Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The …

In my recent post on the EU antitrust regulators' probe into the Oracle Sun merger I did not mention an important class of stakeholders: the MySQL-based special purpose database startups. By these I mean:

• 
  
• Kickfire
  
• Infobright
  
• Calpont
  
• ScaleDB
  

I think it's safe to say the first three are comparable in the sense that they are all analytical databases: they are designed for data warehousing and business intelligence applications. ScaleDB might be a good fit for those …

As a frequent traveler for my MySQL consulting (last 4 weeks were Sydney, San Francisco, New York and Vancouver), I like to keep abreast of any local tech event that includes MySQL that I may be able to attend.

Now there is a consolidated location that you can use, the Open Source Events Calendar. Kudos to the MySQL Community team members Lenz Grimmer and Giuseppe Maxia who have put this together.

We need your help. If you have a local event, please submit your event request. This projects needs the support of all.

You will also find valuable conference information including dates for close of proposals. A great tool for scheduling your upcoming conference year.

Matt Asay and Marten Micknos both tweeted about Oracle's ad targeted at Sun customers that ran in Wednesday's Wall Street Journal. It's also on Oracle's Web site:

read more

The event is public and free. Therefore, it needs public sponsoring. I don't know yet if I can attend, but I have already donated something to the organizers, and I am officially a sponsor. You can be one too. Simply go to the sponsors page and donate a minimum of $100 as in individual or $250 as an …

I’ve always believed that the MySQL Information_schema.tables.table_rows figure for Innodb tables to be while approximate, approximately accurate.

Today I found that the figures varied on one table from 10x to 100x wrong.

Before performing an ALTER I always verify sizes for reference.

+---------+------------+--------+------------+------------+----------------+------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| table_s | table_name | engine | row_format | table_rows | avg_row_length | total_mb   | data_mb    | index_mb  | today      |
+---------+------------+--------+------------+------------+----------------+------------+------------+-----------+------------+
| XXXXX   | s_a        | InnoDB | Compact    |     208993 |           7475 |  1491.5312 |  1490.0156 |    1.5156 | 2009-09-09 |

mysql> alter table s_a modify col VARCHAR(255);
Query OK, 23471 rows affected (4 min 26.23 sec)

After

 …

MySQL provides a level of statistics for your INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, REPLACE Data Manipulation Language (DML) commands using the STATUS output of various Com_ variables, however it is per server stats. I would like per table stats.

You can achieve this with tools such as MySQL Proxy and mk-query-digest, however there is actually a very simple solution that requires no additional tools.
The following 1 line Linux command (reformatted for ease of reading) gave me exactly what I wanted, and it had ZERO impact on the database.

$ mysqlbinlog /path/to/mysql-bin.000999 |  \
   grep -i -e "^update" -e "^insert" -e "^delete" -e "^replace" -e "^alter"  | \
   cut -c1-100 | tr '[A-Z]' '[a-z]' |  \
   sed -e "s/\t/ /g;s/\`//g;s/(.*$//;s/ set .*$//;s/ as .*$//" | sed -e "s/ where .*$//" |  \
   sort | uniq -c | sort -nr  

  33389 update e_acc
  17680 insert into r_b
  17680 insert into e_rec
  14332 insert into rcv_c
  13543 update e_rec
  10805 …

While not a MySQL topic, as most of my readers view my MySQL Blog, my WordPress blog has been hacked? Has yours?

Like many, I’m sure you may have read about it like at Wordpress blogs under attack from hack attack but I was surprised when my custom permlinks did not work.

Being surprised I looked at Administrator accounts, and I found that there was one more number then being displayed in the list. I had to dig into the database to find the problem.

mysql> select * from wp_users where ID in (select user_id from wp_usermeta where meta_key = 'wp_capabilities' and meta_value like '%admin%');
+-----+-------------+------------------------------------+---------------+------------------------------+---------------------------+---------------------+---------------------+-------------+--------------+
| ID  | user_login  | user_pass                          | user_nicename | …

If you are unfamiliar with what to monitor in MySQL, starting with looking at what popular Monitoring products monitor. For example, the following is the list of MySQL Cacti Plugin measurements.

Innodb Buffer Pool Activity

• Pages Created
• Pages Written
• Pages Read

Innodb Buffer Pool Pages

• Pool Size
• Database Pages
• Free Pages
• Modified Pages

Inoodb File I/O

• File Reads
• Files Writes
• Log Writes
• File Fsyncs

Innodb Pending I/O

• Aio Log Ios
• Aio Sync ios
• Buffer Pool Flushes
• Chkp Writes
• Ibuf Aio Reads
• Log Flushes
• Log Writes
• Normal Aio Reads …

As I outlined in Part 1 MySQL Proxy can be one tool for performing SQL analysis. The impact with any monitoring is the art of monitoring will affect the results, in this case the performance. I don’t recommend enabling this level of detailed monitoring in production, these techniques are designed for development, testing, and possibly stress testing.

This leads to the question, how do I monitor SQL in production? The simple answer to this question is, Sampling. Take a representative sample of your production system. The implementation of this depends on many factors including your programming technology stack, and your MySQL topology.

If for example you are using PHP, then defining MySQL proxy on a production system, and executing firewall rules to redirect incoming 3306 traffic to 4040 for a period of time, e.g. 2 …