If you’d take a look at any web site, you will notice, that almost all of the pages on this given site are pretty static in their nature. Or course, this site could have some dynamic elements like login field or link in the header, some customized menu elements and some other things… But entire page could be considered static in many cases.

When I started thinking about my sites from this point of view, I understood, how great it would be to be able to cache entire page somewhere (in memcache for example) and be able to send it to the user without any requests to my applications, which are pretty slow (comparing to memcache ) in content generation. Then I came up with a pretty simple and really powerful idea I’ll describe in this article. An idea of caching entire pages of the site and using my application only to generate small partials of the page. This idea allows me to handle hundreds of queries with one server running pretty slow …

MySQL Slave Delay implements an oft-requested replication feature: the ability to make a slave lag its master, a.k.a scheduling binlog events for some time in the future. This will probably be built into MySQL replication someday, but in the meantime, you can use this tool. A delayed slave is great if disaster strikes and propagates through replication, because it lets you stop the delayed slave before it gets corrupted, restart the slave until just before the offending statement, and recover quickly. This is a lot faster than restoring last night's full backup and replaying a day's worth of binary logs on the master.

mtstat is now totally on launchpad. You can even download files.

I moved a few things around for 0.7.3. The MySQL plugins are now in mysql.mtstat instead of mtstat_mysql. (To go along with my putting the NDB/Connectors Python stuff in mysql.cluster - I'm trying to make a mysql namespace here) And I split up the mysqlqps plugin into mysqlqps, mysqlhandler and mysqlqcache. You can do multiple plugins like:


mtstat -Mmysqlqps,mysqlhandler

And you'll get output like:

_uptime __sel__ __ins__ __del__ __upd__ _quest_|___hf__ __hnxt_ __hkey_ __rrnd_ __rnxt_

1998k      0       0       0       0       0 |     0       0       0       0       0

1998k     80       8       0       5     411 |     0     359     364       5   10144

1998k     27       8 …

Spammers continue to find new ways to do their business and new ways to cause frustration for those of us who administer software that fosters small, open communities. These communities are fragile and grow up in a delicate environment. The environment needs to remain open: self-registration, the ability to post content, and the option of remaining anonymous is the key to success. Unfortunately, it is also a ripe environment for spammers to abuse.

Spammers have now discovered that bugzilla is one of those environments. For those who don’t know, bugzilla is one of the most common open source bug tracking tools. It is used by many open source projects to allow the community to assist in reporting bugs on and enhancement ideas for each project. The original version of Bugzilla was first created at Netscape in the mid-nineties (back when I was working at Netscape). It was rewritten in …

MySQL Replica Delay implements an oft-requested replication feature: the ability to make a replica lag its master, a.k.a scheduling binlog events for some time in the future. This will probably be built into MySQL replication someday, but in the meantime, you can use this tool. A delayed replica is great if disaster strikes and propagates through replication, because it lets you stop the delayed replica before it gets corrupted, restart the replica until just before the offending statement, and recover quickly.

In my talk “DBA Tales from the Front - from Oracle to MySQL”, I said that the terminology is different between Oracle and MySQL. I gave the example of ‘database’ vs ’schema’ and said I’d have a “cheat sheet” of terms and their differences.

Only problem is, I couldn’t find much to put on the cheat sheet besides ‘database’ and ’schema’. (There’s ‘catalog’, but I’m not really sure what Oracle OR MySQL means by it. In MySQL it sometimes seems to mean the same as ‘database’ (eg, in MySQL Administrator). I don’t remember seeing it in Oracle. I know they use it in MS SQL…)

As for ‘database’ vs ’schema’, I initially thought that a ‘database’ in MySQL was like a ’schema’ in Oracle. Why? Because you have multiple databases in an instance, and you can do selects like ’select id from scott.emp’ where ’scott’ is a database. (See? They look like schemas.)

In reality, …

On the subject of MySQL for Oracle DBAs, I found this presentation at the mysql website:

http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/migration/mysql_for_oracle.pdf

It gives some details that might be helpful to look into if you’ve made the switch from Oracle to MySQL.

One of the candidates for a marketing position (btw, we are looking for a very technical marketing talent, drop me a line at dj at zmanda dot com) asked me if Zmanda wants to change the world. The way I see it, our job is just opposite to changing the world. We want to keep the world the way it was. If your hardware dies or a user drops a table, we give you the ability to go back in time and to recover your file with Amanda Enterprise or your MySQL database with Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM).

How do we actually accomplish going back in time? Are we talking here about super-expensive and complicated Continues Data Protection (CDP) technologies? Our solution delivers the same result, but without the cost and complexity of CDP. ZRM incremental backups result in a copy of the MySQL …

I've created a survey on SurveyMonkey that I am hoping to get a bunch of responses for. The survey will help the community team identify how (in)effectively we communicate development and other goals and also what features you, our community users, most want in future versions of MySQL. So, hey, give us ten minutes of your time and help us make MySQL better.

A Blatant Bribe for Participating

And for those who need a bribe, we'll be giving away two Apress books (each) to 3 random survey takers. The survey is anonymous, but if you would like to go into the drawing for the books, just include your email address in the very last question...otherwise, just leave it blank.

Click Here to take the 2007 Community survey

Thanks!

I run mysqldump each night on my backup slave (which is set up with binary logging, can be used as a master in an emergency) is there to allow us to run backups of our various schemas without impacting the live masters. I like to create dumps that contain information such as 'STOP SLAVE; CHANGE MASTER TO...' START SLAVE' that can be used by even non-database guru personnel to be able to restore a slave as quickly as possible, without having to know the inner details of replication. Having a dump that has all the data at a given time, and a master log file position and file name for that point in time is the answer.

I have been using the option to "--master-data" before we had the backup slave on both main masters in each data center. It worked fine because it would add a 'CHANGE MASTER' statement to the dump that set the correct master in the dump. I had another script pre-pend 'STOP SLAVE;' (top of the dump) and append 'START SLAVE;' …