Today I’ve started moving (actually copying) all information I have about MMM to the project’s wiki.

If someone is interested in adding some information there or modifying my descriptions (yes, I know about by awful English and I hope someone will fix my mistakes), ping me (contacts are here) and I’ll add you to the project members list.

Thanks all for participation and support.

A little while ago now, I did some tech reviewing of a book called Backup & Recovery… specifically MySQL related things (and MySQL Cluster). Curtis was kind enough to send me a copy of the book as well - and I’ve been reading the rest of it bits at a time since I got it.

I’m rather impressed… it gives a good mix of overview and digging deeper on just about every way to back up and recover systems. It also discusses several products that I didn’t know about (and have partly investigated now because of it).

It also has good sections on process: as in how to decide what to backup, encouraging the use of checklists and all that. Heck… recently when doing a restore I realised I never backed up /boot (annoying, not catastrophic… as I know my way …

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Episode 18: De-Myth-tifying Indexes

Where I have been:
Wedding video (short) and photos:
http://www.sheeri.com/wedding

Honeymoon (and wedding) photos:
http://www.sheeri.com/photos

News:
FREE training for Oracle DBAs who want to learn MySQL
…

?Linking FileMaker Pro 9 solutions to the open source strengths of MySQL will greatly empower the developer and user communities of both product lines,? said Zack Urlocker, MySQL AB's executive vice president of products.

Hard drives are noisy, eat electric, getting slower, and might go the way of the Doo-Doo.

About four years ago I found a PCI card that had 256megs of memory on it, and a battery that let it last 48 hours with no power to the computer.

Innodb log files! Yes, put the log files on it and watch the performance go up. It was a neat hack but for $800 a card it wasn't all that practical. The performance was nice, but it wasn't worth the
additional investment per machine for the card.

A number of months ago Jeremy Cole blogged about some solid state cards he was looking at. At around the same time I noticed and commented on "IDE" solid state drives coming to market.

Dinner on Tuesday night with Kevin Burton pushed this into my mind again. What was he looking at going with for his data …

Red Hat releases new version of JBoss. Linspire offers Open XML translator. FSF posts GPLv3 launch transcript. (and more)

Red Hat Delivers JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2, Red Hat (Press Release)

Open XML Translator Now Available To Freespire & Linspire Users, Linspire (Press Release)

OrangeHRM Launches version 2.2 of the Open-Source HR Management System, OrangHRM (Press Release)

Zimbra Helps Organizations Meet Compliance Requirements with Robust Archiving and Ajax-based Discovery Solution, Zimbra (Press Release)

…

Did you notice that there is a new component among MySQL products? No? Perhaps you have been on vacation, then.
MySQL Proxy is an exciting tool for anyone willing to get new features now without waiting for new server major releases.
Using the Proxy you can filter queries, create new commands, create customized logs, play with the operating system from any database client, and much more.
Interested? Read Getting started with MySQL Proxy

Unlike MyISAM where data for individual tables is stored in their respective files, InnoDB stores data in a tablespace. By default, there is one single tablespace and data of all the databases is stored in one file. This file has data dictionary, tables, as well as indexes in it. There is a global parameter innodb_data_file_path that defines this tablespace file. It has a syntax like ibdata1:256M:autoextend, this means at the beginning a file of size 256 MB will be created and then whenever the data size exceeds this, the file will be auto-extended. The innodb_autoextend_increment variable defines in MB's that by how much each increment should be.

Let's see how well can we play around:

1. Inserts: Suppose you have too many inserts and InnoDB is extending the file too frequently. It makes sense to increase the value of innodb_autoextend_increment. Say we increase it …

I'll be giving a 1 hour session at ZendCon this year entitled "MySQL Performance Coding - From Soup to Nuts". The abstract says 3 hours, but I believe it's a one hour slot... Either way, it'll be fun and rowdy. The PHP crowd always is a fun crowd!

Yesterday and today I gave a couple webinars on basic performance tuning of SQL queries and schema/index strategies. I've given this presentation quite a few times now, and a number of good questions always seem to come up. I figured I would summarize them and their answers in a blog post.

Q: Which will be faster out of these two queries?

SELECT ... WHERE some_col IN (1,2,3) or
SELECT ... WHERE some_col = 1 OR some_col = 2 OR some_col = 3

A:

Neither. The optimizer rewrites an IN() operator to a series of OR conditions, so there will be no performance diffference. Use IN() as it makes the code shorter and more readable.

Q: Where does MyISAM cache table records? A:

Nowhere. MyISAM does not cache table records like InnoDB does in it's innodb_buffer_pool. Instead, MyISAM relies on the operating system buffering to buffer table records as it reads …