQL 5.1 has zero bugs. He may have been misquoted, or quoted out of context, but there it is. I’ll quote enough of it that you can’t take it out of context twice: Mickos also said MySQL 5.1 has upgraded its reliability and ease of use over 2005′s v5.0. "Now we can admit it, but this version is much improved over 5.0, which we weren't totally happy with,"

2008 was announced as the year of the *change*.

On February I started work on performance tuning features and I planned those two new Editions of HoneyMonitor (Pro and Audit Pro).

On March I returned back to Trieste - my University town - after a two-year-full-immersion experience at HoneySoftware, in Caltagirone, where I forgot all the job-not-related aspects of the human life.

On April, meeting my (old and new) friends, going to cinema and doing things like those, I recovered my social life.

I removed the password protection from my blog, I announced HoneyMonitor Audit Pro (publishing 150+ screenshots of that Edition), I removed some out-of-date pages of our site …

I was reading a post about The Swag Report and realized that I stayed so busy at the Phorum booth (and a little at the memcached booth) and preparing for my talks, I did not bother to go around and collect any swag from the conference.  So, if you are a vendor and want to mail me some swag that I missed, you can send it to: Brian Moon, 198 S. Hillcrest Rd., Odenville, AL  35120.  Of course, I expect nothing.  But, ya never know what product I might pimp because of a t-shirt. =)

I was reading a post about The Swag Report and realized that I stayed so busy at the Phorum booth (and a little at the memcached booth) and preparing for my talks, I did not bother to go around and collect any swag from the conference.  So, if you are a vendor and want to mail me some swag that I missed, you can send it to: Brian Moon, 198 S. Hillcrest Rd., Odenville, AL  35120.  Of course, I expect nothing.  But, ya never know what product I might pimp because of a t-shirt. =)

…

Sun is aggressively pushing T2000 as Scalable MySQL Platforms, and indeed it is Scalable in terms of high concurrency workloads - it is able to execute a lot of concurrent threads and so speed gain from 1 thread to say 32 thread will be significant.

But thing a lot of people miss is - Being Scalable is Not Enough - you need to scale from reasonable base to claim the good performance, and this is where T2000 performs subpar in many cases.

I often hear about people complaining queries take much longer on T2000 compared to recent Intel or AMD CPUs when there is no concurrent load - It is reported T2000 can be as much as 5-15 times slower in this case depending on the workload.

Here is example run of purely CPU consuming "Benchmark" function for 2.6Ghz Intel Xeon vs T2000:

PLAIN TEXT SQL: …

I like Ubuntu's philosophy. Among the Debian derived Linux distros, it's the one that appeals to me the most. The first live CDs (Knoppix, Mepis) were a revolution, but Ubuntu has perfected the trend by adding a quality that was missing from these early ones.
I especially like the ease of installation. Plug to the net, apt-get install package_name, and presto! you got what you want.
MySQL server comes with just one line:

apt-get install mysql-client mysql-server

This will get you the latest server and client binaries, ready to use.
Yesterday I wanted to build MySQL 5.1 from source. The latest one (5.1.24) that has been released is missing the Federated engine, and I wanted the complete thing. So I installed Ubuntu in a spare machine, and got the source code from the development tree.
By …

All of the videos from the 2008 MySQL Conference have been processed and uploaded. Links to the videos, slides, notes, photos for each presentation are all on the mega-conference page at:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008Notes

This represents many hours of my own toil, but it also reflects plenty of people who have blogged, edited the wiki pages and speakers who wrote and gave tutorials and presentations. I am proud of everyone’s efforts to offer so many learning resources for free….

Enjoy! EDIT: I forgot to thank Jay, the folks at O’Reilly and all the speakers for giving me explicit permission to video and freely offer their presentations.

If you know of any video, audio, notes, slides, photos, etc that are not linked, please link them at the wiki page. If you can’t or won’t, please comment here and I will update the wiki …