You can do all sorts of magic with LVM, like backing up MySQL using file system snapshots, but in order to do so you need to set it first. When installing a new computer with Suse Linux I found that this was harder than expected, unless you know what to do. Needless to say, I didn't, but some friends gave me a hand on IRC, and now I do. :-)

So I wrote a little article about this which you can find here, in an effort to save others some time. The article is about setting up LVM with Suse Yast, but you can probably use it for other flavors of Linux, too.

Sysbench is a open source product that enables you to perform various system benchmarks including databases. Drizzles performs regression testing of every trunk revision with a branched version of sysbench within Drizzle Automation.

A pending branch https://code.launchpad.net/~elambert/sysbench/trunk_drizzle_merge by Eric Lambert now enables side by side testing with MySQL and Drizzle. On a system running MySQL and Drizzle I was able install this sysbench branch with the following commands.

cd bzr
bzr branch lp:~elambert/sysbench/trunk_drizzle_merge
cd trunk_drizzle_merge/
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Running the default lua tests supplied required me to ensure …

If your compiling a product that includes a dependency of MySQL, you can easily get the error

configure: error: mysql_config executable not found

I generally don’t see this problem, because I use MySQL binary tar files, however if you use MySQL packages, such as Ubuntu, you can easily miss the required dependency.

My currently installed MySQL packages on this Ubuntu machine are:

$ sudo dpkg -l | grep mysql
ii  libdbd-mysql                               0.8.2-1-4.1                               MySQL database server driver for libdbi
ii  libdbd-mysql-perl                          4.008-1                                   A Perl5 database interface to the MySQL data
ii  libmysqlclient15off                        5.1.30really5.0.75-0ubuntu10.2            MySQL database client library
ii  libmysqlclient16                           5.1.31-1ubuntu2                           MySQL database client library
ii  libqt4-sql-mysql …

It is important to know and understand that while indexing columns in MySQL will generally improve performance, using the appropriate type of index can make a greater impact on performance.

There are four general index types to consider when creating an appropriate index to optimize SQL queries.

• Column Index
• Concatenated Index
• Covering Index
• Partial Index

For the purpose of this discussion I am excluding other specialized index types such as fulltext, spatial and hash in memory engine.

Example Table

For the following examples, I will use this test table structure.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS t1;
CREATE TABLE t1(
  id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
  user_name VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL,
  first_name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
  last_name VARCHAR(30) NOT NULL,
  external_id INT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  country_id SMALLINT UNSIGNED NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY(id)
) …

Microsoft contributes to Linux. Acquia raises $8m. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

Microsoft contributes to Linux
Microsoft announced that it is to contribute device driver code to the Linux kernel under the GPLv2. Prompting us to publish a CAOS Theory Q&A. Answering one questioning we failed to ask, ZDnet reported that Microsoft’s Linux contributions should find their way into the 2.6.32 release.

Acquia raises $8m
Mass High Tech …

I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

I started my company about a year ago, but I’ve been doing consulting for a long time. In fact, my first job in the IT industry was working for a consulting firm. Before that, starting as far back as grade school, I was involved in a lot of volunteer civic and community service activities. I admire companies who get involved in their communities, or even outside of their communities, wherever help is needed.

As part of my business plan, I’ve put in place a policy of accepting one pro-bono consulting project per year. So far, I haven’t gotten any requests for free consulting work, so here’s my public shout out to let you know what types of services are available:

1. Speaking or Training. My specialties are things like advanced Linux administration and SQL, but I’m perfectly capable of delivering content for people who just need to know how the internet works, or want to …

Microsoft has announced that it is to contribute code to the Linux kernel development effort under the GNU General Public License (GPL) v2. What on earth does it all mean? Here’s our take on the situation. With thanks to Jay Lyman for his contribution to the following:

Q. This is a joke, right?

A. Not at all, although if any announcement is better suited to the image above, we can’t think of one. Microsoft has announced that it is going to contribute code to Linux under the GPLv2.

Q. What code is Microsoft contributing?

A. Microsoft is offering 20,000 lines of its own device drivers to the Linux kernel that will enable Linux to run as a guest …

The Call for Papers for the OpenSQL Camp 2009 (European Edition) has ended yesterday — we received 27 excellent session proposals from various Open Source Database projects. I would like to say a big "Thank You" to everyone who submitted a talk! In the beginning I was a bit concerned that the conference would become too MySQL-centric, but this fortunately changed in the last few days.

Sadly we now have more than double the amount of sessions than we can actually host, which means that we will have to review and vote on the sessions to distill the final program. We've formed a small committee that will perform this task (currently consisting of …

Absolutely nothing?

5.4.0 was released with a change in the MySQL Binary distributions, delivering only 1 64bit Linux platform and two Sun Solaris platforms. This was officially announced on April 21 2009 however the 5.4.0 Release Notes state 05 April 2009. So it’s not a big deal, but consistency would be nice.

I’ve seen in a few posts 5.4.1, so I decided to try it out. Spending the time to read what’s changed in 2 months with the 5.4.1 Release Notes before I go downloading and installing, you read.

This release does not differ from 5.4.0 …