I’ve been working with the folks working on OpenSolaris for a few months now providing advice and input on getting MySQL and the connectors (C/ODBC and C/J) installed as a standard component. Having got the basics in, the team are now looking at adding both 32-bit and 64-bit packages.

The question raised at the end of last week was whether OpenSolaris should enable 64-bit builds by default in 64-bit installations, and whether there was a noticeable performance difference that would make this worthwhile.

I did some initial tests on Friday which showed that there was a small increase (10-15%) of the packaged 64-bit installations over 32-bit under x86 using snv_81. Tests were executed using the included sql-bench tool, and this was a single execution run of each package for 5.0.56. Transactions are missing because I hadn’t enabled transactions in the tests.

I've known about the INFORMATION_SCHEMA views (or system tables) in SQL Server for a while, but I just leared recently that they are actually part of the SQL-92 standard and supported on other database platforms.

The INFORMATION_SCHEMA views provide meta data information about the tables, columns, and other parts of your database. Because the structure of these tables are standardized you can write SQL statements that work on various database platforms.

For example suppose you want to return a resultset with a list of all columns in a table called employees

SELECT table_name, column_name, is_nullable, data_type, character_maximum_length
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.Columns
WHERE table_name = 'employees'

Quite a handy feature, but it's hard to find what versions the of various database platforms started supporting this feature, here's a quick list:

• Microsoft …

The problem

Hands up those that don’t monitor their production MySQL web server. I’m a little surprised by this, but I’ve visited several clients that have absolutely no monitoring other then “the customers will tell us when something is wrong”. The lack of system monitoring is one of the topics in my book “101 ways to screw up a successful startup”.

Why is monitoring important? First it can tell you when something is wrong, most monitoring systems introduce some level of constraints that trigger notifications via email, SMS or red flashing screens. Second, and I consider more important, is it allows you to analyze change and compare results over time. Let’s say you added more memory to your server, and then remembered to also increase the MySQL buffers appropriately. How much improvement did it make? Rather then “it seems faster”, you can have hard and fast numbers to back it up.

The …

Some tips around MySQL and SMF on OpenSolaris.

You can enable the MySQL server by starting it through svcadm

% svcadm enable mysql

Although for current builds since the integration on build 79, you need to do this manual stuff first:

% su -
% cd /var
% mkdir mysql
% /usr/sbin/groupadd mysql
% /usr/sbin/useradd -g mysql -d /var/mysql mysql
% chown mysql:mysql mysql

So if your MySQL service is going into maintenance:

% svcs | grep mysql
maintenance    11:03:45 svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50

You could find out more what happened by doing:

% svcs -x
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50 (MySQL RDBMS)
 State: maintenance since February 15, 2008  2:25:49 PM CET
Reason: Restarting too quickly.
   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-L5
   See: MySQL 5.0.45(1)
   See: http://dev.mysql.com/docs
   See: /var/svc/log/application-database-mysql:version_50.log
Impact: This service is …

Some tips around MySQL and SMF on OpenSolaris.

You can enable the MySQL server by starting it through svcadm

% svcadm enable mysql

Although for current builds since the integration on build 79, you need to do this manual stuff first:

% su -
% cd /var
% mkdir mysql
% /usr/sbin/groupadd mysql
% /usr/sbin/useradd -g mysql -d /var/mysql mysql
% chown mysql:mysql mysql

So if your MySQL service is going into maintenance:

% svcs | grep mysql
maintenance    11:03:45 svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50

You could find out more what happened by doing:

% svcs -x
svc:/application/database/mysql:version_50 (MySQL RDBMS)
 State: maintenance since February 15, 2008  2:25:49 PM CET
Reason: Restarting too quickly.
   See: http://sun.com/msg/SMF-8000-L5
   See: MySQL 5.0.45(1)
   See: http://dev.mysql.com/docs
   See: /var/svc/log/application-database-mysql:version_50.log
Impact: This service is …

With the acquisition of MySQL I expect that many people might end up comparing MySQL and PostgreSQL using sysbench. It is like a micro-benchmark utility which includes an oltp mode which is used quite a bit to show MySQL performance. It can actually also be used with PostgreSQL. So this post is about how to configure sysbench to work with PostgreSQL. (Primarily a note for myself since I had to do hunt around to get it configured for PostgreSQL).

 
First download the latest version of sysbench. I had downloaded the version sysbench-0.4.8. After gunzip/untar I had to to figure out few steps to get the right configure script for it.

I am going to use the Sun Studio Compiler (since PostgreSQL in my case is also built with Sun Studio Compiler). So I will need the compiler cc in my …

mysqlcompiler

We recently integrated MySQL 5.0.45 version with Open Solaris. MySQL 5.0.45 is available in SXDE 01/08. Sun Studio was used to compile MySQL on both Solaris SPARC and Solaris AMD64 platform.

This blog entry describes the changes that were made to improve MySQL performance using Sun Studio:

• Enable function inlining when Sun Studio is used.
  • The header file univ.i has the following code:
    
    • #if !defined(GNUC) && !defined(WIN)
    • #undef UNIV_MUST_NOT_INLINE /* Remove compiler warning */
    • #define UNIV_MUST_NOT_INLINE
    • #endif
  •  Modifying it to add Sun Studio compiler as under:
    • #if !defined(GNUC) …

MySQL 5.0.45 is integrated with Open Solaris build 79. It is available in Solaris Express Developer Edition (SXDE) 01/08. MySQL 5.0.45 is integrated with Solaris Service Management Facility (SMF).

This blog entry describes the steps that were taken to integrate MySQL with SMF.

First a quick recap of what is SMF:

SMF is the core component of the predictive self-healing technology available in Solaris 10, which provides automatic recovery from software and hardware failures as well as adminstrative errors.
Some of the advantages of using SMF are as under:

• Failed services are automatically restarted in dependency order, whether they failed as the result of administrator error, software bug, or were affected by an uncorrectable hardware error.

• More information is available about misconfigured or misbehaving …

mysqlcompiler

We recently integrated MySQL 5.0.45 version with Open Solaris. MySQL 5.0.45 is available in SXDE 01/08. Sun Studio was used to compile MySQL on both Solaris SPARC and Solaris AMD64 platform.

This blog entry describes the changes that were made to improve MySQL performance using Sun Studio:

• Enable function inlining when Sun Studio is used.
  • The header file univ.i has the following code:
    
    • #if !defined(GNUC) && !defined(WIN)
    • #undef UNIV_MUST_NOT_INLINE /\* Remove compiler warning \*/
    • #define UNIV_MUST_NOT_INLINE
    • #endif
  •  Modifying it to add Sun Studio compiler as under:
    • #if !defined(GNUC) …

mysqlcompiler

We recently integrated MySQL 5.0.45 version with Open Solaris. MySQL 5.0.45 is available in SXDE 01/08. Sun Studio was used to compile MySQL on both Solaris SPARC and Solaris AMD64 platform.

This blog entry describes the changes that were made to improve MySQL performance using Sun Studio:

• Enable function inlining when Sun Studio is used.
  • The header file univ.i has the following code:
    
    • #if !defined(GNUC) && !defined(WIN)
    • #undef UNIV_MUST_NOT_INLINE /\* Remove compiler warning \*/
    • #define UNIV_MUST_NOT_INLINE
    • #endif
  •  Modifying it to add Sun Studio compiler as under:
    • #if !defined(GNUC) …