It’s a busy time of year for Pythian. With many of our team tied up on client engagements, away at MySQL conference this week, and Collaborate 2010 next week, I’m pinch hitting as volunteer editor in helping to pull together this week’s edition of Log Buffer. Enjoy!

MySQL Conference 2010

Big news this week from MySQL Conference as Oracle’s Edward Screven elaborates on Oracle’s plans for MySQL in his opening keynote. Pythian’s Paul Vallee was interviewed by Network World’s John Brodkin, before the conference in anticipation of the session.

Ronald Bradford responds, writing about his …

We started with the morning keynotes again today and I was a little surprised at the snipping going on while people are promoting their products it felt very counterproductive and will end harming the MySQL eco system. The Community Keynote on the other hand looked into the future for itself under the Oracle umbrella. Its still remains to be seen what form the conference will have next year.

The first session that I attended today were around MySQL partitioning in the beta releases and beyond. They were saying the right things but it remains to be seen when some of these features will be available. I would hope that the engineers responsible for MySQL partitioning have a little talk with their Oracle counterparts which have been at it for quite a while. They should sync the features up which would make it easier for us multi-disciplinary DBAs

The next set of sessions were on IO bottlenecks, MySQL data warehousing and finally …

Well the first day has come and gone and I really enjoyed my first day as a newbie. The keynote from Oracle was well received, they touched on the new Beta version of MySQL and the new mysql enterprise which to a trained oracle eye is looking more and more like Grid Control. The end result is providing more instrumentation to help the DBA but I am a little disappointed that a lot of that instrumentation is not actually in the database itself which forces you to buy the product.

The O’Reilly Keynote provided some interesting glimpse into the future.

There is a strong contingent from Facebook and those sessions are just packed with everybody wanting to know how they scale their infrastructure.

The spider storage engine presentation tweaked by interested with the promise of vertical partitioning…I’ll have to try that when I come back.

My presentation “Better Database Debugging for Shorter Downtimes” went …

I’m looking forward to traveling to San Jose for this year’s MySQL Conference. If there’s anything that can trump the drama of conf two years ago, where we observed how Sun would handle its new property, and then the drama of last year, where we observed how Oracle would handle the pending acquisition, it’s going to be the drama around this one — the first MySQLConf since the Oracle/Sun merger has been finalized and approved.

I think there is some finality to the changing of the guard this time, since there aren’t really that many companies that could conceivably swallow up Oracle itself! (Maybe I shouldn’t say that — next thing you know they’ll spin it off heh.) But regardless, I am looking forward to getting to know Edward Screven and getting a sense from the keynote and other communications exactly what he’s planning to … DO … with …

Here’s what Pythian is cooking up for MySQL Conference this year.

Monday, April 128:30am: Get out of bed lazy bones and head to Ballroom B

… because you’re going to want to attend Sheeri K. Cabral‘s tutorial in two parts:

MySQL Configuration Options and Files: Basic MySQL Variables (Part 1)

Unlock all the information the MySQL server can give you! MySQL has many status variables that show how well your environment utilizes its resources. There are many system variables that can be set and changed to tune the server.
Read more.
Add to your personal schedule at …

Persistence Smoothie: Blending NoSQL and SQL – see user feedback and comments at http://joind.in/talk/view/1332.

Michael Bleigh from Intridea, high-end Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultants, build apps from start to finish, making it scalable. He’s written a lot of stuff, available at http://github.com/intridea. @mbleigh on twitter

NoSQL is a new way to think about persistence. Most NoSQL systems are not ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Generally, most NoSQL systems have:

• Denormalization
  
• Eventual Consistency
  
• Schema-Free
  
• Horizontal Scale
  

NoSQL tries to scale (more) simply, it is starting to go mainstream – NY …

Baron makes an excellent point in Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio — ratio is not the same as rate. Furthermore, rate is [often] the important thing to look at.

This is something that, at Pythian, we internalized a long time ago when thinking about MySQL tuning. In fact, mysqltuner 2.0 takes this into account, and the default configuration includes looking at both ratios and rates.

If I told you that your database had a ratio of temporary tables written to disk of 20%, you might think “aha, my database is slow because of a lot of file I/O caused by writing temporary tables to disk!”. However, that 20% ratio may actually mean a rate of 2 per hour — which is most likely …

I am writing because Sheeri sent me a note about a blog post written by Brian Aker, where Brian concludes, quite correctly, that (in Sheeri’s words not Brian’s)


MySQL is now just a branch (the official branch,
but a branch nonetheless, and a bunch of trademark (logo) and
copyright (docs) ownerships).


This is exactly true. No denying it. Why bother. It’s true. It’s also true for the vast majority of open-source projects, by the way.

I replied to Sheeri:


There's no denying that. The product direction will be set by whoever sets the best product management strategy backed by the most effective development effort. And there can be multiple winners.
-Paul


Well, this is the kind of quality output I can be relied on. It might not fit on twitter, but it’s …

Ronald Bradford’s recent warning to be sure to know your my.cnf sections reminded me of a similar issue that I ran into last summer, where putting the “group” option in both the [mysqld_safe] and [mysqld] directives resulted in a mostly silent problem.

I started noticing this in MySQL 5.1 and it affected both the official MySQL binary and the Percona binary. In trying to be conscientious, I had the following set:

[mysqld_safe]
user=mysql
group=mysql

[mysqld]
user=mysql
group=mysql


However, when the MySQL server started up, the error log showed

[Warning] option 'group_concat_max_len': unsigned value 0 adjusted to 4

This was obviously a problem, but …

According to the official lifecycle calendar at http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/lifecycle/#calendar, active support for MySQL 5.0 (including regular binary updates) will end on December 31st, 2009, which is about 3 weeks away.

Many folks are still using MySQL 5.0.45, as until October that was the package that came with RedHat. That was released in July 2007, over 2 years ago!

Upgrading to MySQL 5.1 is not difficult, though it requires more steps than just upgrading the packages.

There is a list with all the changes made that might affect the upgrade process at http://www.pythian.com/news/1414/new-in-mysql-51-sheeris-presentation/. This includes which variable names have been deprecated and changed, as well as how to upgrade stored …