One of my goals at Acmebenchmarking is make sure I'm running on hardware that is representative of real-world infrastructure, while at the same time doing it as inexpensively as possible.

To date I've been running on two custom built "desktops" (for lack of a better term). Both have an Intel Core i7 4790K processor (quad core plus hyperthreading, 4Ghz), 32GB RAM (dual channel), and a quality SSD. They are named acmebench01 and acmebench02.

Alas, it is time to expand. MUST...PURCHASE...MORE...HARDWARE!

In order to maintain the inexpensive theme I tend to buy used hardware, my goal on this purchase was to achieve many more cores and greater memory bandwidth than my existing machines can provide. Keep in mind that used hardware is great for benchmarking (and likely development and QA environments) but you might want to avoid it for production. For years now I've been purchasing used hardware …

Folks, as usual Pythian is organizing the community dinner. After many years, food, (responsible) drinking and photos, this event has become an important moment for all of us, to know each other better, discuss and have fun.

This year is also the 20th year for MySQL so … YEAAAH let us celebrate, with more food, fun and responsible drinking.

If you had not done it yet … register yourself here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-pythian-mysql-community-pay-your-own-way-dinner-tickets-15692805604

Info about the event:

When: Tuesday April 14, 2015 – 7:00 PM at Pedro’s (You are welcome to show up later, too!)
Where: Pedro’s Restaurant and Cantina – 3935 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054

I know, I know … we …

I’ve started my long journey from Florianópolis, Brazil, to Santa Clara, California and I type this words while waiting for a connection flight. Next Wednesday, Daniel Guzmán Burgos and I will be presenting in the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo (PLMCE).

I’m so excited with the new MySQL 101 program that has been added to this year’s event! Along the years I’ve been working as a Support Engineer at Percona I’ve heard two very distinct types of comments amongst others from some people, customers and community in general, about PLMCE:

1) That they went and it was awesome but they found it hard to follow as most of the …

Introduction

One of the primary objectives of MySQL replication is providing an easy failover process i.e. switching to a redundant system if the primary MySQL server fails. In MySQL this translates to switching to the most appropriate slave server in the eventuality of a failure of the master server.

The promotion of a candidate slave to become a new master is based on a lot of factors, undoubtedly the most important factor being that the chosen slave should be most up to date with the primary server (the old master) before we lost it! This blog explains how to use new features in MySQL 5.7.4 and later to make failover easier.

To find the most up to date slave server, a failover script looks at the set of transactions received by the slave and compares it with every other slave to find the one that has received the biggest set of transactions. There could be more sophisticated ways of doing this, for instance you …

Configuring Perl to work with MySQL is the last part creating a complete Fedora Linux LAMP stack for my students. Perl is already installed on Fedora Linux.

I’ve also shown how to use PHP, Python, and Ruby languages to query a MySQL database on Linux. After installing this additional Perl DBI library, my students will have the opportunity to choose how they implement their LAMP solution.

You can find the Perl version with the following version.pl program:

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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
 
# Print the version.
print "Perl ".$]."\n";

This post works through the Python configuration of Fedora instance, and continues the configuration of my LAMP VMware instance. It covers how you add the MySQL-python libraries to the Fedora instance, and provides the students with one more language opportunity for their capstone lab in the database class.

A standard Fedora Linux distribution installs Python 2.7 by default. Unfortunately, the MySQL-python library isn’t installed by default. You can verify the Python version by writing and running the following version.py program before installing the MySQL-python library:

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# Import sys library.
import sys
 
# Print the Python version.
print sys.version

You can run the version.py program dynamically like this from the current working directory:

Folks, as usual Pythian is organizing the community dinner. After many years, food, (responsible) drinking and photos, this event has become an important moment for all of us, to know each other better, discuss and have fun.

This year is also the 20th year for MySQL so … YEAAAH let us celebrate, with more food, fun and responsible drinking.

If you had not done it yet … register yourself here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-pythian-mysql-community-pay-your-own-way-dinner-tickets-15692805604

Info about the event:

When: Tuesday April 14, 2015 – 7:00 PM at Pedro’s (You are welcome to show up later, too!
Where: Pedro’s Restaurant and Cantina – 3935 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054

I know, I know … we are that kind of …

What the MySQL team is doing with JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) in MySQL 5.7 is great! The MySQL Server Blog (Rick Hillegas and Dag Wanvik) published two key articles about new JSON functions. If you don’t follow these, let me highlight them as a set:

• JSON Functions, Part 1 – Manipulation JSON Data
• JSON Functions, Part 2 – Querying JSON Data

Most folks know how important JSON is to web development. I like the following visual that …

After you install Ruby and build the Rails framework, you need to create the mysql gem. This blog post shows you how to create the mysql gem and how to write a simple Ruby program that queries the MySQL database.

The first step creates the mysql gem for Ruby programming:

yum install mysql

It should show you the following:

Fetching: mysql-2.9.1.gem (100%)
Building native extensions.  This could take a while...
Successfully installed mysql-2.9.1
Parsing documentation for mysql-2.9.1
Installing ri documentation for mysql-2.9.1
Done installing documentation for mysql after 0 seconds
1 gem installed

After you install the mysql Ruby Gem, you can write and …

The MySQL 5.7.7 JSON Lab release introduces a native JSON datatype. In part 1 of this blog post series, Rick Hillegas introduced the new functions for creating and manipulating JSON documents using the new native JSON data type. In this blog post we will be using some of the same sample tables and JSON documents as in part 1, so it will be helpful to read that blog post now, if you haven’t already.

Here we look closer at the functions provided to search through and peer into JSON documents to find values inside of them, and we’ll also cover a few utility functions as we go along. The functions described here are also summarized at the end of this blog for ease of reference.

Please note that the exact set of functions and their semantics may evolve …