I am attending the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco this week. Today was the first day of the conference and the crowds seemed to be larger than last year. The primary focus seems to be on social networking this year. 

I'll blog more about other aspects of the conference, but I wanted to focus this post on the twitter phenomenon. I'd heard of twitter of course, but I just could never figure out what it was all about. What was the big deal about telling the world what you were doing every second ? Who would even care ?

I attended a panel titled  "Short attention span theater: The birth of micro-blogging and micro-media". It was mediated by Gregarious Narain (he turned out not to be all that gregarious) and included Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd (consultant) and …

I am attending the Web2.0 Expo at San Francisco this week. Today was the first day of the conference and the crowds seemed to be larger than last year. The primary focus seems to be on social networking this year. 

I'll blog more about other aspects of the conference, but I wanted to focus this post on the twitter phenomenon. I'd heard of twitter of course, but I just could never figure out what it was all about. What was the big deal about telling the world what you were doing every second ? Who would even care ?

I attended a panel titled  "Short attention span theater: The birth of micro-blogging and micro-media". It was mediated by Gregarious Narain (he turned out not to be all that gregarious) and included Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Stowe Boyd (consultant) and …

In one of his recent posts Vadim already gave some information about possible benefits from using new InnoDB file format but in this post I'd like to share some real-life example how compression in InnoDB plugin could be useful for large warehousing tasks.

One of our clients had really many problems with one of his servers. This is pretty powerful server (Intel Xeon E5430 / 8Gb RAM / BBU-enabled RAID10 with fast SAS drives) with really interesting dataset on it. The only table customer has on this server is one huge innodb table with a set of TEXT fields. We've been trying to optimize this server before by playing with various innodb parameters (including page size changes) but at the end of the day server was dying of I/O load because dataset size was 60Gb+ and all reads from this table were pretty random (buffer …

I wonder what the best way is to get a feature request more visibility (convert a feature request to an actual work item).We use replicate-do-db on all our slave servers , so after many, many, restarts of our slave servers, I checked the bug list for any feature requests surrounding this, and about 6 months ago, one was opened: replicate-* rules should be dynamically configurableSadly,

Last Tuesday when I was walking the show floor at the MySQL conference, I ran into a familiar name,  Jennifer Venable.  I had never met Jennifer before but we had traded mails and had spoken on the phone.  This was about 18 months ago when we were negotiating the renewal of Sun's contract as an Authorized Distributor of Red Hat.  At that time, Jennifer was the Red Hat lawyer working on the contract.

Well since that time Jennifer has escaped from the Red Hat legal ranks and has joined the business side where, as of a couple of months ago, she took over as head of the Red Hat Exchange. 

Take a listen.

My interview with Jennifer (12:25)  Listen ( …

MySQL 5.1.24 was released last week. I am nearly done with preparing and testing the updated package for Debian, and will upload it to experimental within the next few days. MySQL AB decided to disable Cluster support from their official binaries with 5.1.24, but unfortunately they forgot to add a note to the release notes. It was only mentioned in a bugreport where someone asked why mysqld does no longer understand the --ndbcluster option in 5.1.24:It was decided that we do not support NDB Cluster in the 5.1 release but do a general release of the Carrier Grade Edition 6.2 branch (which is based on MySQL 5.1) instead as it has received substantial improvements on the cluster side that can not …

MySQL 5.1.24 was released last week. I am nearly done with preparing and testing the updated package for Debian, and will upload it to experimental within the next few days. MySQL AB decided to disable Cluster support from their official binaries with 5.1.24, but unfortunately they forgot to add a note to the release notes. It was only mentioned in a bugreport where someone asked why mysqld does no longer understand the --ndbcluster option in 5.1.24:It was decided that we do not support NDB Cluster in the 5.1 release but do a general release of the Carrier Grade Edition 6.2 branch (which is based on MySQL 5.1) instead as it has received substantial improvements on the cluster side that can not be backported to 5.1 for now.

So while the 5.1.24 source still includes the cluster …

This past week was the annual MySQL Users’ Conference. It was my fourth time attending the conference, my second as a MySQL-er, and my first as a Sun employee.

The conference was very well attended with many more people than last year. Overall, I’d say it was a great success.

I work on the Backup project for MySQL and I must say it was a very strange experience being in the spotlight of so much controversy concerning the announcement made about making some backup features enterprise only releases.

While there was a lot of blogging expressing the general distaste for the suggestion of making some features of backup enterprise only (as opposed to free), most of these comments seemed to come from a relatively small number of people.

I presented the Backup session and led the Birds of a Feather session on Backup. I must say that the sentiments of the bloggers was not represented in the audience of these sessions. I …

If you use a transactional storage engine in MySQL like InnoDB some of your transaction may be terminated by the storage engine because of deadlocks. Sadly it is a bit tricky to see what has led to the deadlock. SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS gives only a very minimal look into the state when it happened.

With the proxy and a little script we can track what happened in all open transactions before the deadlock happened. A classic example is the cross-over deadlock:

[36] received a ERR(1213, Deadlock found when trying to get lock; try restarting transaction), dumping all active transactions
  [35].1: select * from commit where id = 1 for update
  [35].2: select * from commit where id = 2 for update
  [36].1: select * from commit where id = 2 for update
  [36].2: select * from commit where id = 1 for update

35 and 36 are the two transactions we have open, the last statement in 36 triggered the deadlock.

In the …

New features of InnoDB - compression format and fast index creation sound so promising so I spent some time to research time and sizes on data we have on our production. The schema of one of shards is

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `article87` (
2.   `id` bigint(20) UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
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…