While laying in bed last night thinking about getting started on a project that requires getting a fresh MySQL clustered database up and running I got to thinking. What is the best OS for MySQL from a minimalistic point of view? If you're starting from scratch to set up a server, or farm of servers, to run MySQL and can choose any OS, what do you choose?

I'm going to venture that it's a Unix variant, perhaps a flavor of Linux? There's a lot to think about in terms of what types of data and how the application will use the database, but from a general point of view where would one start? Let's suppose that the hardware is your typical generic AMD/Intel with high-end SCSI disks.

I'm thinking about things like:

• 
  
• minimal OS footprint (only necessary applications/libraries)
  
• minimal OS processes
  
• a kernel optimized for MySQL-specific functions, minized for …

A few days in the job for MySQL and still, even though I can't say I have mastered the tasks at hand (too much to get used to!) I tasted the feeling of working with perople living in different time zones.
To make this feeling more real, I went to a Chinese shop a few blocks down my street and I bought six cheap clocks. I know that I could use the net but the tangible clocks give me a sense of being in a "real office"!

A few days in the job for MySQL and still, even though I can't say I have mastered the tasks at hand (too much to get used to!) I tasted the feeling of working with perople living in different time zones.
To make this feeling more real, I went to a Chinese shop a few blocks down my street and I bought six cheap clocks. I know that I could use the net but the tangible clocks give me a sense of being in a "real office"!

Lorenzo has startet working on better charset support in MDB2. He has added basic support for setting charsets and collations inside field definitions in CVS already. However, there are still plenty of open questions to look at. I have only limited experience with charsets in MySQL. Lorenzo has some experience with Firebird and PostgreSQL. But this is no where near sufficient to come up with a solution that would work reasonably well across all supported drivers. Check out his charset RFC on his blog. Comments are very much appreciated, even if they just highlight problems without giving a solution just yet.

Donald Feinberg, the chief database analyst at Gartner, provided a very thorough analysis of the impact of open source technology in the database market at the Gartner Open Source Summit in Phoenix this week.  Feinberg has been in the database market since there was a database market, and he has the insights (and the scars) to prove it.  Unlike a lot of analysts in the industry, Feinberg doesn't just stick to what's politically correct; he says what needs to be said, whether it's about open source ("Don't go into production without comercial support"), Unix ("It's dead; I just don't know when the funeral is") or proliferation of technology ("No one plans on having 10,000 Access databases, but if you don't have a policy you wake up one day and that's what you have.")

Overall, Gartner is predicting that the …

We’ve been getting lots of questions about how MySQL 5.1 optimises queries on partitioned tables. Recently, we added some new information about this to our Internals Manual provided by one of our developers, Sergey Petrunia. (I hope that my edits and formatting haven’t messed up anything — if there are any problems with what’s been published in the Internals Manual, then the fault’s probably mine and not his.)

The new section can be accessed here, and includes coverage of the following topics:

• An overview of how MySQL performs partition pruning
• What partitioning and subpartitioning intervals are, and why they’re important
• Converting WHERE and ON clauses into intervals
• Partition selection
• Where to find partition pruning and selection code in …

Yup.  It's time to start thinking about another MySQL Conference.  The Call for Participation is now up and I've been told that we will definitely have a Windows/.NET track again this year.  The Conference will be held at the same location as last year from April 23 to April 26, 2007.  Our conferences have grown every year and I expect this year to be no different, so get those proposals in before the November 7 deadline and hopefully I'll see you there!

Want to squeeze a bit more performance out of your MySQL install? Make sure you're not using swap!

Of course you were probably smart enough to make sure MySQL wasn't using all the systems memory to begin with so in theory you shouldn't be swapping. Good idea but the Linux VM isn't that clever.

It can still make poor decisions and decide to swap portions of MySQL out to disk which can end up hindering performance when it needs to page them back into memory. In replicated installs this can yield to periodic situations where certain MySQL slaves fall far behind and take 30 minutes or more to catch up with the master.

If you're not sure your MySQL install isn't using swap you can use vmstat to see realtime stats but I'd recommend using Munin or Ganglia as well.

What you …

A while back I did Cache Performance Comparison for LAMP Stack.

Looking at this data you can see memcached is about 5 times as slow as APC, and this is with tests done on localhost - with network difference is going to be larger, even with fastest network. Such latency can add up especially if you're, being lazy "P" Developer, request objects from cache one by one rather than fetching all items you need for the page at once (not to mention this is not always possible).

So I thought if there is any way to use both of them at once benefiting from strong sides of each of them.

APC Cache (Eaccelerator and other similar caches) is Fast but it is not distributed so you're wasting cache and reducing possible hit rate by caching things locally if you have many web servers. MemcacheD is relatively slow but distributed and …

When I was leaving MySQL I wrote I will be doing some Web projects on my own, besides doing MySQL Consulting. I think some people thought I am just using that as an excuse and really I will only do consulting. So I'm pretty happy to announce my first project.

NNSEEK Is NewsGroup search engine, as well as NewsGroup->Blog converter, allowing people to view NewsGroups as blog, meaning threads starts are showed as posts and replies are shown as comments.

It is quite early version so at this point - it has number of little problems, rough edges, it is also not overly optimized in terms of performance yet, but it is …