In the past… One of the typical problems you have when restarting mysqld is that the InnoDB buffer pool (buffer pool from now on) is empty and consequently access to the database requires reading directly from disk. Performance suffers dramatically as a consequence.

So the common solution is to artificially warm upthe server by doing queries which will fill the buffer pool. Typical solutions might be to do: SELECT COUNT(*) FROM some_table FORCE INDEX (PRIMARY) LIMIT ... on a number of tables to fill up the pool on startup. Fitting this into the standard mysql init start script is somewhat tricky as no hooks are provided for this sort of post-start action. (It would be nice to have this for other tasks too.)

Of course choosing the right parameters here can be tricky as workload changes over time, and as the ratio of the size of the database to the size of the buffer pool increases, you need to be more selective …

The new MySQL 5.6 GA release delivers a host of new capabilities to support developers releasing new services faster, with more agility, performance and security .

One of the areas with the most far-reaching set of enhancements is MySQL replication used by the largest web, mobile and social properties to horizontally scale highly-available MySQL databases across distributed clusters of low cost, commodity servers.

A new on-demand MySQL 5.6 replication webinar takes you on a guided tour through all of those enhancements, including:

- 5x higher master and slave …

Join Oracle’s MySQL Team on April 22, 2013, as we celebrate the general availability of MySQL 5.6. With product demos and fun activities in a relaxing atmosphere, this is the party for the MySQL community to get together and have a toast on the work all of us did to make MySQL 5.6 the best release ever. Whether you are an attendee at Percona Live, a member of local MySQL user groups, a MySQL user in the San Francisco Bay Area, or simply interested in MySQL technology, you’re all invited to Oracle’s MySQL Community Reception.
    •    Mingle with your peers and learn from real-world experiences.
    •    Meet MySQL engineers and get the first-hand information on the latest product development.
    •    Have lots of fun!

Date: Monday, April 22, 2013
6:30 PM – 8:30 PM

Location: …

We had a great kickoff to the Bangalore MySQL User camp on 22 March 2013 at the Oracle Kalyani Magnum Office.

There were 17 attendees from the MySQL community besides more than 15 MySQL engineers who attended the meet. Of these 3 community members were from groups inside Oracle. There was a mix of new and veteran MySQL users. The MySQL India teams gave a brief introduction about themselves, followed by a quick overdrew of MySQL and how it is different from other databases. The presentation about 5.6 features was presented last and the one that was most liked. There was a great networking over juice and Donuts after the meeting. There were lots of questions by the community on technical details of 5.6 features. Everyone interacted and there was help offered for ensuring that the next meeting on 19th June 2013 is an even greater success.

Thanks to all the attendees, and organizers. Hope to see you in person again in 3 months …

<< Previous Post: Advanced use of Global Transaction Identifiers

As we saw in my previous posts, Global Transaction Identifiers in MySQL 5.6 allow you to change the replication topology arbitrarily. You don't even need to specify the positions in the replication stream – when you turn on auto-positioning, the master automatically sends only those transactions that are missing on the slave.

When you do a fail-over, you want to make sure that the new master is up-to-date. For instance, consider the following scenario:
Server A is a master; B, C and …

Update – the recording of this webinar is now available here.

This Wednesday (27th March) Mat Keep and I will be presenting a free, live webinar on MySQL 5.6 Replication. You need to register here ahead of the webinar – worth doing even if you can’t attend as you’ll then be sent a link to the replay when it’s available. We’ll also have some of the key MySQL replication developers on-line to answer your questions and so it’s also a great chance to get some free consultancy

Details….

Join this session to learn how the new …

With MySQL 5.5 the default storage engine was changed to InnoDB. This was a good step as most users expected MySQL to support transactions, row level locking and all the other InnoDB features, but with 5.1 they sometimes forgot to choose the right storage engine. As most databases don't have multiple storage engines and many MySQL users changed the default storage engine to InnoDB this made the switch to MySQL easier and the default behaviour more in line with what people expect from a relational database.

Changing the storage engine can of course be done on a per table or per instance basis (default-storage-engine in my.cnf). The temporary tables created with 'CREATE TEMPORARY TABLE ...' should not be forgotten. The performance of InnoDB or MyISAM for temporary tables can have quite some impact, especially with slow storage, a buffer pool which is too small to hold the complete dataset or very small temporary tables. In MySQL 5.6 …

There are many thing changed in MySQL 5.6 which are related to passwords:

• There is a new password hash algorithm (SHA-256)
• There is obfuscation for passwords with the .mylogin.cnf file.
• The option to store slave passwords in a database table.
• It's now possible to supply a password to START SLAVE.

But that's not what this blog post is about.

This blog post is a great new feature: Hiding passwords from your log files, automatically.

MySQL 5.6 will by default hide passwords from the general log. This is not just obfuscation as only the one-way hash will be put in the log files. By setting log-raw=OFF you can disable password hiding for the general log. The log-raw setting will only influence the general log, so the passwords in the slow query log and the binary logs will still be hidden.

With MySQL 5.5 this could be done manually by …

MySQL is deployed in 9 of the top 10 most trafficked sites on the web including Facebook, Twitter, eBay and YouTube, as well as in some of the fastest growing services such as Tumblr, Pinterest and box.com

Working with these companies has given MySQL developers, consultants and support engineers unique insight into how to design database-driven web architectures – whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud.

The MySQL Web Reference Architectures are a set of documented and repeatable best practices for building infrastructure that deliver the highest levels of scalability, agility and availability with the lowest levels of cost, risk and complexity. 

Four components common to most web and mobile properties are sized, with optimum deployment architectures for each:

• …

MySQL 5.6 is probably the version of MySQL with the biggest bundle of new features. You may want to try it soon, since it's now released as GA, and I would like to offer some practical experience on how to use some of the advanced features.

Since replication is my main interest, I will focus on some of the new features in this field, and I will compare what's available in MySQL 5.6 with Tungsten Replicator.

The focus of the comparison is usability, manageability, and some hidden functionality. Parallel replication has been available with Tungsten Replicator for almost two years, and Global Transaction Identifiers for much longer than that. With MySQL 5.6, it seems that the MySQL team wants to close the gap. While the main feature (parallel execution threads) is available and performing well, there are some shocking differences in terms of ease of use, administration …