The latest from the MySQL community

A few weeks ago I got a copy of "High Performance MySQL" (from now on referred to as HPM) and just the other day they also send me "Refactoring SQL Applications" (aka "RSA"). Actually I had a copy of HPM at the office already, but its nice to have my own, seeing that its already severely beating up from having to live in my backup. Good to have a neat copy for the company book shelve. I have gotten to chapter 4. So far there has not been all that much earth shattering, but considering the hours I spend reading posts on planetmysql, I guess its not a huge surprise. But at the same time there is also nothing I feel is missing, so in the sense this book fulfills my expectations 100%: its a well written summary of advanced techniques that people have found in the trenches. And yes of course I did learn a few things still.

For example I was not entirely up to snuff with MyISAM's index prefix compression and recent advances in index merging. In …

Good news Kettle fans!

Our community is bound to become a bit larger as a whole group of students (38) at the Katholieke Hogeschool Mechelen (Batchelor level) will receive a one day workshop with Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).  This workshop will take place in early November, most likely the 4th.

It’s interesting to see that during that day we’ll be able to go through most of the work involved in reading and staging the data, data cleansing and a few slowly changing dimensions with a fact table.  On top of that we’ll explain how to use Pentaho Data Integration in that setting.  When time permits we’ll show how to set up a metadata model on top of that data to create reports on it.  On top of that the students will get an idea about what exactly open source is all about.

Obviously, the …

krow asked for two more plugin types for Drizzle: Scheduler (which allocates and controls threads, and assigns them to sessions), and (drumroll), Parser.

People have been asking for plugin parsing for MySQL for years.

Drizzle is about to get it.

:)

There is patch from Google to improve SMP performance , but for some workloads it showed for us reverse scalability.
E.g. update_key benchmark from sysbench. There are also results with Yasufumi's rw_locks (http://bugs.mysql.com/bug.php?id=26442)

Today's "commercial quality disks" are amazing but they follow the same limitations as yesterday's disks. mySQL scales very well, but disks do not. So if you're IO bound when will your expectation of speed fail?

Test setup:

DELL 2950 PERC-6 HWRaid BBC 6 DISK 15K RPM 3.5" RAID-10 256K stripe across two channels-using WRITE THROUGH CACHE on mkfs.ext3 -T largefile4 Linux Filesystem.


The theory is that the outer part of the spindles is the fastest, and the inner portion is slower - since the outer is where the data starts (thanks for the info Benjamin Schweizer). Thus one can conclude that the more disk space your application(s) use the slower the throughput, since the heads have to move more. Brad F. my co-worker did a benchmark to prove this. Our goal …

I just thought I would share some of my discoveries. You may already have known this but I didn't.
In recent releases both the PBMS and PBXT engines have been using a configuration flag "--with-mysql" to tell the build where to find the MySQL tree. We then looked inside the 'config.status' file generated when MySQL was configured to get the build options, most importantly the compiler options used. We had been doing this using 'grep' and 'sed'. The problem we soon discovered was that the format of the 'config.status' file changes quit frequently with different versions of 'autoconf'. 
With the help of the good people on the 'autoconf' forum I discovered that you can ask 'config.status' to give you the value of a single substitution. So to get the value for CFLAGS you enter: echo '@CFLAGS@' | config.status --file- and it will print out a line with the CFLAGS.
I understand that this feature which has always existed is now being …

I am starting a trip of two days to Munich to attend tomorrow, October 21st 2008, the MySQL™ Central EU Customer Conference.

And.. sure! I am still wondering why I am coming stated that I don’t understand German :-/
I thought that the Conference was in English or at least part of it but.. eh eh eh.. it seems it isn’t.

Two things deceived me. The name “Central Europe” and the possibility to come with some friends which are used to go in Germany in this period to drink liters of beer.

Possibility no. two vanished cause one of them went away to U.S. for a short period @ Standford University and the others are very busy during this week.

Moral:

• devote yourself to Euroregions and EU Political Integration as much as you can, :-0 …

Stop the press! My boss, Stefan Hinz, has just started blogging, with his first post here: Using NetBeans with MySQL.

So who is he? Well, Stefan is the guy that keeps the rest of us in the docs team in check and makes sure we do what we’re asked, when we’re are asked and that all of the machinery, legalities and management tasks happen in the background. Without him we really couldn’t function as effectively as we do.

It’s wonderful to see some other Docs team members getting in on the act (to be fair to the rest of the team, Jon is also a blogger). We are all writers, you would think the blogging would come as a natural extension.

Behind the tease is the simple fact that the improved system for MySQL University I was talking about is getting a trial run this week. …

The next MySQL University session will take place this Thursday, 23rd October. David Van Couvering will show how to use NetBeans with MySQL.

Note that this session will start at 9:00 Pacific Time (18:00 CET, 17:00 BST).

For this session, we'll use a new presentation system that we hope will make things much easier for both presenters and attendees: Dimdim (www.dimdim.com). If it works out as expected, Dimdim will replace our current presentation system which required attendees to open a browser, connect to an IRC channel on Freenode, and open some fancy URL with a voice streaming application. With Dimdim, all that needs to be done is point your browser to a URL, and that's it. …