Effective April 1, I will join Percona full-time as a consultant. I’ll be helping people build high-performance applications with MySQL, but I’ll also be continuing to develop and improve tools such as Maatkit.

This career change has been a long time in progress. I’m really looking forward to it, but at the same time it’s hard to leave my current employer, The Rimm-Kaufman Group (RKG). Working with them has been the best job I’ve ever had. But ultimately, my dream job is to help as many people as I can, and consulting will be a better way to do that.

At a time like this, I like to reflect on the trail that has led here. It’s a good opportunity to realize how fortunate I really am and fill up my gratitude tank. So I’d like to thank everyone who has …

IBM has got back to me with a terse response to some questions I posed following its investment in EnterpriseDB earlier this week (sample Q&A: Q. Is the investment a response to Sun?s acquisition of MySQL? A. No). What IBM does not say is in fact as revealing as what it does say, however.

Here’s the official line:

“IBM has become a minority shareholder of EnterpriseDB. This affords us an opportunity to continue to participate in, and gain further insight into, the open source community. This complements other experiences such as with the Linux, Apache and Eclipse communities and previous investments we’ve made in Red Hat and Novell. IBM has been a long-time supporter of Open Source communities, and we continue to see interest among our clients for Linux and other Open Sources solutions. This investment …

Ronald writes:

Tonight we were told at the NY PHP Meeting MySQL 5.1 is not due to late Q2, so that?s at least June 2008. The MySQL 5.1 Release Notes reveals a history that I don?t find very flattering…

Aside from Ronald’s totally correct observations re. the MySQL release schedule in general, “late Q2″ leads lots of current 5.0 users to a rather “interesting” situation, dictated by a questionable decision on the part of the MySQL marketing team several years back: If “late Q2″ sticks , then you’ve got just over 6 months to do the switchover to 5.1 before 5.0 goes EOL. …

This article contains my notes and detailed instructions on setting up a MySQL cluster. After reading it, you should have a good understanding of what a MySQL cluster is capable of, how and why it works, and how to set one of these bad boys up. Note that I'm primarily a developer, with an interest in systems administration but I think that every developer should be able to understand and set up a MySQL cluster, at least to make the dev environment more robust.

Notes

• High availability. If one or some of the machines go down, the cluster will stay up, as long as there is at least one copy of all data still present. The more redundant copies of data there are, the more machines you can afford to lose.
• Scalability. Distributed architecture allows for load balancing. If your MySQL …

Today sees the release of our latest CAOS report, Turning the Tables? ? The impact of open source on the enterprise database market, which examines - as the subtitle suggests, how much of an impact the open source database projects and vendors have made on the traditional relational database market.

One of the key findings is that open source software has had a superficial impact on the enterprise database market in that adoption has been widespread but shallow. While open source databases have been widely deployed for Web-tier applications, there has been minimal adoption in the enterprise application tier, and adoption for enterprise applications is at this time limited to certain specific application workloads.

Some people may be inclined to disagree with that assessment, but you only have to look at the comparative revenues of the open …

On several occasions this year I’ve been prompted to mention in conversation Ingres as an alternative Open Source Database. Jonathan Levin in A list of Open-Source Alternatives to Business Applications was the latest example where Ingres was not mentioned and perhaps it should have been.

Want features like online backup, online alter, multi-master replication, parallel queries and partitioning. These are all long existing features in a more mature product then MySQL presently. Is this a sleeping giant that nobody remembers about? Ingres has been around a long time, in fact my experience extends back to 1988 (that’s 20 years).

From a product perspective they have created a number of pre-packaged product stacks, for example …

While doing a standard audit for a new client, I recommended a few changes to get better performance. Because I had several changes, I used the documentation at

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/server-system-variables.html

and found that innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit is a dynamic variable. I was surprised, because most operations dealing with file sizes and operations are not dynamic. But the client proceeded with:

set global innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2;

and got:

ERROR 1193 (HY000): Unknown system variable 'innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit'

So I searched for others who may have had the same error, and ended up getting an unintentional googlewhack. Well, it’s not a real Googlewhack, because it has more than 2 …

After following the scale up path (i.e. buy bigger boxes) for a while now, we definitely need to scale out as things start to become “unhandy” and simply HUGE. (See small things are better)

We are running an OLTP application with about 200 million transaction per month. Currently we have some very large tables with more than 1,5 billion rows and the total database size is about 600 GB - all InnoDB.

What we want to implement is application based sharding, i.e. splitting up the big tables and distribute them among many smaller servers. Furthermore we need to implement some sort of archiving mechanism since the db size is growing very fast. Putting old data into compressed myisam tables seems to be a good solution here.

So, how to implement this?

These solutions come into mind immediately:

…

I’m still looking for new entries. I get quite a few suggestions, but not all of them make it into quiz questions. Do send in your suggestions!

This entry comes from Rudy Limeback

A user searching your website is moving through categories, and you want to display descriptions of these categories as the user progresses. Your basic SELECT looks like this:

SELECT id, description
FROM descriptions
WHERE id IN (23, 6, 9, 37)

You want the descriptions (records) to appear in the same order as the IDs listed in the WHERE clause.

How do you do that?

Show answer

Answer: Tag on an ORDER BY clause with the FIELD function like the following:

ORDER BY FIELD(id, 23, 6, 9, 37)

Very handy. I only wish Rudy had told me this 6 months ago when I was trying to do something exactly …

Reading Martens interview we see the quite:

"As soon as the deal closed we immediately secured a big deal with a major European national police agency," said Mickos, now SVP database products at Sun. "Key to them choosing MySQL was that we are now part of a much larger public corporation. The deal wouldn't have happened when we were private."

Cool stuff! But I'm wondering how much the opposite applies as well - this would leave small companies to seek for other ways to get the service they need ?

As company gets ready to server higher end customers it often "moves up the stack" and fails to deal with needs of lower end customers. This especially applies to Professional Service Companies.

Let me give you an …