First time for me to review a book on Sensual, but I just finished MySQL Database Design and Tuning by Robert D. Schneider (MySQL Press, ISBN 0-672-32765-1), and considered it to be both a good read and am sure it will prove a good reference in the future. For the most part, the author is straight to the point providing realistic scenarios and solutions. He also covers a plethora of variables that affect database performance, and exactly how to monitor certain aspects to determine which settings to adjust.

His primary focus is on MyISAM and InnoDB, as they are the most popular, but he does have a brief chapter at the end of the book covering NDB (Clustering). Overall, it was worth the read, so if you’re struggling with database performance, or just feel like getting more into the database administration side of MySQL, pick up a copy =)

The slides for my innotop presentation at the recent MySQL Conference have been posted, along with other presenter’s slides, on the conference presentations page. Love that stock photography!

MySQL Table Checksum 1.1.0 adds many improvements, but the most important is a new way to ensure replicas have the same data as their master. Instead of checksumming the replica and the master, it can now insert the checksum results directly on the master via an INSERT.. SELECT statement. This statement will replicate to the replica, where a simple query can find tables that differ from the master. This makes a consistent, lock-free checksum trivially easy.

I've seen Windows Blue Screen of Death, stalled boot process or simply application error dialog on many big information screens in shops, airports and other places as well in other systems such as cache machines, airport self checking systems or photo print kiosk.

Today coming back from US on NorthWest Airbus A330 we got stalled Linux boot screen on the main display when we landed. This must be some older kernel as it was in pseudo text mode black screen with penguin in the top left corner.

It is always fun to learn what is inside of these closed systems via error messages they might throw up. Too bad you can't see if MySQL is inside the same way. In the Internet however you can frequently learn smaller sites are powered by MySQL when they print MySQL error messages to the screen in case of problems.

Yesterday, I got myself a Mac Book with 2GB of RAM and I am very excited about it. Earlier I created a Microsoft Windows XP virtual machine using Parallels. The whole process was a breeze. While going through Parallels documentation that it partially supports Solaris 10 as well. I had a DVD with Solaris 10 6/06 handy (which folks at Sun gave me when I visited them around two months ago in New York) so I thought why not try it out as if it works, I would have my dream machine ready. My work is 100% Solaris 10 shop as far as my professional duties are concerned. However, I didn't want to buy a Solaris 10 laptop due to lack of support available.

One cool thing about Parallels is that it lets you choose between "Shared Networking" and "Bridged Networking". Shared Networking is ideal if you don't want your virtual machine to have its own IP. This way your virtual machine will not be visible on the network.

Overall, creating …

Welcome to the 43rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s start with Leon Katsnelson on Database Talk, the first of a series on choosing a free database. He will be writing about SQL Server Express 2005, Oracle Express Edition (XE), MySQL, PostgreSQL, and in this first, DB2 Express-C. That [...]

MySQL is now looking for a CIO (Chief Information Officer).  For the right guy or gal, this could be a dream job.  The ideal candidate should have 15 years IT experience and a proven track record managing complex infrastructure and familiarity with Sarbanes-Oxley.  Send info to jobs@mysql.com .  More info to be posted shortly.

Eben talks at length of the modern Memory Palace and how on-line email and photo services have the potential to undermine our privacy and freedoms.

Here are the links….

Download and direct play

If you can't ride two horses at once, you shouldn't be in the circus --Proverb

The ETL load time can be reduced, for large data volumes by running several tasks in parallel rather than serial.

In addition to the data that we receive from the Sierra stores, in the given example, let us assume we receive sales transaction data from the Tundra line of stores as well. If the data file from the Tundra store arrives in the normalized structure, we might want to join the files together for data profiling. We can do this by loading the 3 files into 3 separate tables and join the 3 tables together in the data profiling SQL query. If this join needs to happen …