Two themes emerged at this week's MySQL conference: Mix your relational database with less formal solutions and move to the cloud. Naturally, the event included many other talks of a more immediate practical nature: data warehousing and business intelligence, performance (both in MySQL configuration and in the environment, which includes the changes caused by replacing disks with Flash), how to scale up, and new features in both MySQL and its children. But everyone seemed to agree that MySQL does not stand alone.

The world of databases have changed both in scale and in use. As Baron Schwartz said in his broad-vision keynote, databases are starting to need to handle petabytes. And he criticized open source database options as having poorer performance than proprietary ones. As for use, the databases struggle to meet two types of requirements: requests from business users for …

This week there are two big events for the MySQL community: The O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Oracle Collaborate run by the IOUG. At these events our Engineering VP, Tomas Ulin, announced the latest milestone releases for our main products. MySQL 5.6 and MySQL Cluster 7.1 as well as our new Windows Installer. There's lots of cool stuff in there but one feature really excited me: MySQL 5.6 contains a memcache interface for accessing InnoDB tables. This means you can access data stored in MySQL not only using SQL statements but also by using a well established and known noSQL protocol.

This works by having the memcache daemon running as plugin as part of the MySQL server. This daemon can then be configured in three ways: Either

• to do what memcached always …

Interesting question on human mistakes was posted on the DBA Managers Forum discussions today.

As human beings, we are sometimes make mistakes. How do you make sure that your employees won’t make mistakes and cause downtime/data loss/etc on your critical production systems?

I don’t think we can avoid this technically, probably working procedures is the solution.
I’d like to hear your thoughts.

I typed my thoughts and as I was finishing, I thought that it makes sense to post it on the blog too so here we go…

The keys to prevent mistakes are low stress levels, clear communications and established processes. Not a complete list but I think these are the top things to reduce the number of mistakes we make managing data infrastructure or for that matter working in any critical environment be it IT administration, …

Groklaw declares victory. Cloudera updates Hadoop distro. And more.

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

# Groklaw claimed victory, will stop publishing new articles on May 16.

# Cloudera released version 3 of its Hadoop distribution.

# VoltDB released version 1.3 of its open source distributed in-memory database.

# Black Duck grew sales by 51% in Q1.

# eXo and Convertigo …

Join the MySQL Team as we celebrate the health and growth of the MySQL community. Whether you are an attendee at O'Reilly MySQL Conference, a member of local MySQL user groups, a MySQL user in the Bay Area, or simply interested in MySQL technology, you're all invited to Oracle's MySQL Community Reception at 8:30pm on April 13, 2011.

You'll get the opportunity to mingle with your peers as well as meeting MySQL engineers to get the first-hand information on the latest product development. Plus, complimentary food and beverages will be served to add the flavor and color of the night. RSVP" today and get ready for an evening of relaxing and informative conversation!

The MySQL Council has not being idle. We have addressed the bugs database concerns, and we are continuing our dialog.
To do a better job, we would like to hear more from the community. Unlike other established user groups, MySQL does not have a world wide organization for its users. The council exists on a voluntary basis, and we are seeking support from the rest of you. Please let your voice heard. There are three main channels for this:

• A MySQL Council survey
• A set of questions that will be answered during the keynote at the MySQL Conference
• Talk to a council member

SurveyThe …

Spring is making its way into everything, and the databases are blooming as the DBAs who manage them are savoring the fragrance of the changing weather and fresh new ideas in the world of blogging. In order to appreciate the springing blogging innovations, this week’s Log Buffer, Log Buffer #215 picks some of the flowers just for you.

Oracle:

Hemant, the Oracle ACE from Singapore writes superbly about OuterJoin with Filter Predicate as usual with a reproducible case.

When …

Cannot give you all details yet and it's too early to say what the max performance we'll finally obtain, but currently we out-passed 100.000.000 (!) Read+Write transactions/sec on the latest MySQL 5.5 simply integrated on the Exadata X2-8 (full rack) instead of Oracle database!!! :-))

The result is so incredible.. - but we spent several days now to validate that workload is perfectly matching customer's requirement and really reproducing their production environment. The problem came from the performance issue they observed month to month and came in our Benchmark Center to test a new HW platform (and we're in competition here with HP and IBM, but they have already finished their testing and without a positive result (no comments.. ;-))).. Finally, no one of any tested platforms was able to keep the load expected for the end of the year.. And of course we think about Exadata :-)) but the problem that the customer's application is …

Longtime MySQL-er Lenz Grimmer

Lenz Grimmer

is leaving the MySQL side of the business to work in the Linux and Virtualization side of the Oracle business. He came from SuSE Linux and has retained interest in that area all the many years he helped make MySQL into the ubiquitous tool that it is. Lenz’s list of accomplishments is too long to note here and working with him on the MySQL Community Team has been a tremendous pleasure. He is not dropping off the face of the earth and will presenting at Collaborate 11 .

Please join me in wishing all the best for Lenz!

…

2011-06-26 update:

I am not sure if there are any changes in the latest make and gcc packages. Anyway, I noticed when run make, I encountered the message below:

make: g: Command not found
make: [qgen] Error 127 (ignored)

To fix this, find where gcc is at, then created a symbolic link g that points to gcc. All is well afterwards:
[root@ip-10-245-209-196 dbgen]# which gcc
/usr/bin/gcc
[root@ip-10-245-209-196 dbgen]# cd /usr/bin/
[root@ip-10-245-209-196 bin]# ln -s gcc g

End update
Recently I found myself doing some data loading benchmark testing with table partition. Data loading and storing for BI/DW/DSS stuff almost always involves data partitioning. SQL Server partition has a nice feature called partition switch, where you can swap data in and out of a partitioned table. …