As promised, I’ve created some improved software for monitoring MySQL via Cacti. I began using the de facto MySQL Cacti templates a while ago, but found some things I needed to improve about them. As time passed, I rewrote everything from scratch. The resulting templates are much improved. VividCortex is the startup I founded in 2012. It’s the easiest way to monitor what your servers are doing in production and I consider it far superior to Cacti.

This is a shortlist of the questions raised during the webinar MySQL Enterprise Performance and Benchmarking that I presented the 9th of April.

The slides are available here.
The full recording of the webinar is available here.

Questions and Answers:

Q from Chris: Are you able to monitor all versions (non-Enterprise and 4.1) with MySQL enterprise monitor ?
A: Yes, you can, but some advisors will not work with versions prior to 5.0.

Q from Chris: If for example I have a couple of Enterprise systems but also some non-enterprise systems (we will be migrating over time) then would we be able to use the monitor (which we will have access to with the enterprise license) to monitor our …

MySQL, the open-source database maker that Sun Microsystems bought earlier this year, recently closed a $10 million deal, according to Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Schwartz noted the deal Saturday in a Twitter Q&A related to the Web 2.0 Expo.

A $10 million deal...that's big, even ...

For the past couple weeks I’ve been catching up on the Planet MySQL blogs in preparation to start participating in the community. I figure this would be the best way to get to know the “who’s who” of the most active members and to follow the latest features and developments. I’ve also been doing a fair amount of reading/research on MySQL development and databases in general. In particular, I’ve found the new MySQL Forge site very helpful (especially the wiki), along with the “Understanding MySQL Internals” book written by Sasha Pachev. My plan is to become familiar enough with the code base to contribute new features, help fix bugs, and hopefully meet some friends along the way! In particular, I have an interest (and experience) in parallel, …

I talked about Microformats in a post last year on web20expo. It appears that the technology is now going main stream. I attended a workshop on Web2.0 Best Practices
at the Web20 Expo this week in which the speaker, Niall Kennedy
expounded on th advantages of using microformats. He said he's seen a
significant growth in traffic on his site since he started doing so since search engine results show direct links to pages on his site.
 Yahoo is adding microformats to many of their properties. The yahoo event …

I talked about Microformats in a post last year on web20expo. It appears that the technology is now going main stream. I attended a workshop on Web2.0 Best Practices
at the Web20 Expo this week in which the speaker, Niall Kennedy
expounded on th advantages of using microformats. He said he's seen a
significant growth in traffic on his site since he started doing so since search engine results show direct links to pages on his site.
 Yahoo is adding microformats to many of their properties. The yahoo event …

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 …