This year, it seesm that whenever I go out for significant travel, the following things will break on my trip:

• a laptop power supply
• a disk

At least this time the disk is part of a RAID1 array.

Oh, and for some reason my mythbackend stopped doing anything a few days ago…. and I wasn’t checking it. grr… annoying. At least there’s not much on TV.

There was long played scalability issue with InnoDB auto-increment field. For details check Bug 16979. In short words the problem is in case of insert into table with auto-increment column the special AUTO_INC table level lock is obtained, instead of usual row-level locks. With many concurrent inserted threads this causes serious scalability problems, and in our consulting practice we had a lot of customers who was affected by InnoDB auto-inc. For several of them we even advised to replace auto-inc column by that or another solution.
Good news is the bug is fixed. Bad news is it is fixed only 5.1.22, which is not released yet.
I wonder if the fix is going to be ported to 5.0, as I mentioned it affected many production systems and not all of them are ready to upgrade to 5.1.
…

So, I'm developing a new application that's in the capacity planning phase. The application is designed to scale linearly and scale is very easy to do just by adding another database server. But, at what point do you upgrade? What point in the applications life do you add new servers to serve the expectation of the users?

To figure out these questions, thresholds need to be defined. When these thresholds are exceeded then upgrades need to occur.

Here is a process (my process) of questions to ask to define thresholds: First I start out with generic questions listed below.

What is the expected amount of users who are going to use the product initially?

What is the expected usage pattern? For instance if they are adding data what is the add rate? If they are reading data what is the read rate?

Given that the first two questions are answered now ask when is it going to …

As noted already in March and described more closely in July, we had a MySQL Developer Meeting in Heidelberg, opened up for selected members of the MySQL community. Since yesterday, I’m back and reflecting upon how it all went.

The first reflection is that I’m biased, since I was organising the meeting together with above all Patrik Backman (for the agenda) and Georg Richter (for the lion’s share of all real work, such as the coordination with our venue, Marriott Hotel). But I would still like to concur with the many MySQLers who think it was “the best MySQL Developers Meeting ever“.

So what made the meeting a success?

We got plenty of work done. Our motto was “Working Together“, making use …

Hot on the heels of the MySQL Japan User?s Conference, the Japanese-language versions of the Developer and DBA certification exams were published on Sep. 25.

This means that the following exams are now available in Japanese:

• 003-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer Part I
• 004-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 Developer Part II
• 005-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA Part I
• 006-002 : Certified MySQL 5.0 DBA Part II

As always, the exams are available through Pearson VUE, and all 121 Japanese testing centers are standing by to help you with the exams.

For more information on the Japanese certification exams, see http://www-jp.mysql.com/certification/

A

Seklos just posted a story on his Oracle blog on how he installed Oracle 10something in less than an hour.

I found the story hilarious. why . because about a decade ago .. when I was still into database & webdevelopment, Oracle first started shipping Oracle for Linus (somewhere in 99)
Back then some collegue had been struggling for a couple of days already to setup up Oracle on a Windows box and was thinking to just use SQL server.
So I went home found the famous CD with the typo (or did I really get the CD that should have been shipped to Finland ?) in my mailbox and as I had a new Siemens Server sitting in my basement, I installed a fresh RedHat and on a machine I never had seen before (that's the ninetees I`m talking about so no fancy just install it on most common hardware and it will work like we have these days) and then went on installing an Oracle …

While working on MySQLDump.java this weekend I decided to look into the new features that are heading our way in MySQL 5.1. It cannot be long before we see a general release and I needed to start thinking of ways to backup items like Events. This also made a good opportunity to start afresh with my dev server and try out the latest Solaris 10 8/07 release with GlassFish v2, the releases just keep coming! (SXDE 9/07 was just released).

The Solaris 10 install was as smooth as previous releases (Using Text Based) …

Are you a brand-newbie to MySQL? Coming from another database (or databases)? If so, here are some concepts to read up on right away to ease your confusion down the road. These are the top things I wish someone had told me about before I did anything else with MySQL.

(I’ve had a lot of questions along these lines, and have posted on all of each of these items somewhere, but thought it’d be more helpful to gather the points together into one place.)

MY TOP 2 “BEFORE YOU BEGIN” TOPICS

#1: storage engines. Before you do any big planning, if you don’t know what a “storage engine” is, find out!
I can’t think of a good analogy for what a storage engine is. The best I can come up with is, you know how with Oracle you choose your index types (btree? bitmap? etc)? In MySQL, you choose your table types (and with them, the index types). Your choice determines a lot. Each storage engine (table …