My presentation slides are now up here.

The testing tool is still very early days, but it is based on some very cool research from Microsoft’s SQL Server team.

Say what you will about MS (and I have plenty to say), their QA is quite amazing and they are one of the only resources for information related to database QA.  In case you didn’t know, the amazing randgen is based on research from their team as well.

I’ll be posting more about how to play with the tool later and it requires a bit of explanation, so I won’t go too deeply into it.  If someone is just dying to try the new hawtness in dbms testing, you can contact me and I’ll see about getting you sorted.

I’ll just close with an explanation of the source …

The first Oracle Technology Network (OTN) Developer Day MySQL will be held in Santa Clara California on May 3rd. And if it is judged a success, we make take this show on the road*.

The OTN Developer Day MySQL is a one-stop shop for you to learn all the essential skills about MySQL. In this free, one-day seminar, we will cover everything you need to know to successfully design, develop, and manage your MySQL databases. You’ll also learn the guidelines and best practices in performance tuning and scalability.

Attend this event and gain the knowledge to:

* Develop your new applications cost-effectively using MySQL
* Improve performance of your existing MySQL databases
* Manage your MySQL …

In our 5.6 release, we introduced a new feature – “InnoDB Metrics Table” as part of our effort to extend InnoDB diagnostic and monitoring capability. The “Metrics Table” feature consolidates all InnoDB related Performance and Resource related counters (as of today, 176 counters) and makes them available through an information schema table. In addition, it gives the user the ability to control these counters for their monitoring need.

In following sections, we will go over the feature in detail and focus on its usage to get you started with “metrics counters”.

1) The user interface – InnoDB Metrics Table

Before this feature, InnoDB already had dozens of performance counters. They are exposed to the user through “MySQL System Variables”. These counters are permanent counters, and there are no external controls on them. However, they had become important probes that allow users to peek into …

As Calvin mentioned in “NoSQL to InnoDB with Memcached“, we just released a “technology preview” of the feature that makes memcached a MySQL Daemon Plugin. And this “technology preview” release demonstrates how user can go around SQL Optimizer and Query Processing and directly interact with InnoDB Storage Engine through InnoDB APIs. Here, we would like to walk with you step by step to see how to get the memcached Daemon Plugin set up and get it running.

If you would just like to get a brief introduction on the setup steps, there is a “README-innodb_memcached” in the mysql-5.6.2-labs-innodb-memcached package. This is a more elaborated description on these steps.

1) Prerequisite:

Currently, the Memcached Daemon Plugin prototype is only supported on Linux platform. And as a prerequisite, you must …

We’ve been busy at The MySQL Council. Giuseppe’s summary does a good job explaining what we’ve been up to.

You can communicate with the MySQL council in several ways including:

• Respond to the MySQL Council Survey.
• Talk to one of the council members. I’ll be in Orlando on Sunday and Monday, and in Santa Clara on Tuesday through Friday. Giuiseppe say’s he’ll be in California then in Florida. Other council members include Sarah Novotny, Sheeri Cabral, Rob Wultsch, and Matt Yonkovit. Any of us would be glad to hear your questions, concerns, or ideas about how to make the …

Why do B-trees need “Tricks” to work?

Marko Mäkelä recently posted a couple of “tips and tricks” you can use to improve InnoDB performance. Tips and tricks. A general purpose relational database like MySQL shouldn’t need “tips and tricks” to perform well, and I lay the blame on design choices that were made in the early ’70s: the B-tree data structure underlying all OldSQL databases. B-trees were designed for machines that had very different performance characteristics than the machines of today. Hardware has changed, but B-trees are the same. Tips and Tricks are an attempt to make up the difference.

So B-tree implementers — InnoDB, Oracle, MS SQL Server — are fighting an uphill battle; they’re fighting the future. B-trees just aren’t meant to cope with high-bandwidth, slow-seek-time storage systems, because …

Some of you already know since you helped us move, we recently shifted Open Query’s main office to Fifth Avenue, next door to Elizabeth’s. The new place is comfortable, I really like it so far. Anna is also happy with her new admin space and cat Figaro has found an empty spot on a bookshelf to stretch out on!

The lease costs are a bit steep, as is common these days… chances are we’ll just buy our next place.

Follow-Up yes this was an April 1st post. But, everything in the above post is the truth, it’s just phrased to be very open for a bit of mis-interpretation

I find that the real world provides plenty of fun and unbelievable yet true tidbits, so why bother making up nonsense!

A couple of weeks ago at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup, I gave a talk on HandlerSocket and got a couple of questions that, while I thought I knew the answer, I had never actually verified by testing. So, for the attendees who asked, here are the questions and answers: Can you use HandlerSocket on [...]

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This is a personal account of my effort to clean up my web presence. My web pages of personal and semi-professional nature needed weeding, and I ended up moving from sporadically maintained multi-lingual blogs and manually edited HTML pages to a set of Google Sites. Generations of cruft are being superseded by a solution based on a weighted balance of contemporary ease of use, versatility and my limited available time.

Before joining MySQL AB in 2001, I had lived through a set of personal web pages that I had set up with PHP. My mental mode was one of combining some fun PHP coding, a bit of editing of pics, and manual uploading of HTML files with scp with emacs editing on the server, that I hosted at my then-employer Polycon Ab. Once at MySQL, I continued in the same mode, but from 2005 onwards started blogging on …