I say correct because there are several incorrect approaches to managing MySQL logs. In MySQL you have two important log files, the MySQL error log (configured with –log-error) and the MySQL slow query log (configured with –log-slow-queries or –slow-query-log and –slow-query-log-file which is available …

I’ve heard that the mechanic’s wife always has a car that needs repair or tuneup, the painter’s wife always had walls of peeling paint, you get the picture. What about MySQL DBA’s and their own databases? While I have many versions of MySQL for testing including for example the latest 5.1.44 which I was using for my previous post, what is running on my production server? Let’s see:

mysql> select version();
+-----------+
| version() |
+-----------+
| 5.1.25-rc |
+-----------+

That’s really old. And yes, to prove my point that we can be our own worst enemy, the previous version before 5.1.25 was 5.1.6. Yes, .6 which worked just fine, and never crashed once for my 20+ websites. While I have downloaded onto my production server several versions ready for upgrade including versions 5.1.30, 5.1,38, and 5.4.1 I’ve never actually gone through the upgrade process.

Continuing on from preparation in our MySQL latin1 to utf8 migration let us first understand where MySQL uses character sets. MySQL defines the character set at 4 different levels for the structure of data.

• Instance
• Schema
• Table
• Column

In MySQL 5.1, the default character set is latin1. If not specified, this is what you will get. For example.

mysql> create table test1(c1 varchar(10) not null);
mysql> show create table test1\G
Create Table: CREATE TABLE `test1` (
  `c1` varchar(10) NOT NULL
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1

If you want all tables in your instance to always be a default of utf8, you can changed the server variable character_set_server. This can be set dynamically.

mysql> set global …

I sound like a broken record with every client when I talk to about the resilience of their production environments. It’s very simple in theory, however in practice many organizations fail.

Ask yourself these checklist questions for your MySQL backup and recovery process?

1. Do you have MySQL backups in place?
2. Do you backup ALL your MySQL data?
3. Do you have consistent MySQL backups?
4. Do you have backups that include both static snapshot and point in time transactions?
5. Do you review your backup logs EVERY SINGLE day or have tested backup monitoring in place?
6. Do you perform a test recovery of your static backup?
7. Do you perform a test recovery to point in time?
8. Do you time your backup and recovery process and review over time?
9. Do you have off-site copies of your backups?
10. Do you backup your primary binary logs?
…

At FOSDEM 2010, MariaDB was represented by Kristian Nielsen and me. Together with Vlad Kolesnikov we’ve manned the joint MariaDB & PBXT stand. I’ve had the main track talk titled “MariaDB: extra features that make it a better branch of MySQL” (slides), and
Kristian had a more general talk titled “Beyond MySQL GA: patches, storage engines, forks, and pre-releases” (slides) in MySQL devroom.

There were no other MySQL-related main track talks, so overall, MySQL ecosystem was represented by one devroom, one stand, and one talk. This is exactly as much as a certain other open source database had, with the exception that our stand didn’t have anything to match the blue plush elephants and pencils and mugs.

…

Before undertaking such migration the first step is a lesson in understanding more about how latin1 and utf8 work and interact in MySQL. latin1 in a common and historical character set used in MySQL. utf8 (first available in MySQL Version 4.1) is an encoding supporting multiple bytes and is the system default in MySQL 5.0

• latin1 is a single byte character set.
• utf8 is a 1-3 byte character set depending on the size of the character. NOTE: MySQL utf8 does not support the RFC 3629 4 byte sequences

MySQL variables

MySQL has a number of different system variables to consider, the following is the default representation in MySQL 5.1

mysql> show global variables like '%char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name            | Value …

Kristian Nielsen presented “Beyond MySQL GA: patches, storage engines, forks, and pre-releases”.
This included a history of current products:

Google Patches (5.0 & 5.1) included improvements in :

• statistics/monitoring
• lock contention
• binlog
• malloc()
• filesorts
• innodb I/O and wait statistics
• SHOW …STATISTICS statements
• smp scalability
• I/O scalability
• semisync replication
• many more

Percona Patches (5.0) focus on

• statistics/monitoring
• performance/scalability
• buffer pool content/mutexes
• microslow patch

These have been ported to 5.1 and mainly integrated into XtraDB.

EBay Patches (5.0) have included:

• variable length memory storage engine
• pool of …

If you have multiple database servers with strange names, or if you have to hop over multiple machines to connect to any mysql database server, then you know what a pain it can be to administer such a setup. Thanks to some scripting, you can automate such tasks as follows:

Create an expect script:
/path/to/sshmysql.exp

#!/usr/bin/expect -f
#script by darren cassar
#mysqlpreacher.com

set machine [lindex $argv 0]

set timeout -1

spawn ssh username@$machine
match_max 100000
expect -exact “assword: “
send — “password\r”
send — “sudo -k; sudo su – mysql\r”
expect -exact “sudo -k; sudo su – mysql”
expect -exact “assword:”
send — “password\r”
interact

# you should change the word password in ‘send — “password\r”‘ to your login password
# if you have the same password for each …

Matt Asay writes today in Oracle loses some MySQL mojo about Ken Jacobs leaving Oracle. For me, that’s a major bummer. Ken has been a long-time visitor of the MySQL Conference and that’s where I first met him: a friendly and knowledgeable person, on database technology in general but also about MySQL. When Innobase Oy got bought by Oracle, InnoDB got placed under Ken’s leadership and did pretty well there. We’d occasionally exchange emails, and I’ve always found him to be responsive and helpful.

I think it was kinda presumed by people that the technical part of MySQL at Oracle would also reside with Ken. Obviously now, that’s not going to be the case. What that means exactly, I don’t know as I am not familiar with the other person (Edward Screven). We’ve got to know Ken over the years, so it would’ve been nice to keep going with him. Ohwell. …

The slides for my presentation at FOSDEM 2010 are now available online at slideshare. In this presentation I describe a successful client implementation with the result of 10x performance improvements. My presentation covers monitoring, reviewing and analyzing SQL, the art of indexes, improving SQL, storage engines and caching.

The end result was a page load improvement from 700+ms load time to a a consistent 60ms.

10x Performance Improvements – A Case Study View more presentations from Ronald Bradford.