The conference is over, and it was a great week but pretty exhausting! From what I saw, and from what I have heard the sessions were of a very high standard this year. I have come back with a number of new ideas and quite a few things I would like to implement in PBXT. One of these is new online backup API for MySQL which will enable you to make a snapshot backup of data stored by all engines, and do point in time recovery.

For me the week started off with the BoF on scalable BLOB streaming on Tuesday evening. The BoF was well attended and there was significant interest in the topic. I will be reporting on some of the issues discussed soon.

On Wednesday morning I presented: PrimeBase XT - Design and Implementation of a Transactional Storage Engine. I was pleased with the number …

Just a quick note to let everyone know that the new MySQL 6.0 alpha is now available for download. At last week’s MySQL User’s Conference, all the Falcon sessions were packed so there is definitely a lot of interest about our new transactional storage engine. Do note the version number change - previous alpha’s were labeled 5.2, but we’ve now made the decision to move to 6.0 for the Falcon release of the MySQL Server.

The latest alpha contains bug fixes, performance improvements, and the first cut of the new diagnostic/performance views (contained inside the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database) that helps DBA’s get insight into how well Falcon is performing and the resources it’s using:

mysql> show tables like 'FAL%';
+-------------------------------------+
| Tables_in_information_schema (FAL%) |
+-------------------------------------+
| FALCON_RECORD_CACHE_SUMMARY         |
| FALCON_SYSTEM_MEMORY_DETAIL         |
| …

Always remember, if you’re using MyIsam tables, KEEP THE INDEX AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE. That means, your full text index will be huge and you don’t want to keep them together with other types of index for faster queries. Simply create another table to have the text fields and full text indexes and left join. It works [...]

Over at mysql.bkbits.net you can also get the “telco” (commonly known as CGE or “Carrier Grade Edition”) source trees of MySQL Cluster.

I think it’s exciting that we now have the source trees up here. You can use the freely available bk client to pull the sources or the commercial bitkeeper.

Since I just got back from the US for the MySQL UC (which was rather awesome) I don’t quite have the energy to go into the difference between normal mysql 5.1 and the telco trees… so wait for part 2 :)

SugarCRM has their Global Developers Conference later this week.  It's their first ever and it should be a fun event.  I'll be speaking there on Thursday morning.  There's a developer track as well as an IT Manager track as well as some excellent training sessions.  The conference is in San Jose May 3-5.  If you're using SugarCRM or even thinking about it, this is a bargain event.

• SugarCRM: Global Developers Conference, …

From the “I wish I attended this talk” department. When I attended Dathan’s talk about Federation at Flickr, he did mention that the next day there was going to be a really interesting talk by John Allspaw, who is an Engineering Manager at Flickr. John has posted up his slides, which I might add, are quite an interesting read (look at the speaker notes, they sort of give a heads up as to what you missed).

Its a pity no one made notes of this on Planet MySQL, so if anyone did attend the talk and you did take notes, please do place them online! This talk isn’t so much teaching you about capacity planning, its really more about all the pointers you can take away, about …

So I have been working on a tool here at work that will run a query a specified number of times using a specified number of threads running concurrently. It is actually similar to the new 'mysqlslap' utility available in MySQL 5.1, but is designed to operate on a user-defined query and database. It is what I have been using in my previous posts, and though some might find it useful. You can find it here, which is my software page. It is pretty easy to use. Just edit config.php and fill in the values as appropriate. You can also specify some command-line arguments (the first being number of threads to use, the second is the total number of iterations, and the third is the query you want to run) if you prefer. Here is an example:

tim@filedawg ~/benchmarks/SQLBuster $ php bustit.php 4 10000
SQLBuster v0.81
Written By: Tim "Sweetums" Soderstrom
---------------------------------------
Running With 4 Threads, 2500 …

In the spirit of the recent MySQL Conference, I decided to have some fun and make a MySQL Storage Engine that would be of practical use. My idea is that so, so much information is available through, say, /proc on Linux and FreeBSD that it is a shame there isn't a convenient way to get to it short of ssh or (shudder) snmp. So, I made a little storage engine that turns arbitrary files into MySQL tables. It supports basic things like space separation to derive columns, etc. Pretty simple, but I'm amazed how easy it was and how useful it could be.

Enjoy!

http://code.google.com/p/mysql-filesystem-engine/

Ideas for files to watch:

• 
  
• /proc/mdstat - how is your software RAID array doing? any bad …

Over at Tecosystems, SOG was trying to explain a misquote of his in Computerworld re:MySQL and somehow drafted a great explanation of dual-license models. The short version of my explanation went something like this: in layman's terms (I know there... READ MORE