I’ve had to accept the “practice what you preach” pill recently due to a disaster at my hosting provider. See Learning from a Disaster.

While it was my own personal site on a dedicated server in question and not a business generating review I found that my MySQL Backup Strategy was incomplete ( It is also based on code 4 years old). I found that I had not tested my Disaster Recovery Plan adequately. I have used my backup and recovery approach in the past for various controlled situations and testing successfully.

So what mistakes did I make. There were two.

1. I was using a cold backup approach. That is specifically copying the entire MySQL Database in a controlled manner at the file system level. These were also copied to an alternate shared hosting server for storage. This works fine when you backup server supports a …

I’m happy to say that the market response to our launch continues to be positive. So far we have had nearly 30 postings on the leading blogs in the MySQL world as well as close to 20 articles published in traditional media. Our press releases were picked up and published on over 30 sites. We had about 400 people stop by our booth at the MySQL conference and we continue to get a significant number of prospective customers and partners contacting us every week who want to know more about the company and our product.

Though the response has been very enthusiastic there has also been some healthy skepticism about how well the product would perform in real customer environments. In this post I’d like to briefly describe the results we are seeing at one of our beta customers.

The customer in question is a publicly traded company that manages the online forums for large media and web businesses. They use MySQL extensively today …

As I indicated in my previous post on MySQL performance, we have been doing some performance work using an internally developed web2.0 application. Akara and I will be presenting this app publicly to a large audience for the first time at the upcoming Velocity Conference in Burlingame, CA on June 23, 24. Check out our abstract.  Most of our work uses Cool Stack so a lot of the results we will be presenting will be based on that. If you're struggling with performance issues, this conference may be worth checking out.
If you will be attending the conference, please stop by and say hello. It's always good to see people whom we only know through blogs and forums.

This rocks. It’s not complete, but Pyshards is the closest thing I’ve seen to a real attempt at making a more or less generic sharding toolkit, written in Python. This is not just great because it’s written in Python or because it helps people who need sharding capabilities in MySQL. It’s great because having a toolkit to use for this benefits the community by creating a point of reference for how to get things done, and can help unite those who are treading into this territory and help them all get a leg up on this beast that is “sharding”.

I, for one, have found ways (so far) to avoid having to do this. It’s a good bit of complexity for data that would otherwise be very simple, and an infrastructure architecture that would otherwise also be simple (by design). But one of the things that makes sharding seem complex is that there aren’t any …

I have in front of me a contract which I've signed and am sending out today. It's a contract to write a book for Wiley/Wrox titled "Developing Web Applications with Perl, Memcached, MySQL and Apache". I have never written a book before, so I'm wondering what this experience will be like. It seems like a huge task but one that I think I can handle both in terms of my experience and ability. This book is slated to be around 500 pages covering what the title suggests, of course in detail. Originally, Memcached wasn't included, but I thought that it's become an ever-increasingly used tool that is part of the LAMP stack (LAMMP?).

My goal is to create a book that helps web developers be able to build web applications using Perl as the language, MySQL as the database, Memcached as a read-through or write-through cache, Apache as the web server platform. With this book I hope create more interest in Perl web development. There are so many …

To coincide with EURO 2008, I’m embarking on a virtual European tour, taking a quick look at open source policies and deployment projects in the 16 nations that are competing in the tournament.

Turkey kept its hopes of qualifying for the knockout stages of EURO 2008 alive with a last-minute victory over hosts Switzerland last night and now faces a winner-takes-all final group game against the Czech Republic on Sunday.

When it comes to open source software adoption, details of public and private deployments are thin on the ground, and we are indebted to Erkan Tekman, Pardus project manager, for contributing his insight into open source adoption in Turkey (see below).

…

It seems that word has started to leak out, so I might as well remove any speculation or ambiguity. In the next few weeks, I'll walk the halls at Yahoo! as an employee one last time and turn in my purple badge. After 8.5 years of service and a better experience than I could have possibly imaged back in 1999, the time for me to move on has arrived.

It's always hard to make a decision like this. It took several months to finally decide. I've really enjoyed my time at Yahoo and have a lot of people to thank--people who took a risk on me, believed in me, encouraged me, and even defended me over the years. There are literally too many to name, but some of them are: David Filo, Jerry Yang, Jeff Weiner, Phu Hoang, Ash Patel, Jeffrey Friedl, Mike Bennett, Anil Pal, …

Occasionally, you find yourself in the need to kill problematic connections to the database.
Usually if it's only one or two connections, you can use the combination of "SHOW PROCESSLIST" command to identify the problematic connection ID, and run a "KILL ID" command.

What do you do if you need to kill 10 connections? Or 56? I wouldn't want to type in all those kill commands, it's just dirty work. What we need is a more neat manner to perform those kills. Mass kill, if you wish.

Alternative way: use the INFORMATION_SCHEMA's PROCESSLIST table, to construct the kill statements semi-automatically.

SELECT CONCAT('kill ',id,';') AS kill_list
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PROCESSLIST
WHERE command='Sleep';


This select will return something like this (when using the command line client):

 …

Perception and reality don't always converge with users when it comes to MySQL licensing, even with Sun/MySQL focusing on selling its MySQL Enterprise support subscriptions. Just today I was talking with a client who thought that to get a MySQL Enterprise subscription, it was required to purchase licenses.

Not true. Simple. They hadn't talked with a MySQL sales person, so this wasn't the (usual ;-) warping of reality that I tend to see, but somehow perusing the information on the net they'd come to the above conclusion. Easy to dispell once understood, but much more complicated (if not impossible) to figure out how they came to that conclusion in the first place....

They also didn't realise that the MySQL Enterprise binaries are also GPL. Ohwell.

But really, nobody wants to care about licensing, it's this necessary evil that you have to deal with. Best to keep it simple, or even better, make it a …

As I indicated in my previous post on MySQL performance, we have been doing some performance work using an internally developed web2.0 application. Akara and I will be presenting this app publicly to a large audience for the first time at the upcoming Velocity Conference in Burlingame, CA on June 23, 24. Check out our abstract.  Most of our work uses Cool Stack so a lot of the results we will be presenting will be based on that. If you're struggling with performance issues, this conference may be worth checking out.
If you will be attending the conference, please stop by and say hello. It's always good to see people whom we only know through blogs and forums.