When you have to evaluate a MySQL System & Environment, what questions do you ask in order to determine critical information about the environment and evaluate the business success and viability. You don’t have to be a consultant to ask these questions, ask them of your own environment. Do any of the answers shock or concern you?

I was prompted to write about this from a conversation with a colleague about “accepting risk”. His comment was, “every IT server on the planet is vulnerable regardless of best practices.”

Here is my list of questions for you based on an immediate response from this discussion?

Technology

• What is your full technology stack, i.e. Operating System, Database, Application Server, Development Language(s) and other essential components?
• What are the versions of these technologies?
• What new technologies or versions of existing technologies are you …

Today, while on the MySQL manual page, I typed in ’select’ in the search manual box to confirm the SELECT syntax.

The result was not what I expected, the “SELECT” command. Instead I only got two options “Speed of SELECT …” and “Optimizing SELECT and …”.

Ok, well that’s not what I want, there is a suggestion box to the right so I pick the top option “mysql select”. Not only is this worse with “Type Conversion in …”, “Searching on Two Keys” I also get 3 totally useless “Keymatch” records

Download MySQL -http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
MySQL Training - http://www.mysql.com/training/ KeyMatch
Buy MySQL Enterprise -http://shop.mysql.com/enterprise/

I know in the past just entering ‘SELECT’ worked, because I’ve been presently writing tests on JOIN syntax and I wanted to link in my blog …

A new feature to MySQL Version 5 was the introduction of SQL_MODE to support STRICT… or TRADITIONAL values.

This feature enabled a closer compatibility to other RDBMS products. MySQL by default performs a number of silent data changes which do not help in providing a level of data integrity if you come from a more traditional background. MySQL by default represents these as warnings, while with an appropriate SQL_MODE, these are in turn treated as errors.

How does Drizzle handle this? Very simple. There is no SQL_MODE. By default Drizzle handling a strict mode of producing errors for any invalid data. The following are some test case examples showing the varying conditions.

Test Case

select version();
create database if not …

Continuing on from CPU, we turn our attention to Memory. One of the first steps when addressing a MySQL performance tuning problem is to perform a system audit of the physical hardware resources, then identify any obvious bottlenecks in these resources.

In auditing, I start with the ‘free’ command, the already used ‘vmstat’ command, the /proc/meminfo and /proc/sys/vm/swappiness files to get an indication of memory and swap resources. While we are looking at the Memory, the configuration of Swap is also very important. I will discuss this in more detail later.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3955       3838        117          0        402       2366
-/+ buffers/cache:       1069       2886
Swap:         1027          0 …

One of the first steps when addressing a MySQL performance tuning problem is to perform a system audit of the physical hardware resources, then identify any obvious bottlenecks in these resources.

When dealing with CPU, a quick audit should include identifying the number of CPU cores your server has, and the types of these cores. The key file on Linux systems is /proc/cpuinfo.

Number of cores can be found via the command cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep “^processor” | wc -l

You need to look more closely at the file to determine the type of CPU (e.g. below the model name shows Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X3220 @ 2.40GHz. The combination of knowing the number of processors (cores) listed and physical id and siblings helps identify how many CPUs and how many cores per CPU exist.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor       : 0
vendor_id       : GenuineIntel
cpu family      : 6
model …

The annual MySQL Conference & Expo will be held in this year on April 20-23 in Santa Clara, California with a double twist.

Not one, but *two* FREE additional MySQL Conferences are running at the same time, in the same hotel. If you on the west coast you can effectively get a free conference with many MySQL experts speaking at them. I am speaking at all three on three different topics.

The first announcement was the 2009 MySQL Camp organized by Sheeri K. Cabral - The She-BA in line with the O’Reilly approach of having a smaller un-conference within a conference such as with Web 2.0 NY last year.

However the big news was the …

Here are some quotes from a recent article talking about Oracle's maintenance and support fees:

Before Oracle acquired BEA earlier this year, the company charged 18% to 20% for support and maintenance. Oracle increased those fees to meet its own structure and also raised list prices on most BEA products.

That didn't sit well.

and


One Java-centric VAR, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some of his BEA WebLogic customers are moving to alternative application servers just to get away from Oracle.

and

"What company comes in this climate and not only jacks up prices but support prices as …

Here are some quotes from a recent article talking about Oracle's maintenance and support fees:

Before Oracle acquired BEA earlier this year, the company charged 18% to 20% for support and maintenance. Oracle increased those fees to meet its own structure and also raised list prices on most BEA products.

That didn't sit well.

and


One Java-centric VAR, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some of his BEA WebLogic customers are moving to alternative application servers just to get away from Oracle.

and

"What company comes in this climate and not only jacks up prices but support prices as …

Here are some quotes from a recent article talking about Oracle's maintenance and support fees:

Before Oracle acquired BEA earlier this year, the company charged 18% to 20% for support and maintenance. Oracle increased those fees to meet its own structure and also raised list prices on most BEA products.

That didn't sit well.

and


One Java-centric VAR, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said some of his BEA WebLogic customers are moving to alternative application servers just to get away from Oracle.

and

"What company comes in this climate and not only jacks up prices but support prices as …

While working with Monty Widenius on a bug I reported in MariaDB I was surprised to not get an IRC response for a few minutes. When committed Monty can identify, create a workaround, and patch a problem in code before you have time to read all the responses he also types. See my Monty’s Monument “Passion is a timeless wisdom” comment. One thing I forgot to say in that entry was, while 9pm in New york, it was at last 3am-5am Monty time.

We all love memorable quotes, so here is one.

“sorry, machine died; First time in years”

[9:40pm] montywi: then just try compiling mysqld.o, no need to wait for everything else...
....
[9:58pm] rbradfor: make is clean.
[9:59pm] montywi: sorry, machine died;  First time in years
[10:00pm] rbradfor: laughs …