The latest from the MySQL community

For many MySQL implementations scalability is a crucial requirement. Scaling on various dimensions: Size, Performance, Cost and DBA-Stress-Level.

While several factors impact the scalability of the database, underlying storage probably has the highest impact. You need to make sure that the storage will fill up the buffers fast enough to keep queries happy, and acknowledge the writes fast enough to keep transactions happy. You need to make sure that you can keep growing the available storage as your database grows - MySQL databases are particularly prone to collect more and more data. You also need to make sure that maintenance tasks such as backup, cloning, and application testing will scale gracefully with the size of your database.

Storage systems from NetApp are a great choice when designing for MySQL scalability. Administrators can expand storage on the go …

I got a fair amount of response from my last blogging about including the MySQL Administrator tool as a useful utility in a hands on exam for DBAs. In general I do not like GUIs and prefer the old fashion way. The first thing I did after getting my Mac laptop was open up a terminal to get to the command line interpreter. But I never expected so many to be in favor of forgoing the Administrator tool and sticking with the CLI.

You can read the comments for yourself. I found myself agreeing with all of them. I did receive some private emails that generally distilled to the DBA exam being test of DBA skills and not how well one can manage the latest version of an add-on product.

One of the reasons I used to tell novices to use the vi editor was that it was a common denominator and would be there at three in the morning after your data center had go to heck and you needed to get your servers back on line.
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I created and ran some simple tests on mysql and postgresql to figure out which one is faster. It is already known that postgresql is more stable and reliable than mysql. pgsql has a rich set of features. It is a complete RDBMS and also supports fulltext search.

All benchmarks were done on my laptop - Intel core 2 duo (2.0 GHz) with 4MB L2 cache & 2 GB ram. I have 64 Bit ubuntu system loaded

Nexaweb contributes code to open source Ajax effort. IBM releases v1.0 of Lotus Symphony. Zmanda teams with NetApp on MySQL backup. (and more)

Open Source Ajax Gains Enterprise Momentum With dojo.E Contribution From Nexaweb, Nexaweb Technologies (Press Release)

ODF Comes of Age: IBM Lotus Symphony Turns 1.0, IBM (Press Release)

Zmanda Teams with NetApp to Deliver Highly Optimized Backup Solution for MySQL, Zmanda / NetApp (Press Release)

Linux Framework Wars Down to Two Parties, ABI Research (Press Release)

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We (the MySQL Web team) have now made it easier for you to keep track of upcoming MySQL Live Web Seminars as well as MySQL OnDemand Webinars - check out the new RSS Feeds:





Have you noticed the change on www.mysql.com?



BTW, did you see the RSS icon next to MySQL Training? This …

I was intrigued by this survey about MySQL today, and I took it.
Some of the questions made me think about the status of MySQL community. Unlike other free/open source projects, MySQL community people are not direct contributors to the project, but just users. Then there are the more advanced ones who keep an active role, and the majority who are just content to use it and don't even care to participate in blogs or forums.
Seen throrugh the articles in PlanetMySQL, the MySQL community has three components, with sub components:

• Sun/MySQL employees, who link between the noisy users and the company.
  • The ones who produce or advocate closed source
  • The ones who only deal with open source
  • The ones who tell interesting stories without taking sides.
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Keith Murphy and Mark Schoonover have put together an excellent survey which is already doing good (seeing the numbers they have been clocking). Survey results will be out in the summer issue of MySQL magazine. I feel this is a "must take" survey for everyone in the MySQL community. And do not forget to mention my blog in the "top 5 favorite MySQL blogs" ;-). Just kidding!

Overall, this is the best survey regarding MySQL that I have ever taken, don't miss it. It will hardly take 10 minutes of your busy schedule. A busy man has the time do anything, right?

Quick Links:

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In the next proxy release we introduce plugins, we talked about it already in http://jan.kneschke.de/projects/mysql/mysql-proxy-a-chassis-and-a-mysql-server. Take a look at http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysql-proxy/trunk/plugins/ and check out:

• proxy
• admin
• debug

each of them sharing the common code that is provided by the chassis.

The debug plugin is a lua shell with a mysql-protocol ... well, just read on ;)

The purpose of the plugin is to be able to introspect the proxy at runtime. If it is loaded you can connect to port 4043 and execute lua code inside the proxy core:

$ mysql --user=root --password=secret --port=4043 --host=192.168.2.113 …

There are now two ways how to do this:

1. Using "set debug=d,flag" and adding some DBUG_EXECUTE_IF("flag", abort()) we can trigger the server to crash at a specific place in the code. There is an example of this in crash_commit_before.test
This requires a debug compiled server so you need to add a "source include/have_debug.inc" at the beginning of the test.

2. There is also a new way to do it without using DBUG_. By using the new command in mysqltest called "shutdown_server"[1], we will tell the server to stop, wait a while(60 seconds) and finally kill it off. This way we get a reliable shutdown. The first testcase that uses this is events_restart.test

In both of these methods, the testcase has to write a small file before the "crash/shutdown", that file tells mysql-test-run.pl that it was an expected crash/shutdown. The server will be started up again with the same settings as before …