In 2002, a short while after I started at MySQL, I saw Lawrence Lessig present at OSCON. The presentation was extraordinarily good and Lessig is a tremendously passionate, genuine and compelling orator.

I immediately revised my presentation style. I stole what ideas and style I could. While I was mostly presenting about MySQL and PHP at the time, the ideas served me well (though the style has at times fit me about as well as a young child fits their parent’s clothes.)

Five years have passed since then, and I have given a hundred or more presentations. Never have I presented as well as Lessig that night, but I still keep trying. In a few days, I am going to have to try a lot harder.
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Time vs (Money/Skill).

I go into the average IT startup that has been around for a few years
and I can mention our, meaning MySQL's, monitoring system and I hear
"We already built that. We have a couple of guys and all they do..."

Compare this to walking into a bank like I did this week. They loved
it. Typical Oracle shop migrating off Oracle and moving all new
systems to MySQL.

The difference?

The bank guys are focused on what they do, while the IT shop is
focused on build out. The IT guys feel that they are Jedi.

Hire Jedi. Hire the guy who needs to know how everything works. Hire
the guy who knows he needs to build his own lightsaber.

Avoid? The guy who thinks he also needs to build his own starship,
droids, sew his own cloak, and is into replacement body part surgery.

One of the most …

59 - that is the number of statistics collected by mysqlnd. When I started writing this blog post, I hoped it would be easy going describing them. But it wasn’t. Some ten days ago, we’ve had 51 statistics and near zero tests for them. Now we have 59 statistics. And, in a certain way, every figure is a tuning screw in the hand of one who knows what they do.

I must confess, I grossly underestimated the time it takes to write only a few words about some of them. Here is a first batch of comments on some 20 figures. Already those some 20 figures should give you an idea how the mysqlnd statistics might help you with bottleneck analysis, monitoring. Or you use the statistics to identify scripts that select more rows than they consume, open more connections than needed, …

How to access client statistics with mysqlnd

Statistics are only available with mysqlnd. Statistics can be accessed using:

• Per process: …

Dear Future self,

The next time you run into PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined method DB_Error::query() and you are pretty sure all the correct libraries are installed , check if you can connect to the database with the username / password you have configured. Just as today you might have migrated to a new mysql server and forgotten to update the connection string.

thank you for your attention.

You know, normally I use this blog for posting thoughts primarily focused on technical aspects of DRBD, Linux, HA solutions, or (normally) a combination of all three. This one is an exception.

These past couple of days I had the pleasure of doing a DRBD/Linux-HA training with 6 Sales and Professional Services MySQLers. And like just about anyone I’ve met from MySQL up to this point, without exception each and every one of them was smart, professional, open-minded, and generally fun to be around. I greatly enjoyed my past two work days. If you reading this post happen to be one of those 6 guys, thank you very much.

And the nice part about the company I work for is that highly productive and fun days at work like these are the norm, rather than the exception.

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MySQL Proxy 0.6.0 has been tagged and should hit the mirrors near you pretty soon.

In the last 3 month of development we added a lot more features to the proxy-core which should bring the proxy closer to your needs. As always the proxy is transparent to your application, no requirement for a special language, no special needs for a platform and all customizable for your needs.

The most powerful feature is Read/Write Splitting which allows you to scale a application which is unaware of replication automaticly cross several slaves without changes to your application. Instance Scale Out we say.

The Proxy also became a 1st class citizen in the MySQL world with …

59 - that is the number of statistics collected by mysqlnd. When I started writing this blog post, I hoped it would be easy going describing them. But it wasn’t. Some ten days ago, we’ve had 51 statistics and near zero tests for them. Now we have 59 statistics. And, in a certain way, every figure is a tuning screw in the hand of one who knows what they do.

I must confess, I grossly underestimated the time it takes to write only a few words about some of them. Here is a first batch of comments on some 20 figures. Already those some 20 figures should give you an idea how the mysqlnd statistics might help you with bottleneck analysis, monitoring. Or you use the statistics to identify scripts that select more rows than they consume, open more connections than needed, …

How to access client statistics with mysqlnd

Statistics are only available with mysqlnd. Statistics can be accessed using:

• Per process: …

In this modern Web-based world, I figure I should try and keep things, well, really, up-to-date as quickly as possible. For those of you not in Japan, I do hope the pictures of the UC-J interest (and tempt) you… The master set: MySQL Users Conference Japan (UC-J) 2007.

Some quick snippets follow. I’ve tagged them uc-j (flickr should treat it as “ucj”) as well as uc-j2007 (because, this may be the first, but it’s definitely not the last!).

Mats, Mr. Ruby

Big, big, crowd. Room holds 600. 1,200 registered. Standing room!

Jimmy, Mr. Carrier Grade Cluster

I haven’t actually written about my amazing Japan trip. Arrived late on Saturday night, spent the whole of Sunday doing tourist-y stuff, visited MySQL KK on Monday, had an amazing dinner later with lots of MySQLers, and today, Tuesday is the first day of the users conference. And boy was it fun!

Larry-san spoke Japanese in the keynote introduction, and boy was it amazing. I absolutely loved the honesty in Yukihiro “Mats” Matsumoto’s talk. It was even funnier that while he spoke Japanese, and people laughed at his jokes, it took a while for the simultaneous translators to catch up with English, and then we’d have delayed laughter :)

I gave my talk today, and was pretty pleased with the attendance. My 35 slides were delivered in a mere 50 minutes, and at parts I was …

There are two recent updates on the MySQL storage engine front worth looking into.  Paul McCullagh over at PrimeBase has updated their BLOB Streaming engine MyBS. (Ok, some people like the name, others don't.  I suggest going for something more serious sounding.)  The engine itself is pretty cool.  It'a not really a general purpose engine, but the idea is to be able to store BLOBS of any size and stream them directly into and out of the database.  Ideally, any engine could use the BLOB repository and streaming API. Paul got a good reaction at his MySQL Camp …