A few days ago, I received a MySQL Chart from Bob Stein of VisiBone and immediately hung it on the wall.

And just a minute ago, I used it for the first time to check the syntax of an INSTR() command I couldn’t get to work. Sure enough, there’s a small “bomb” icon next to it to make me aware that the order of the arguments may not be what you expect.

Even though the poster is large (61cmx85cm / 24″x33″), there’s a lot of information that’s been stuck on there and it takes a few minutes to learn to navigate it properly. But once you get it, it’s a great tool to quickly look up syntax and other information.

There’s a lot of small icons beside each command and function giving some hints about best usage, things to be aware of, etc. — Including a black circle to tell you that …

Today is Fotolog's 5th birthday. For a quick history of Fotolog, see John Borthwick (CEO) and Adam Seifer's (co-founder) posts.

From Peter Z's Blog: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/05/22/wishes-for-mysqldump/

I noticed this:

Parallel restore This is absolutely required if time is the issue as serious systems may perform much better in such case.


In 5.1 I added the following option to mysqlimport "--use-threads".

With it you can now tell mysqlimport to use multiple threads while doing an import of a backup made with mysqldump where you specified dumping the database in tab format. I don't believe I have a graph anywhere showing the speedup, but its pretty damn impressive.

Oh, and what is especially nifty about this?

Just take a copy of mysqlimport from the 5.1 distribution and use it on your previous versions of MySQL. I can't promise it will work with …

Here are some random thoughts, notes, observations, etc.

Jay Pipes - he made the conference possible

• Friendster uses Bugzilla internally. Yes they’re still alive, even though MySpace and so forth are around and kicking. Had to Google them (I wanted to find their old talk about their storage engine), and found MySQL Customers - Friendster, instead. From 2005, Dathan’s (now at Flickr) presentation. Never did find the storage engine stuff, beyond random bits in the press.
• Probably the best blog post that hit Planet MySQL, as opposed to the session summaries and so on, comes from …

NOTE: Problems presently exist, I’m seeking the expert help of the community and Perl Gurus

I have the need to do some quick benchmarking, I use MyBench as it’s effective in being able to plug in a query, some randomness and 2 minutes later (with a correctly configured Perl/MySQL environment) you have multi-threaded load testing.

However, when the environment you are on is not configured, and you only know the basics for Perl Operation and Installation, (code is just code, that’s the easy part) and the box is not accessible to the outside world say for cpan, it gets more complicated. I’ve attempted to install and configure DBI, DBD::mysql and …

MySQL's version-specific conditional comment syntax confused me for the longest time. Then I learned about printf formatting rules, and it all became clear. Read on if you don't already know what I mean.

Mark Shuttleworth on software patents: Microsoft is not the real threatThe real threat to Linux is the same as the real threat to Microsoft, and that is a patent suit from a person or company that is NOT actually building software, but has filed patents on ideas that the GNU project and Microsoft are equally likely to be implementing.Interesting thought... and actually, not just a thought: Microsoft alumnus Nathan Myhrvold is busy accumulating patents with his Intellectual Ventures company. There's more like that around...

I'm thinking... perhaps money (greed, that is) will solve this problem after all. These companies have nothing else going on except to try and arrange licensing deals. And thus companies producing a lot cash (big licensing potential) will be the prime targets. And, funnily …

Dealing with dumping and recovery of large and partially corrupted database I’ve got couple of feature ideas for mysqldump or similar tool and appropriate import tool

Dump in parallel single thread dump is not efficient of course especially on systems with multiple CPUs and disks. It is lesser issue in recovery case because import takes most of the time anyway but will be handy for some backup needs.

Dump each table in its own file This is much more convenient compared to single say 100GB sql file allowing to prioritize data load and if load fails for any reason you can easily restart it. Also it allows to prioritize data load if you’ve got to load many tables which have different priority for your application.

Safe Dump Dumping corrupted Innodb tables you will have some of the them crashing Innodb which breaks mysqldump process. It would be great for load script to …

I have not had a serious Innodb corruptions for a while, typically even if it happened it was some simple table related corruption which was easy to fix on table level. In couple of cases during last year when it was more than that we had backups and binary logs which means it was easier to recover from backup and replay binary logs.

This time I have a challenge to play it hard way because backup is in special form which will take a while to recover. It also should be nice exercise in patience because database is over 1TB in size.

One bug I already reported makes me worry. If it is global bug it should have been Innodb recovery show stopper while it goes back so many releases (5.0.33 surely still has it).

Lets see what else we run into.

One minor “practicality” I should mention is using –socket=/tmp/mysqlx.sock –port=3307 or something …

I have been very busy this past months, with both personal crisis and mega-patches. This is my MySQL blog so lets keep it to topic.
A couple of weeks ago, the plugins mega-patch was finally pushed and was released to the world in version 5.1.18. Thanks to Ingo and Sergei for keeping up the effort while I was occupied. As part of the code push, InnoDB code was stripped out of the main mysqld code and stored where it belongs, within Innobase's code. This is an exciting development as it now makes it easier than ever for plugin developers to create plugins without having to modify any existing code within mysqld. It has taken many months to get to this point but we are finally there. Anyone remember our CEO announcing the plugin initutive back when Innobase was acquired by Oracle? October 2005, I believe.

Since that push, I am back on bug-fixing... I have an annoying bug on Itanic with Intel's Itanic Compiler. (Yeah, I know the …