MySQL 5.6 is going to have a lot of improvements. I want to mention a few things I think are uniquely valuable for a large set of typical MySQL users.

The first is index condition pushdown. If you’ve read High Performance MySQL, you saw a lengthy “indexing case study” in the chapter on indexing. It’s many pages of if-this-then-that kinds of things: you have to include this column in the index, but then in that order, but only for this query because for this other query you need these other indexes with columns in these orders, and this index can be suitable for these queries if you combine some other things, and it just goes on and on. Why? Largely because of something that we call the left-prefix rule. It imposes a lot of …

The new stable version of innotop is now released. Version 1.8.1 is a bug-fix-only release, with no new features. It’s available for immediate download.

Further Reading:

• Version 1.5.2 of the innotop MySQL monitor released
• Version 0.1.149 of innotop released
• Version 1.6.0 of the innotop monitor for MySQL released
• …

This is a cross-post from the MySQL Performance Blog. I thought it would be interesting to users of PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, and $system-of-interest as well.

For about the past year I’ve been formulating a series of tools and practices that can provide deep insight into system performance simply by looking at TCP packet headers, and when they arrive and depart from a system. This works for MySQL as well as a lot of other types of systems, because it doesn’t require any of the contents of the packet. Thus, it works without knowledge of what the server and client are conversing about. Packet headers contain only information that’s usually regarded as non-sensitive (IP address, port, TCP flags, etc), so it’s also very easy to get access to this data even in highly secure environments.

I’ve …

“Legacy MySQL does not scale well on a single node, which forces granular sharding and explicit application code changes to make them sharding-aware and results in low utilization of severs”– Dr. John Busch, Schooner Information Technology A super-set of MySQL suitable for Big Data? On this subject, I have interviewed Dr. John Busch, Founder, Chairman, [...]

The Northern California Oracle Users Group (NoCOUG) just published an interview with me in their journal. It’s titled “A Whole New World of MySQL”. You can read it in the full journal (PDF), or on Iggy Fernandez’s blog. The full journal is well worth a read; there’s a lot of good information.

Thanks to Iggy for such a thought-provoking interview, and for inviting me to participate!

Further Reading:

• Wishing I could be at ODTUG
• …

Want a free copy of High Performance MySQL, Third Edition? If you register before the early-bird pricing expires for the MySQL Conference in April, and use the discount code PL-Book, you’ll get to take a free copy home from the conference!

And now, a status update: I’m currently proofing the QC2 (quality control #2) revision of the book; after this, the book goes to manufacturing. The PDF is now 820 pages, which is a lot of work to proofread. You can imagine how much more in-depth we’ve been able to go with so many more pages.

The free sample online is …

70x Higher JOIN Performance, NoSQL Key-Value API & Cross Data Center Sharding with Synchronous Replication 

Oracle is delighted to announce the immediate availability of the production-ready, GA release of MySQL Cluster 7.2, available for download under the GPL, and as part of the commercial MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition, including management tools, product certifications and 24x7 global support.

1 Billion Queries per Minute

MySQL Cluster delivered 1 billion queries per minute (17.6m million queries per second), scaled-out across 8x commodity Intel x86 server nodes, accessed by the NoSQL C++ NDB API.

It …

A tale of Oracle SQL object types, their constructors, and how you use them. This demonstrates what you can and can’t do and gives brief explanations about why.

The following creates a base SAMPLE_OBJECT data type and a sample_table
collection of the base SAMPLE_OBJECT data type.

CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE sample_object IS OBJECT
(id       NUMBER
,name     VARCHAR2(30));
/
 
CREATE OR REPLACE TYPE sample_table IS TABLE OF sample_object;
/

If the base SAMPLE_OBJECT data type were a Java object, the default constructor of an empty call parameter list would allow you to construct an instance variable. This doesn’t work for an Oracle object type because the default constructor is a formal parameter list of the object attributes in the positional order of their appearance in the declaration statement.

The test case on this concept is:

After the recent update to pt-table-checksum, I’ve seen a few FAQs about it.

Q: is it still multi-threaded/parallel? A: No, that was a pile of bugs and complexity. If you need to run the tool in parallel to take advantage of powerful hardware, you can run several instances, say, one per database.

Q: what chunk size should I use? A: None, let the tool adjust itself dynamically.

Q: what if it skips a table or chunk because it’s oversized? A: this should be rare unless you have tables without any indexes; if you want to do the table in one chunk, run the tool again and specify to checksum only that table, with an appropriately large chunk size. This is one of the rare cases where you will need to specify a chunk size.

Q: what commandline options should I use after upgrading? A: It has sensible defaults for everything, and is designed to run without any options at all in most cases. If you’re upgrading from …

It might surprise you to hear this, but I had no idea whether my talks would be accepted. The committee decided on that, and neither I nor anyone else at Percona is on the committee. In any case, I’ll be giving some tutorials again this year, and two of my talks have been accepted: Measuring Scalability and Performance With TCP and Diagnosing intermittent performance problems.

This seems like an appropriate place to mention a few words about the conference organization. The number of people involved is staggering (100+). The logistics — the number of tasks, vendors, …