I was contacted this week by a previous client regarding a failure of processing data. This was a Contact, Financial and Media Management system I developed for a non-for-profit organization a LAMJ stack, and I’ve had to do nothing since deployment in the past 3 years, no bug fixes, no feature enhancements. The only thing lacking is additional management reporting, and data is extracted for this option now.

It runs under commodity Hardware, Linux and MySQL and it’s only unscheduled downtime was an power failure before UPS power was installed. However this all changed last week. Processing of regular scheduled encrypted data simply failed unexpectedly.

A summary of the environment.

• Data is inserted with AES_ENCRYPT(data,key);
• Data is retrieved with AES_DECRYPT(data,key);
• Data is never updated.
• New data is always added, and historical data always remains.
• The …

Long ago I wrote a 100-page book on MySQL 5.0 stored procedures. It’s on our dev-zone pages. But it’s out of date. In 2006 I made some corrections for MySQL 5.1. It took me a long time to publish the revised book, but here it is: http://blogs.mysql.com/peterg/files/2008/05/book01.pdf.

I finally have some images to show you what my improved Cacti templates look like.

These aren’t a perfect demo, since for example this server doesn’t have the query cache enabled, but it should show you what I’ve done. Note, for example, that each graph is labeled with the actual values of the images drawn on it. You don’t have to guess what the values are by squinting at the graphs.

You can click on any image to go to a larger version. Enjoy:

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learning the 5 string banjo

Originally uploaded by Elliot Murphy

This week Sun will host the first two free webinars on MySQL and Memcached. Ivan Zoratti will kick off on Wednesday with "Highly scalable solutions with MySQL and Memcached".

On Thursday Monty Taylor, Jimmy Guerrero and Frank Mash will talk about "Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL".

You should do as I did and register for the event as soon as possible :-)

My Sakila Cube (black)
Originally uploaded by Geert JM VanderkelenThis is maybe an old idea, but still great to do! Thanks to Ronald's tip I could make the cube you see here. Just pure fun!

Check out how to do on Ned Batchelder's site!

(Also thanks to Ronald Bradford, I can walk the earth with my good walking shoes! )

Much has been written about the new InnoDB pluggable storage engine, which Innobase released at the MySQL conference last month. We've written posts ourselves about its fast index creation capabilities and the compressed row format, and how that affects performance. One of the nice things they added in this InnoDB release is INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables that show some status information about InnoDB. Here are the tables:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SHOW TABLES FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA LIKE 'INNODB%';
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Sun Microsystems - Australia - APAC Extended Horizons Summit 2008

I’m giving a Cluster session tomorrow (Sunday) and talking about Scaling MySQL on Monday. Hope to see you there!

I'm not big fan on flow control functions like IF or CASE used in MySQL Queries as they are often abused used to create queries which are poorly readable as well as can hardly be optimized well by MySQL Optimizer.

One way I find IF statement very useful is computing multiple aggregates over different set of rows in the single query sweep.

Here is how I like to use it for web site performance analyzes. As you can see in this table we have recorded "wtime" which is wallclock time it took to generate the page. We also track types of pages because they often have different performance profile.

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT count(*) cnt, avg(wtime) avw, sum(IF(wtime>0.3,1,0))/count(*) soso, sum(IF(wtime>1,1,0))/count(*) poor, sum(IF(wtime>5,1,0))/count(*) fatal FROM performance_log_080523;
2. +---------+------------------+--------+--------+--------+
3. | cnt  …