In a sense of ironic fate I’m officially stuck between countries. (I feel a little like Tom Hanks in one of his movies, need to find the name of it).

As part of my resignation from MySQL/SUN, I was required to leave the US within 10 days to satisfy visa requirements. I packed, stored, discarded and arrived at the airport with 2 suit-cases of belongings to leave one country - The US, and enter another - Germany.

I don’t require a visa to enter Germany, normally. However as I’m leaving the country permanently and relocating to Germany I do. So I can’t leave, but I also can’t stay (as I’m at 10 days)

This leaves me with little choices. I can’t work now in the US, I’ve violated my visa obligations for the future, even a career change won’t help me here. I may never be able to enter the US again. Seems my only option right now is to return to Australia ahead of plans.

Those hoping to see me at …

One of the goodies of MySQL Proxy is the execution of multiple queries in response of a single query from the client.
One example given in the manual is a normal query sent by the user, with a SHOW STATUS executed before and after the query to evaluate the efficiency of the query itself.
Another common possibility is to create a loop, i.e. the client sends a query with appropriate commands for the Proxy, and the query is executed N times.
Both cases are accomplished using the query queue, a data structure that the Proxy uses to process user defined queries.
The tricky part in multiple query execution is that the client has only sent one query, and thus it expects only one result. If we execute multiple queries, we will get multiple results from the server. Thus, we need to handle the results that we want to process within the Proxy and prevent them from reaching the client, while making sure that the …

Hello,
I am excited to introduce another big event in Australia!

Following its success last year, the Extended Horizons Summit is back for a thirteenth consecutive year, with a bigger and more insightful two-day conference plus pre-event workshops.

This year’s summit will include users of Sun’s SOA & Java Composite Application Suite, Identity Management, Java Enterprise System, Sun Secure Global Desktop and MySQL.

MySQL Sessions scheduled:

Sunday 25th May 2008
1:45pm - 5:00pm A Hands-On MySQL Cluster 5.1 Tutorial

Monday 26th May 2008
3:40pm - 4:30pm Tuning MySQL for Large Database Performance
5:30pm - 6:20pm MySQL in the Enterprise - Compelling Reasons to Adopt Case Studies from Web 2.0

Tuesday 27th May 2008
11:05am - 11:55am The MySQL Storage Engine …

Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on "Memory Appliance" by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system.

I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon running CentOS5 was tested using ext2 filesystem and SysBench tool.

Using 16K read sizes (matches Innodb page size) I could get 1.2GB/sec (80K req/sec) for reads and about 500MB/sec writes with 16 concurrent threads. Things scaled well and with 256 threads I got even a bit better performance.

Interesting enough utilization in iostat never went over few percents and load was mostly CPU bound.

Next I went on testing MySQL. My goal was to simulate as much IO as possible so I use …

In just two weeks I will be heading to the 2008 MySQL Conference.  I will be speaking this year.  My two talks are:

MySQL Hacks and Tricks to Make Phorum Fast
04/16/2008  4:25pm PDT Room: Ballroom A

From One Server to a Cluster
04/16/2008  5:15pm PDT Room: Ballroom C

I have to pull back to back talks.  *PHEW* I hope I can hold up.  To make it worse, they did not put me in the same room. If I remember right though, those are really close to each other.

Of course, the Phorum team will be in the Expo Hall in the DotOrg pavilion.  Just look for the big dog.

…

I decided to run some very basic performance test comparing the non-partitioned table with a primary key, and a partitioned table with a primary key and a unique constraint enforced via a secondary table explained in my previous post.Overall, it appears that with partitioning, as the data/rows scale, the inserts actually get faster :) This is what I would expect theoretically, so score one for

In an earlier article I described how MySQL Enterprise takes the guesswork out of deciding which version of the MySQL server customers should be running by providing alerts around regularly scheduled Monthly Rapid Update and Quarterly Service Pack releases of the Enterprise Server. Being of an old school "if it ain't broke don't fix it" mindset, I understand the conservative approach most DBAs take when deciding if a new release of any software is relevant to their environment. In fact, given the monthly frequency of Enterprise maintenance releases and the work involved with upgrading, I completely understand how recipients can begin to ignore Update Alerts (unless of course a known fix is on the way). Based on feedback from customers, MySQL colleagues, and my own field experience, I recognize that while notifications around the regular Enterprise Server drops is a good thing, upgrading an existing MySQL implementation is no small task and that a …

Worried about Backup and Recovery of your MySQL Databases? MySQL Backup school from Zmanda provides hands on and in depth training on Backup and Recovery of MySQL. Just sign up and show up with your laptop. More information available here.

The Google Summer of Code deadline has been shifted one week forward. This means that students have until April 7 to submit their applications.
Submission status
We have so far received 38 proposals.
Some of them are excellent. Many are good. A few of them could be improved. If you have submitted a proposal without reading my recommendations you have now plenty of time to review your submission and adjust it for maximum quality.
Advice to students: how to get your application approved
Submitting an application is only the first step. If your proposal is weak, your chances of being chosen are limited. Now it's time to check the application and improve its contents, according to the guidelines mentioned above. …

There's a relatively little known feature about Linux IO scheduling that has a pretty significant effect in large scale database deployments at least with MySQL that a recent article on MySQL Performance Blog prompted me to write about. This may have an effect on other databases and random I/O systems as well, but we've definitely seen it with MySQL 5.0 on RHEL 4 platform. I have not studied this on RHEL 5, and since the IO subsystem and the Completely Fair Queue scheduler that is default on RHEL kernels has received further tuning since, I can not say if it still exists.

Though I've heard YouTube discovered these same things, …