There was several changes in InnoDB to fix scalabilty problems, so I ran benchmark to check
new results and also compare overall performance of InnoDB in 5.0 and 5.1 before and after fixes.

Problems in InnoDB that were fixed:

• Thread trashing issues with count of theads 100+. In this case
  performance of InnoDB degraded dramatically. The problem was in the mutex impelementation
  and was fixed in 5.1.12 (more info about InnoDB mutexes)
• Scalabilty issue, the well know bug 15815, that was fixed in 5.0.30 and 5.1.14.

So I took for tests:

• 5.0.27, the release with both problems
• 5.0.32-bk (snapshot from 26 Dec 2006) - with 15815 bug fix
• 5.1.12 with fix of …

Distributed development teams are becoming more and more commonplace - truly distributed teams with individual members living around the globe, not just a big company which happens to have independent teams in several different countries. The MySQL development team is organized this way, as are many other projects.

A new paper is available from Andrew Bennetts about distributed development: Coding in a Distributed Team: Testing, Reviewing, Sharing and Merging Code Without Going Crazy. This is definitely worth reading for anyone who does MySQL development even if you don’t consider yourself a developer - there are ideas in this paper which can make the life of both developers and operations folks much better.

Andrew speaks from personal experience working on …

This is not freshest news ever but I simply have not yet had a time to comment on it.

I already wrote about interesting benchmarks Tweakers.net have done for MySQL and PostgreSQL with different CPUs. I was in contact with Tweakers.net team to see if they miss something obvious in MySQL settings as well as to let them know the fix is now out for Innodb scalability bug and they can rerun the test to see if there are any difference.

Recently Tweakers.net published comparison of MySQL 5.0.20a vs 5.0.32bk as well as matching PostgreSQL 8.2 results

Same as in previous test PostgreSQL is winner with large margin especially when it …

As I have seen some concerns about the release schedule of MySQL Community Server and the availability of MySQL Enterprise Server sources, let me recap and detail some of the plans, which haven’t changed since the introduction of MySQL Enterprise Server in October:

1. MySQL 5.0 Community Server sources and binaries are available from our download pages. The latest version is 5.0.27, released in October.
2. MySQL Enterprise Server is released more frequently than MySQL Community Server. This means that we’ve seen also 5.0.28, 5.0.30 and 5.0.32 being released for MySQL Enterprise Server. Even numbers are for Enterprise, odd numbers for Community.
3. MySQL …

If you modify the innodb_log_file_size, MySQL will fail to restart and InnoDB will complain about the size of the changed log file.

The proper way to increase the innodb_log_file_size:

1. shutdown mysql server
   
2. make backup of data and log files
3. remove InnoDB log files
4. set new value for innodb_log_file_size in my.cnf
5. start mysqld
6. check error logs to ensure everything went fine.
   

Also see:

1. Choosing proper innodb_log_file_size
2. innodb_log_file_size (forum post by Jay Pipes)
3. …

I recently read O'Reilly's SQL Hacks book. It's an interesting and rewarding mixture of tips and tricks for novice to expert users. I give it 3 out of 5 stars. Here's why.

I wrote recently about using events and the new processlist table in MySQL 5.1 to keep track of the number of connected processes.  Although having the PROCESSLIST available as an INFORMATION SCHEMA table is usefull, it seemed to me that having SHOW GLOBAL STATUS exposed in a similar fashion would be far more useful.  So at the MySQL UC last year, I asked Brian Aker if that would be possible.  I know how many enhancement requests MySQL has to deal with, so I was really happy to see that table appear in the latest 5.1 build (5.1.14 beta). 

This table, together with the EVENT scheduler, lets us keep …

In my blog post before the holidays, I briefly mentioned that we were adding a second full-time open source analyst to The 451 Group. I’d like to introduce Jay Lyman, although for many of you, Jay will be a familiar name in the open source world already. Jay’s focus at The 451 Group will be Linux operating systems and distributors, virtualization, databases and other free and open source software. Conveniently for me, Jay is located in Portland, Oregon, and with the two of us here, I can now state with greater validity that Portland is The 451 Group’s ‘open source office.’

Prior to joining The 451 Group, Jay was a daily writer for LinuxInsider and TechNewsWorld, where he covered open source and a range of other IT topics from 2003 to 2006. Jay also covered open source software communities, development and products as a contributing editor with NewsForge from 2004 to 2006. He has been a regular contributor to other technology …

Dear Stupid Web,

Here is a crazy idea.

Every website that has events should publish an ical file. Just like they publish RSS, they should publish their events based on dates. ICS files with VCALENDAR entries are easy to publish.

Today when I look in my browser it looks in the header for a line that looks like this:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://tangent.org/index.pl?node=rss" />

I want to see something like the above with calendaring information. I can subscribe to it, so therefor I want my browser to auto discover it.

Calendaring is more then just shoving it into a database, its about finding events and being alerted to them.

And no, don't just put the events into RSS since my calendaring program doesn't know RSS, it knows about …

Been wanting to play with Falcon?

The tree is now public:
http://mysql.bkbits.net:8080/mysql-5.2-falcon

Instructions can be found here on how to download and compile from the source trees:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/installing-source-tree.html

Just to point this out:
1) Don't use this in production.
2) Don't assume you can upgrade from it
3) While we haven't designed it to crash, this is compiling from a source tree so bugs are very likely (please report bugs to bugs.mysql.com)

The changeset that is likely to become the Alpha is "Cset 1.2384"

Have fun!