Let me premise this post with the statement I think the MySQL documentation is an excellent and highly accurate resource. I think the MySQL docs team do a great job, however like software and people, documentation is not perfect.

As members of the MySQL community you can always contribute to improve the process by reading the documentation and logging any issues as Documentation Bugs.

Some time ago in a discussion with a friend and colleague, we were talking about changes in historical defaults that had been improved finally in MySQL 5.4 The specific discussion was on the new default innodb_buffer_pool_size and we both agreed it increased significantly. One said 1GB, the other said 128MB. Who was right? Well we both were, and we were both inaccurate depending on versions.

Referencing the 5.4 Manual in …

One thing I have often wondered is just how many MySQL instances exist in the world and what MySQL versions and architectures are in use. We hear of 50,000 windows downloads per day but this is misleading because MySQL is basically bundled with Linux by default or installed from various repositories. Linux servers powers many websites.

In Drizzle we have a proposed plan, the Drizzle Census. From the productive Drizzle Developers Day recently at the 2010 MySQL conference we sat down and created a blueprint, and subsequent high level spec of what we considered this optional plugin should do. We didn’t get as far as I would have liked in a code …

I was installing the latest MySQL 5.5.4 on a new machine and I came across the following issues during installation, steps I generally perform on other versions without any incidents.

$ sudo su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.4-m3-linux2.6-x86_64.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.mirrors.hoobly.com/
$ tar xvfz mysql-5.5.4-m3-linux2.6-x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-5.5.4-m3-linux2.6-x86_64
$ scripts/mysql_install_db
Neither host 'barney' nor 'localhost' could be looked up with /usr/bin/resolveip
Please configure the 'hostname' command to return a correct hostname.
If you want to solve this at a later stage, restart this script with the --force option

Perform some checks

$ /usr/bin/resolveip
-su: /usr/bin/resolveip: No such file or directory

$ hostname
barney

$ head -2 /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       localhost
127.0.1.1       barney

I was surprised to find that my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx box had a …

I have uploaded my three presentations from the 2010 MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, California which was my 5th consecutive year appearing as a speaker.

• IGNITION – MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA – Volume I
• LIFTOFF – MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA – Volume 2
• 10x Performance Improvements – A Case Study

A full history of my MySQL presentations can be found on the Presenting page.

…

Back in November 2009 I was working on a project to port Scribd.com code base to Rails 2.2 and noticed that some old plugins we were using in 2.1 were abandoned by their authors. Some of them were just removed from the code base, but one needed a replacement – that was an old plugin called acts_as_readonlyable that helped us to distribute our queries among a cluster of MySQL slaves. There were some alternatives but we didn’t like them for one or another reasons so we’ve decided to go with creating our own ActiveRecord plugin, that would help us scale our databases out. That’s the story behind the first release of DbCharmer.

Today, six months after the first release of …

Saw this interesting paper about highly concurrent programming methods and figured the word should be spread! It’s not new material but it’s a good read. See the full article here: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/

“Highly concurrent applications such as Internet servers and transaction processing databases present a number of challenges to application designers. First, handling large numbers of concurrent tasks requires the use of scalable data structures. Second, these systems typically operate near maximum capacity, which creates resource contention and high sensitivity to scheduling decisions; overload must be handled with care to avoid thrashing. Finally, race conditions and subtle corner cases are common, which makes debugging and code maintenance difficult.

…

I hinted last week of my acceptance with Oracle before the formal announcement this week at the MySQL Users Conference, not for a job but as Oracle ACE Director. In today’s State of the MySQL Community keynote by Kaj Arnö I was one of the first three MySQL nominees that are now part of this program.

What exactly is an ACE Director? Using the description from the Oracle website.

Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates, with candidates nominated by anyone in the Oracle …

Edward Screven – Chief Corporate Architect of Oracle provided the opening keynote at the 2010 MySQL Users Conference.

Overall I was disappointed. The first half was more an Oracle Sales pitch, we had some product announcements, we had some 5.5 performance buzz. While a few numbers and features were indeed great to hear, there was a clear lack of information to the MySQL ecosystem including employees, alumni and various support services. I hope more is unveiled this week.

Some notes of the session.

• Oracle’s Strategy covers storage, servers, virtual machines, operating system, database, middleware, applications
• We build a complete technology stack that is “open” and “integrated” based on “open standards”
• products talk via open standards with the intention for customers to not feel locked in to any technology
…

Brian Aker parted ways with the mainstream MySQL release, and with Sun Microsystems, when Sun was acquired by Oracle. These days, Aker is working on Drizzle, one of several MySQL offshoot projects. In time for next week's MySQL Conference & Expo, Aker discussed a number of topics with us, including Oracle's motivations for buying Sun and the rise of NoSQL.

The key to the Sun acquisition? Hardware:

Brian Aker: I have my opinions, and they're based on what I see happening in the market. IBM has been moving their P Series systems …

There have been a number of April fools jokes today so I thought I’d add my own to the list. While this sounds unexpected it’s actually no joke.

I just accepted a position with Oracle yesterday but I can’t say any more about the details until the MySQL users conference in a few weeks.

A special thanks to Lenz, Kaj & Giuseppe that championed everything to make it all happen, I really didn’t have to do anything other then accept.