The Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo 2012 is over. Together with the SkySQL solutions day, it has kept me occupied for 4 full days, from early morning to late at night.

I have to say that I am pleased. The quality of the organization was very high, with a very good lineup of speakers and an excellent technical support.

As usual, I have learned a lot during this week, either directly, by attending talks, or indirectly, by meeting people who told me what was juicy at the talks that I had missed. And I have met new interesting people, and caught up with the people that I know already.

This conference was particularly intense also because I got myself involved in 5 talks, which was probably more than I should have. How did I end up with such a task? It's a long story. …

Cloud databases have a memory problem.   Continuent has been doing a lot of Amazon deployments lately, and it is becoming apparent that memory utilization in those environments is more than just an inconvenience.  In this article I would like to discuss the memory problem that we see in customer implementations and some new features of Tungsten Enterprise that help alleviate it for MySQL.

The Cloud Memory Problem and Database Arrays

As I discussed in a recent article about prefetch, the amount of RAM allocated to the InnoDB buffer pool is one of the principle determinants of MySQL performance.  The speed difference between using a page in the buffer pool …

MySQL community conferences are alive and well in 2012.   Percona has taken the initiative to host the yearly MySQL event at the Santa Clara Hyatt; it's now called Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo.  It runs from 10 through 12 April.  But don't plan on going home Thursday night.  On Friday 13 April you can also attend the SkySQL and MariaDB MySQL Solutions Day in the same location.  And wait, that's not all!  Drizzle Day is also on 13 April and also at the Hyatt, so you can catch up on what the Drizzle folks have been up to for the last 12 months.

Now for some specifics on the conferences where Continuent will be appearing. …

When I joined Continuent, at the end of 2010, I was fascinated by the technology of its core products. Readers of this blog know that I have had my hands full with Tungsten Replicator, but what really turned me on was the flagship management suite, Tungsten Enterprise. After hammering at it for several months, and always marveling at the beauty of its technology, let me give a tour of the suite, so that you'll understand what's so exciting about it. First off, Tungsten Enterprise is not simply a replication tool. It is based on replication, but it is mostly a data management suite. Its aim is to reduce complexity for the user and to show a database cluster to the user as if it were a single server, always on, no matter what happens. The most amazing things that you will see in Tungsten Enterprise are

• Automatic failover
• Cluster console, and …

Tungsten Replicator 2.0.5 was released this week-end. The release notes have quite a long list of bug fixes. Thanks to all the ones who have submitted bug reports, and fixes! There are a couple of new features as well. The replicator includes now a slave prefetch service. Unlike parallel replication, this feature works fine with a single database, and provides performance improvements that in many cases solve the slave lagging problems. This was a bitch of a feature to get right. Many have tried it, many have experienced various degrees of success, and several failures. We started with the bold assertiveness of the brave after an exciting talk at Percona Live in October, and I was …

Slave prefetch is an increasingly popular technique for speeding up native MySQL replication, with several tools already published to enable it, such as mk-slave-prefetch and Replication Booster.  Tungsten Replicator is now joining the fray.   This article explains how our implementation works, how to install and tune it, and how well it performs compared to unaided MySQL native replication as well as Tungsten parallel replication.

Understanding Slave Prefetch

Slow reads from storage are the principle reason for lagging MySQL replication.   This seems paradoxical since at first glance the lag is caused by delayed updates.  The explanation is due to the way DBMS engines …

The MySQL DevRoom at FOSDEM is ready. The schedule has been voted. Thanks to all who have participated. Now, let's make sure that the event is successful. The schedule is juicy, and not only because I have three talks in it!

MySQL::Sandbox 3.0.24 was released yesterday, with many new features. More than vanilla MySQLIf you have missed my previous announcement, here's the gist of it. MySQL Sandbox can now deal with tarballs from either Percona Server or MariaDB. The main difference after this change is that you can now create a directory called <PREFIX>5.5.16 and make_sandbox will recognize it as well as the plain 5.5.16.

$ make_sandbox --export_binaries --add_prefix=ps \
   Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz  \
   -- --sandbox_directory=msb_ps5_5_11
unpacking Percona-Server-5.5.11-rel20.2-114.Darwin.i386.tar.gz
[…]
installing with the following …

When an open source project becomes popular, bug reports start flocking in. This is both good and bad news for the project developers. The good news is that someone is using the product, and they are finding ways of breaking it that we didn't think of. The bad news is that most of the times the reporters assume that the developers have super human powers, and that they will find what's wrong by the simple mentioning that a given feature is not working as expected. Unfortunately, it doesn't work that way. An effective bug report should have enough information that the ones in charge will be able to reproduce it and examine in lab conditions to find the problem. When dealing with databases and database tools, there are several cases, from simple to complex. Let's cover them in order. Installation issuesThis is often a straightforward case of lack of functionality. When a tool does not install what it is supposed to, it is a show stopper, and a solution …