Last week I spoke to Lenz Grimmer, MySQL Community Relations Manager for Europe, ME and Africa, about the Users Conference, PBXT and the Community.

The interview has been featured under Articles on the MySQL home page.

For those of you that missed it, here is the link to the interview again:

Interview with Paul McCullagh, developer of the PrimeBase XT Storage Engine.

At this week I came across great blog of Peter Zaitsev and Vadim Tkachenko - two developers from High Performace Group at MySQL Inc. This blog’s name is MySQL Performance Blog and, as you probably assume, it is about misscelaneous sides of MySQL optimization and related stuff. So, if you are MySQL administrator or, even, developer, that works with MySQL, I would advise you to take a look at this blog - there are lots of useful MySQL optimization info.

Tags: mysql, high, performance, …

Do you has what it takes to join the MySQL Documentation team? The Guts? The Determination? The Five Bucks?

If you think you do, send me an email.

Those confused can click here.

Guiseppe Maxia recently posted on Filling Test Tables Quickly. However, he only gave examples for numbers, words and dates. This article will deal with randomly inserting images into a database — particularly useful for testing images stored in the database versus the filesystem. This article was inspired by Guiseppe’s article.

[note: there will be a post soon with my presentation on storing images in the MySQL filesystem, and there will be ample opportunity for discussion then, especially since everyone making a claim will have tested their system, given this code.]

Getting images into the database is not easy. All the tutorials I have read have used a programming language to get images into a database. Using cat and similar unix tools, I have attempted to be able to insert an image into a …

OK, so in case anyone didn't notice, I've had quite a few problems with spam comments and trackbacks on my blog. What does this have to do with the MySQL Forge Wiki? Well, Tim Bunce had an excellent comment on my post yesterday that in order to prevent the Forge Wiki from duplicating content of the documentation, I should put links to the MySQL Manual in the wiki pages, to show contributors that the Forge Wiki is a place to put community-driven content that enhances already existing documentation.

In fact, Tim's comment was so good, that I accidentally deleted it when removing the 100+ spam comments I received between yesterday and today. Sorry Tim!.

Anyway, I have gone ahead and updated the Server …

I’ve been working on BUG#17928, which is all about “testBackup fails in error handling testcases” which appeared after we merged in some work to the 5.1 tree (which is okay in 5.0) that changes some things in the way that online backups are done in NDB to better support recovery in the event of various types of failures and various times in the process.

Anyway, not all systems are affected by this bug… I’m at least reproducing some of the failures on my laptop and have spent the past while in the depths of the BACKUP and NDBFS blocks trying to work out what’s going on and why we’re hitting this assert.

NDBFS is an interesting block as it’s the file system interaction for NDB - so we’re doing things that could take an arbitrary amount of time. We don’t like waiting for those sorts of things in cluster, so we go on and do other work.

…

The development of a prototype of SQLbusRT has started.

This first version will contain an implementation of all the components in the current architectural design. However, these components will not contain much functionality yet. The interfaces will be designed, but the messages being sent between the components will mostly be hardcoded.

This first version will be used to do some first measurements on the real-time characteristics of the architecture. As soon as the coding has finished, a link to the package will be posted here.

After doing the first measurements, the results will be posted here as well.

If you are interested in specific measurements, please let me know. I might include them in my research.

Blog: http://sqlbusrt.blogspot.com/

Project website: …

MySQL Server has tons of variables which may be adjusted to change behavior or for performance purposes. They are documented in the manual as well as on new page Jay has created. Still I see constant confusion out where which of variables apply to storage engines only and which are used on SQL layer and apply to all storage engines.

Lets start with a bit of history. When MySQL was just written there was not that many storage engines - there was MyISAM for disk tables and HEAP for in memory tables. So first MySQL versions did not bother naming variables with storage engines prefix. This is why we have key_buffer, not "myisam_key_buffer" for example. The other excurse Monty used to make was - it is not really MyISAM specific. key_buffer was also used by now retired ISAM storage engine and could be used by something else. True in theory but in practice for years now when …

AnandTech published Intel Woodcrest preview benchmarks which have some numbers for MySQL as well.

From these numbers performance looks great and it looks like finally Intel has something to respond to AMD Opterons on Server market. Now competition heats up and we'll see what AMD will have to respond. As Opteron did not have serious updates for a while I guess there is something on a way.

Same site publishes Core vs K8 architecture comparison which is very interesting reading.

This article also looks at performance of Irwindale based Xeon and Sun T2000. Results are close to the ones I had in …