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:

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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 …

It's gotta be tough for InfoWorld's overworked editors to figure out how to recognize the best open source products out there. Open source has become so pervasive in IT that there aren't too many areas where there aren't at least a half-dozen interesting pieces of open source technology from software infrastructure, networking, development tools, desktop software, you name it. I'm not a part of the decision making process in these awards, but I have empathy for them and all the different products they need to consider.

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I just read Björn Schotte's post on the activities of the European Union antitrust regulators concerning the intended takeover of Sun Microsystems by Oracle.

Björn mentions a news article that cites EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes saying that the commission has the obligation to protect the customers from reduced choice, higher costs or both. But to me, this bit is not the most interesting. Later on the article reads:


The Commission said it was concerned that the open source nature of Sun's MySQL database might not …