At MySQL, we know our users want Performance, Scalability, Reliability, and Availability, regardless of the platform the choose to deploy. We have always had excellent benchmarks on Linux, and with MySQL 5.5, we are also working hard on improving performance on Windows.

The original patch of improving Windows performance was developed by MySQL senior developer Vladislav Vaintroub; benchmarks by QA engineer Jonathan Miller. We integrated the patch into MySQL 5.5 release.

The following two charts show the comparison of MySQL 5.5 vs. MySQL 5.1 (plugin) vs. MySQL 5.1 (builtin) using sysbench:

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Write-heavy workloads can reach a situation where InnoDB runs out of usable space in its redo log files. When that happens, InnoDB does a lot of disk writes to create space and you can see a drop in server throughput for a few seconds. From InnoDB plugin 1.0.4 we have introduced the ‘innodb_adaptive_flushing’ method that uses a heurstic to try to flush enough pages in the background so that it is rare for the very active writing to happen. In this note I’ll try to explain how the heuristic works i.e.: what factors are taken into account when deciding how many dirty pages to flush from the buffer pool in the background. I’ll skip some details for the sake of clarity.

You may find InnoDB glossary useful to understand the terminology used in this note. adaptive_flushing is of consequence to you if your workload involves significant write activity. …

With all the changes surrounding Sun and MySQL joining Oracle, and InnoDB becoming part of the MySQL organization, let’s recap how and where to find information related to InnoDB, so first-time users can learn InnoDB from the ground up, and long-time users can keep up with the latest developments.

MySQL 5.1

In MySQL 5.1, the MySQL Reference Manual has information about the InnoDB storage engine in the Storage Engine chapter.

To take advantage of the latest InnoDB features and performance improvements in the 5.1 release, you’ll need to start using the InnoDB Plugin. The InnoDB Plugin went through a series of “Early Adopter” releases, reaching GA status with InnoDB 1.0.x. So this is the level of InnoDB that you should be using with 5.1, and it comes with 5.1, but requires action on your part to enable it. The InnoDB Plugin has its own manual that discuss features like fast index creation, table compression, …

This is a brief overview of the history of InnoDB with respect to the Version Control Systems (VCS) that were used for developing. It could be useful to people who want to trace back in time to find the origins of bugs or features.

Early days
InnoDB was born in the mid 1990s when Heikki Tuuri started developing this masterpiece. Heikki was a lone developer at that time and he did not use any VCS. There is no InnoDB revision history before 2001.

2001 – 2005
Then in 2001 InnoDB was imported into MySQL’s BitKeeper repository and development continued, recording the history there.

2005 – 2010
Later on in Oct 2005 when Oracle acquired Innobase, InnoDB developers had to move away from MySQL’s BitKeeper repository and Subversion was chosen for InnoDB development. The latest sources from BitKeeper were imported into SVN without preserving the history …

Today is all airports and flights. The flight between London and San Francisco is not too bad, but I don’t like long haul flights and for 12 hours I can sympathise with sardines and anchovies…

Tomorrow it will be different. The weather looks good, the sessions very interesting. Just few hours to settle, review the presentation and relax a bit before it begins. Then, Oracle Open World is going to open on Sunday evening at the Moscone Center.

What about MySQL?

Sunday is all MySQL! We will have opening keynotes from Edward Screven and the MySQL team. We will have technical sessions all afternoon and a closing keynote from Marten Mickos in the evening. The program for MySQL Sunday is here.

If you cannot participate in person, I am sure you will find presentations and videos soon after the event.

My …

Last night I was the invited guest at the SF MySQL Meetup. In my presentation “Successful MySQL Scalability” I talked about a set of principles to ensure appropriate system architecture, data availability and best practices to build an ideal solution for your business. The presentation was also live streamed and is available online.

Successful MySQL Scalability

Spinn3r is hiring a cool Java engineer here in our San Francisco office.

It’s a great position with a super smart bunch of guys. Centrally located right in SOMA (2nd and Howard) and we have an AWESOME office (it’s 102 years old !)

Responsibilities:

* Maintain our current crawler.
* Monitor and implement statistics behind the current crawler to detect anomalies.
* Implement new features for customers
* Work on backend architecture to improve performance and stability.
* Implement custom protocol extension for enhanced metadata and site specific social media support.
* Work on new products and features using large datasets.

Requirements and Experience:

* Deep understanding of Java (Threads, IO, tuning, etc)
* Internet standards (HTTP, HTML, RSS, DNS, etc)
* SQL
* Basic understanding of distributed …

DISCLAIMER: This post contains no technical MySQL content however it is good news for the MySQL Community.

MySQL content will be included for the first time with the LAOUC (Latin American Oracle Usergroups Council) Oracle tour that is being organized in conjunction with OTN (Oracle Technology Network).

I have no idea what MySQL user communities are in South America however if you live in any of the following cities, please feel free to contact me. I am happy to have additional discussion regarding MySQL or help in some way if there is interest in any cities.

This seven country tour includes:

• Oct 12 – Lima, Peru
• Oct 14 – Santiago, Chile
• Oct 16 – Montevideo, Uruguay
• Oct 18 – São Paulo, Brazil
…

Leif (who works for Spinn3r) published a great post on the mySQL relay-log-space-limit variable and using the page cache efficiently:

When the SQL thread is not able to keep up, logs will accumulate. You can set the location of your relay logs with the relay-log option; in the default configuration (and many production configurations), the relay logs are stored on the same disk as the rest of MySQL’s data. If the total size of the relay logs ever exceeds relay-log-space-limit, the IO thread will pause until the SQL thread has moved on to its next file and deleted its previous one.

Unfortunately, relay-log-space-limit defaults to zero (unlimited). This means that when the SQL thread can’t keep up, the slave’s relay logs will continue to accumulate indefinitely (until its disk fills up). When the total size of …

Apparently, Digg performed a big migration from MySQL to Cassandra and a big migration to their new Digg v4 architecture and now their VP of Engineering has been shown the door:

Ever since Digg launched its new site design, it’s been plagued with all kinds of trouble, not least of which is that it keeps going down. The problems with the new architecture are so bad that VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, we’ve confirmed with sources close to Digg.

In a Diggnation video today, CEO Kevin Rose explained some of the technical issues the site is dealing with and why it can’t simply roll back to the previous architecture. The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called Cassandra, which replaced the MySQL database the site ran on before. Cassandra is very advanced—it is supposed to be faster and scale …