I had the pleasure to sit on the Performance Panel at the recent Percona Performance Conference. While the panel contained a number of usual MySQL suspects, one person was not familiar, that being Cary Millsap from Method R.

An expert in optimizing Oracle performance, Cary also gave an session on Day 2 that I attended. While he opened professing not to be an expert in MySQL, his talk provided valuable foundation knowledge irrespective of whether you use MySQL or another database product.

Having come myself from 7 straight years in system architecture and performance tuning in Ingres, then a further 6 years in Oracle again heavily involved in system architecture and performance tuning, a lot of my …

Looks like there is hope yet for the owners of the MySQL copyright to bring around their development. There is a proposal (actually it seems its already decided to ahead with it) up on their public wiki that details a development approach that could finally become compatible with the real world, rather than managers checking off feature lists. Maybe its too late already, but maybe its just in time to "fend off" the increasing competition for who provides the best MySQL distribution.

Recently on a client site I had to fight the pain of having no way to confirm loss of data integrity when optimizing data types. Due to MySQL’s ability to perform silent conversion of data, when converting a number of columns we enabled sql_mode to catch any truncations as errors.

sql_mode=STRICT_ALL_TABLES

This ensured that should any data truncations occur, an error is thrown not a warning. The following shows an example case study for converting an INT to TINYINT UNSIGNED and shows that without sql_mode silent conversions occur.

mysql> drop schema if exists tmp;
Query OK, 25 rows affected (0.40 sec)

mysql> create schema tmp;
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> use tmp
Database changed
mysql> create table t1(i1 INT NULL);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.15 sec)

mysql> insert into t1 values(1),(2),(3),(256),(65536),(NULL);
Query OK, 6 rows affected (0.06 sec)
Records: 6  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0 …

As the recipient of the 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year award I received a MySQL crystal ball. While it looks good in my bookcase, unfortunately the best advice I can offer during this time of uncertainty is “watch this space”.

A number of topics where information is still very much unknown and I’m either asked about, or am following includes:

• The Oracle acquisition of Sun, owner of MySQL.
• MySQL 5.4 Alpha release and schedule for production release
• The end of MySQL 5.0 Community/Enterprise split
• The future of Falcon in MySQL 6.0?

Thanks to Julian Cash of the Human Creativity Project of his photograph at the 2009 MySQL Conference.

…

The announcement last month of Oracle to acquire Sun continues to warrant a lot of discussion over exactly what Oracle will do with MySQL. Only time will tell what will happen with the official product, however it is important to remember that MySQL is GPL, there will always be a free version of MySQL available for popular LAMP stack products such as WordPress and Drupal and new and existing startup’s will continue to use MySQL.

This announcement will see Oracle resources begin to better understand and evaluate MySQL. As a resident MySQL Expert, I also have a strong background in Oracle having also worked for Oracle Corporation. I have also delivered several successful one day and half day workshops on MySQL/Oracle related content including:

• 2009 - Best Practices …

Giuseppe Maxia spoke at the May 2009 Boston MySQL User Group about MySQL 5.4 and what it can do, the new performance features, etc.

Sorry for the (relatively) short notice, but I will be talking at Sun’s CommunityOne conference in San Francisco on June 1st.

I’ll be talking about, and demonstrating, the DTrace probes we have put into MySQL in a joint presentation with Robert Lor who will be doing the same for Postgres.

CommunityOne West Badge

Our presentation is on the Monday afternoon.

Check out the CommunityOne West Conference Site for more details and registration.

I recent visit with old Brisbane friend HiTCHO which I met at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group in 2005, has lead to this cool list of some hardware and software technologies he used that I am now considering or have already implemented or purchased.

Software

1. xmarks.com - Bookmark-Powered Web Discovery
2. Pulse - Smart Pen
3. Quicksilver Mac windows manager
4. MailPlane - Brings Gmail to your Mac desktop
5. Evernote - Remember Everything, with Firefox plugin and iPhone App
6. …

Scaling MySQL and ZFS on T5440

Solid State Disks : a 2009 fashion

This technology is not new : it originates in 1874 when a German physicist named Karl Braun (pictured above) discovered that he could rectify alternating current with a point-contact semiconductor. Three years later, he had built the first CRT oscilloscope and four years later, he had built the first prototype of a Cat's whisker diode, later optimized by G. Marconi and G. Pickard. In 1909, K. Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with G. Marconi.

The Cat's whisker diodes are considered the first solid …

Scaling MySQL and ZFS on T5440

Solid State Disks : a 2009 fashion

This technology is not new : it originates in 1874 when a German physicist named Karl Braun (pictured above) discovered that he could rectify alternating current with a point-contact semiconductor. Three years later, he had built the first CRT oscilloscope and four years later, he had built the first prototype of a Cat's whisker diode, later optimized by G. Marconi and G. Pickard. In 1909, K. Braun shared the Nobel Prize for physics with G. Marconi.

The Cat's whisker diodes are considered the first solid …