Over the past several years whether I am working with a small company or a fortune 500 client I have seen lots of issues and mistakes made around the configuration, setup, and ongoing maintenance of disk on Unix and Linux Servers. This is not only an issue with MySQL shops, rather it can be an issue with all database setups whether it is Oracle, DB2, or Sybase. Neglecting the disk is setting yourself up for long term issues. These mistakes often force companies to throw more and more hardware at the problem… Lets look at some common mistakes around disk:

#1 The problem is always an IO problem, and remember spindles not capacity

In performance disk is everything. It makes you happy, it makes you sad. Learn to love it. Learn to hate it. Learn to understand it. Everything eventually comes back to disk. Take this example: Lets say you have a bad query that you fix with an index. Why …

The messages going back and forth on the “close sourcing” or paying to make use of some “plugins” /addons within MySQL are flying still! And in my opinion this is getting way out of hand. < DISCLAIMER >I work for Sun/MySQL as a senior consultant but claim no special knowledge or agenda here. The comments here are simply my opinions. </ DISCLAIMER> I can not help but look at all the hubbub and laugh a little bit. The vast majority of what I have read seems way off base (more of a he/she posted this, fifth hand retelling instead of from official channels). But there is a lot of FUD floating around, and I keep seeing more and more legit news sources picking up on this “massive change to licensing”, which In my opinion it really is a non-story… because there is no massive change.

What is the issue?

One thing that still springs to mind when I think of the MySQL User Conference last week is Sun's opening keynote. While talking about Sun's market penetration with open source software, Jonathan Schwartz, Sun's CEO, slipped in a short mention of the mobile market saying something along the lines of "Sun is going to be entering the mobile market later on this year". He didn't spend more than 5 seconds talking about it, moving on to the acquisition of MySQL.

Last year, Sun already made an announcement of …

I will be at the Mashable Party at Webster Hall on May 16, 2008. The party starts at 8PM and goes till 4 AM although I won't be staying till 4.

There are less than 100 tickets left. If you are attending and use MySQL, Solaris 10 or Sun hardware in your environment, I would love to chat with you.

And, there are no presentations :)

------ EVENT DETAILS ----

What: MashBash NYC : Mashable?s NYC Spring Party!
Who: 2,500 Sold Out Crowd, 400 Mashable VIP Tickets on Balcony, Grandmaster Flash starts the night off
When: Friday, May 16th, 2008
Drinks: Open Bar, 8 - 10 pm sponsored by Kluster
Where: Webster Hall, 125 East 11th Street, New York, NY

Schedule for the …

Welcome to Tip #1 in MySQL Replication Series. In this tip we will go over what to do when you only want to replicate certain data to slave(s). Most general way to tell what is replicated to which slave is to include following configuration directive in my.cnf file depending on your environment and your goals. We will start with slave server side options since you have more flexibility on slave on what to replicate and what not to.

Slave server options:

• replicate-do-db = dbname (or) replicate-do-db = dbname1, dbname2, …, dbnameN
  This option is used on slave server to tell the server to only replicate dbname db on this particular host. You would want to use this if you have a master which is replicating to multiple slaves and each slave may contain different database for read performance reasons.
• replicate-ignore-db = dbname (or) …

Doing Billions of Queries per Day
Read this doc on Scribd: DVPmysqlucFederation at Flickr: Doing Billions of Queries Per Day

Whenever I work at a place I do the following.

Get a rundown of what the application is, what its demands are, what does the company expect the application to be a year from now - like how many users are going to use the application. 10 million, 20 million, 100 million?

Then I find all the slowdowns:
- What are the my.cnf settings?
- What are the most active tables?
- What type of SQL is being used?
- How is the data accessed?
- Who/What owns the data?
- What is the Read-Write Ratio?
- How many servers are used now to handle the site load, and how many are needed within a few months.
- What is the reads per second, connections per second, writes per second
- How does the data grow? MxN, MxNxO, N^4 etc.

Once I get this down (a few days) then I change everything :)

If the data is small and doesn't change often I don't bother …

At the end of the first day of the MySQL conference and expo I caught up with Marten Mickos former MySQL CEO and current Sun Database SVP.   Marten was in high spirits and eloquent as always.

My interview with Marten (10:29)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Marten worked the floor like the consummate host he is. 

Some of the topics we tackle:

• How he felt …

Yup, the presentation slides as well as the scripts are now available online on the conference website.

The stuff you will find in there:

Information_schema.pdf

Diagram of the information schema

I_S_VC_Slides.pdf

Slides for the UC presentation, "Grand Tour of the Information Schema"

I_S_INDEXES2.sql

script, returns one row for each index (rollup of information_schema.STATISTICS)

I_S_REDUNDANT_INDEXES2.sql

script, lists all redundant indexes. Redundancy rules:

• 
  
• two indexes with the same columns, type and uniqueness are interchangeable. The one with the largest index name is listed as redundant
  
• if there is a unique …

This morning I landed back at my home airport, EWR, after spending a fun-filled week and a half at the MySQL Conference 2008.

This year's conference was the best ever for me. I have a lot of people to thank and a lot to blog about. The number of pings I have received about lack of my blogging during conference is truly humbling. However, I did have a good reason for not being able to blog.

First, I was presenting three sessions, with two on the final day of the conference. Since I have the habit of continuously revising my presentations, that put a little bit of pressure on me. A big thanks to all those who came to my sessions.

Second, I was given a great opportunity to be a keynote panelist at the "Scaling up or out" …