In the Jonathan Schwartz interview at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco yesterday, I screwed up. After learning we weren't set up for audience Q&A with microphones, I thought, "well then, I'll just suggest to the audience that they twitter questions @timoreilly, and I'll check my phone during the interview." I kept checking, but no questions. Bummer. Not till I heard complaints afterwards that I hadn't asked any of the questions did I do a little digging, and discover that I had twitter set to show me only @ replies from people I'm following. Bad idea.

To all of you in the audience, a big apology for the screwup.

However, I did collect all the questions after the fact, and forward them on to Jonathan to answer by email. The questions and Jonathan's answers are below. …

The MySQL Event Schedule is one of the new features in MySQL 5.1. It is explained well in this article from the MySQL site, and in the manual itself. I'd like to demonstrate an interesting way to use it. What gave me this idea is actually a feature in SQL Server 2005, called Service Broker. It's a sort of queue manager / messaging platform, which can also be exploited in the same way.

Lets say you are writing a stored procedure, that loads data into the database. Benchmarks show that loading data in parallel from several threads increases overall throughput, as MySQL is unable to utilize several CPUs to process a single SELECT query, moreover a bulk load operation. To work in parallel, …

I happened to need an extra Linux install on one of my computers.

I went to my local Ubuntu mirror (under network installer) and downloaded the files 'linux' (kernel) and 'initrd.gz'.

Copied them to random directory on the existing Linux install.

Rebooted, and typed 'c' in Grub to get a command line.

Entered the three commands kernel <path to linux>, initrd <path to initrd.gz> and boot.

Went quickly through the installer, downloading packages from a mirror and installing the sshd server.

Hey presto, Linux install in maybe 15 min or so? No fiddling with burning and juggling CD/DVD, which I really hate. Grub + network installer is a piece of genius.

(For an initial install, I usually boot from network, downloading the two above files by tfpt from another computer on the network, which is only slightly more involved and still avoids any …

This is a continuation post on InnoDB plugin row format performance with few more test scenarios to cover based on the feedback and questions that I got in my Inbox.

This time the initial table looks like this

CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
) ENGINE=InnoDB ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED;

This time, the table does not have a secondary index in the create time, instead it will be added after the table is populated with the data to test the performance of the new faster index support from the plugin. I also added a new scenario to test 2K compression as we noticed 4K compression …

Agenda:

* The state of open source venture funding
* What’s up with MySQL?
* Desktop Linux troubles
* Qlusters stepping away from open source
* OSI Board election
* Open source social - centralized or distributed?
* The Open Source Census

iTunes or direct download (37:31, 8.6MB)

Let me start out by saying: the best response to a disaster is backup you can count on.

Found a scary story today about hundreds of thousands of websites using Microsoft IIS and SQL Servers being affected by Internet-wide SQL injection attacks. The story originally reported by F-Secure is now on Slashdot as well.

On the IIS forum, panic is visible. Those who had backups are breathing a sigh of relief like one administrator who commented, "We have been hit by this as well. Lucky backup ran last night just prior to the attack."

Others without backups are just screwed.

F-secure …

Here is number 5 in my series of six podcasts from last week's MySQL conference and expo.

Just after lunch on Tuesday, I was able to corner Brian Aker, former CTO of MySQL, introduce myself and ask him if he was up for a podcast.  Without any convincing or arm twisting he happily agreed. :)

My interview with Brian (9:18)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Brian's lenses adapt to match the art around him. 

Some of the …

At this year's MySQL Conference I was invited to be a keynote panelist at Scaling MySQL Up Or Out keynote. Other keynote panelists included Jeff Rothschild (VP of technology at Facebook and a consulting partner with Accel Partners), Paul Tuckfield (DBA at YouTube), John Allspaw (manager of operations engineering at Flickr) and Domas Mituzas (DBA at Wikipedia). There were also representatives from MySQL (Monty Taylor) and Sun (Matt Ingenthron).

I really enjoyed being a keynote panelist with my peers. We were seated according to our Alexa ranking with the highest ranking YouTube on the right side. Even though I was representing the thirteenth largest site, our traffic compared to Facebook and YouTube was humbling.

All of the keynote panelists met early in the morning to get equipped with microphones and to go over the format.
…

Or, When MySQL Lies!

When I do a show slave status\G, sometimes mysqld will lie to me and give me a wrong Exec_Master_Log_Pos. Let me explain with a situation from last night.

This is the output of show slave status\G from mysql version 5.0.41-community-log:

mysql> show slave status \G
*************************** 1. row ***************************
                Slave_IO_State: Waiting for master to send event
                   Master_Host: XXX.XXX.XXX.XXX
                   Master_User: replic_username
                   Master_Port: 3306
                 Connect_Retry: 60
               Master_Log_File: mysql-bin.000480
           Read_Master_Log_Pos: 690470773
                Relay_Log_File: db2-relay-bin.000028
                 Relay_Log_Pos: 683977007
      Relay_Master_Log_File: mysql-bin.000480
              Slave_IO_Running: Yes
             Slave_SQL_Running: No …

While being subscribed to the full blogs.sun.com feed certainly feels like drinking water from a firehose, every once in a while I stumble over very well-written and useful articles about MySQL. Below is a collection of helpful posts, especially if you run MySQL on Solaris (surprise!). And while I still am an avid Linux user, I must admit that Solaris has a few neat features - particularly DTrace and ZFS are quite intriguing. If only userland would not feel so weird for someone coming from a GNU/Linux background!

From Jenny Chen's blog:

• DTrace Integration with MySQL 5.0 - Chime demo
…