The latest from the MySQL community

Now you may not believe me, but there actually are situations when DRBD is not the right choice for meeting your storage needs. Since I’ve been asked to compile some of these and present them here, let’s take a look.

Don’t use DRBD when…

• All or most of your data is static. Front-end web servers are a prime example for this. Even though they usually serve highly dynamic content these days, your PHP documents and Perl scripts and JSP’s usually don’t change that often. Using DRBD for that type of data isn’t much use. Use DRBD for your backend store instead. On the front end, you’ll do fine with rsync, although it …

OK, so I spent a few hours this afternoon cleaning up PlanetMySQL's stylesheets and layout, and fixing some bugs in the code. You'll notice a more streamlined PlanetMySQL now, with the following bug fixes and changes:

• The truncation of entries now works correctly without stripping HTML tags, so that the content does not get all bolded or italicized like it was doing. Thanks to Monte Ohrt's Smarty plugin "truncate_tagsafe"
• Fixed a bug in the "Read More" links for truncated entries so that short entries don't show the Read More link anymore
• The Most Active Authors list is now just the top 30 most active authors and does not include MySQL AB and aggregate feeds. It was getting a little out of control with well over 200 authors...
…

Today I wondered about a really bad performance when running the test-create script from sql-bench on a freshly installed 64-bit OpenSuSE 10.2 system (Linux 2.6.18.8-0.3, MySQL 5.0.26-12). Using the same hardware, running this test on Debian 4.0 (Linux 2.6.18-4-amd64, MySQL 5.0.32-7etch1) performed much better.

I'm not sure why, but replacing the OpenSuSE 10.2 default kernel with a self compiled vanilla kernel fixed the problem. No other changes have been made on the system.
Continue reading "MySQL performance on OpenSuSE"

Reading Dave's post on MySQL's IPO range of $600M - $1B, I started to wonder what type of revenue we're talking about. If you have access to IDC's massive pivot table with Software Vendor revenues (license & support only - services are excluded) split across the 100+ software markets they cover, you can follow along. I can't use the actual figures because I'd get in trouble with IDC's copyright office. But, if you take IDC's estimate of 2006 Microsoft revenue in the operating system market and divide that by Microsoft's market cap you get 5.3%. If you do the same... READ MORE

We’re rounding the corner on releasing the first MySQL 6.0 beta, which will have a number of updates to our new Falcon transaction storage engine. One enhancement I wanted to give everyone a sneak-peek on is the addition of user-defined tablespaces for Falcon.

Many of you have requested the ability to define tablespace storage containers that allow you to place data exactly where you want it. Well, now in MySQL 6.0/Falcon you get your wish (below example is on Windows):

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1
Server version: 6.0.1-alpha-pb605 MySQL Pushbuild Edition, build 605

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use gimf;
Database changed

mysql> create tablespace gimf_ts
    -> add datafile 'c:/dev/gim_ts1.fts'
    -> engine=falcon;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (1.17 sec)

mysql> create table t1 (c1 int) engine=falcon tablespace gimf_ts;
Query OK, …

I ran into pretty interesting behavior today. We needed to dump and reload large database and we had pretty good IO subsystem so we started number of mysqldump processes in parallel. Unlike in other case when we did load in parallel, dump in parallel did not increase IO rate significantly and we could still see just about 1.5 average outstanding IO requests to the disk.

Lets look at SHOW INNODB STATUS:

——–
FILE I/O
——–
I/O thread 0 state: waiting for i/o request (insert buffer thread)
I/O thread 1 state: waiting for i/o request (log thread)
I/O thread 2 state: doing file i/o (read thread) ev set
I/O thread 3 state: waiting for i/o request (write thread)
Pending normal aio reads: 256, aio writes: 0,
ibuf aio reads: 0, log i/o’s: 0, sync i/o’s: 0
Pending flushes (fsync) log: 0; buffer pool: 0
112084404 OS file reads, 29836003 OS file writes, 2038246 OS …

I have just released the first version of the BLOB Streaming engine for MySQL (MyBS). You can download the source code of the engine from http://www.blobstreaming.org/download. Pluggable binaries for MySQL 5.1.19 (32-bit Linux and Mac OS X) are also available.

To install the plug-in copy libmybs.so to the /usr/local/mysql/lib/mysql directory, connect to your server using mysql, and enter:

mysql> install plugin MyBS soname "libmybs.so";

This version allows you to download BLOBs that are already stored in the database using HTTP. The URL is specified as follows:

http://mysql-host-name:8080/database/table/blob-column/condition

Where condition has the form: column1=value1&column2=value2&...

I gave an example of this in my previous blog: …

Earlier this month, Lenz Grimmer and I approached the top Forum posters on our Forums (http://forums.mysql.com), thanking them for their contributions and soliciting them for feedback on how we could improve the Forums to make them more usable and fun to use. Especially, we asked for suggestions in these areas:

• for easier navigation / threading / search
• for ranking / highlighting / voting on entries
• for showing user profiles / avatars / case studies of contributors

Of the 24 people we approached, fifteen replied. Out of these, thirteen came back with suggestions, some of which were very detailed proposals.

Here is a condensed summary of the most popular requests/suggestions:

1. Re-enabling the display of new posts per forum on …

If you are as curious as I am about technology, you would have been intrigued when the MySQL proxy entered the radar. So I followed this promising jewel from its first inception as source only (and for internal distribution) until its release with a full series of binaries.

The recent announcement has made it official. MySQL Proxy is a full fledged supported product, and it's ready to use.
You just have to get the binaries and use it.
If you feel like experimenting (and there is no reason to get the proxy if you aren't) you can have a look at the sample lua scripts available on the Forge …

It couldn't happen to a better set of people. As BusinessWeek reports, MySQL is well on its way to an IPO. The interesting thing is what it's doing to get there:

...[C]an MySQL keep up the growth without adding hefty sales and marketing costs?and getting squeezed by competitors? The company employs just 30 field sales staff out of a head count of 360 and strives to close deals more quickly than rivals. Most employees work from home. "Managing the cost of sales and marketing in an open-source company is the key to profitability," says Mickos, sitting in a small, spartan office adjacent to a sea of cubes in the company's Silicon Valley digs. "We're not just innovating in software, we're innovating in sales."

Open source, leaving the cave to …