The latest from the MySQL community

April 25th, 2008 - by Ronald Bradford

Welcome to the 94th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of the database blogsphere. Adding to the list of usual database suspects, I have some more alternative considerations for our readers this week.

We start with Conferences

Still some discussion from last weeks’ 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo.

Baron “xarpb” Schwartz calls it correct in Like it or not, it is the MySQL Conference and Expo. Matt Assay of c|net gives us some of his opinions in three posts …

A buddy of mine just upgraded to an iPhone so he lent me his old iPod Touch to try out. I used it at the MySQL Conference along with my Palm Centro chick-phone to see if I could get away without dragging my laptop everywhere. And if I was successful, then I'd upgrade to an iPhone myself. I must admit, I was more impressed with hands-on use of the iPod Touch than I expected. It's small enough and light enough that you barely notice it in a jacket or pants pocket. And despite the small screen, the browsing experience via... READ MORE

Ahh seems like a few people do take the time to read my blog:) Peter Z Commented here on my common disk performance mistakes post. He makes some great arguments, and you may want to give it a read. While he does not agree with everything I say it is interesting to see his views. Remember different folks have different experiences and a lot of times there are multiple roads on the path the performance nirvana.

Let me start off saying I wholly admit that saying “everything” is a disk issue is a dramatic exaggeration. And i did not specifically say disk, I said “The problem is always an IO problem”, more on that later. I have run into my far share of issues outside of this sphere ( network, context switching, cpu ), but I still find disk performance to be by far the most common issue effecting systems I deal with. In my …

Last week at the MySQL conference and expo in Santa Clara, I was able to grab some time with Baron Schwartz,  the man behind  innotop and Maatkit (formerly known as Prince MySQL Toolkit).  Baron was also one of the three winners of the Community Code Contributor of the year award.

My interview with Baron (11:39)  Listen (Mp3)   …

I really thought I was done writing about MySQL for a while, but I attended a Sun/MySQL event in London today and have some shocking news to impart. It seems we’ve got MySQL all wrong.

At the event, MySQL co-founder David Axmark talked through some of the history of the MySQL project and company, confirming what has previously been reported about the origins of the database’s name.

It was, he confirmed, named after co-founder Monty Widenius’s daughter, My. …

I did an interview with Barton George from Sun while I was at the conference last week. Barton has now posted the interview. If you’re quick, you can listen to it before I do.

Topics: everything and anything, including Maatkit and PostgreSQL.

Baron Schwartz, Barton George, maatkit, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, Podcast, …

Here is a quick comparison of the new InnoDB plugin performance between different compression, row formats that is introduced recently.

The table is a pretty simple one:

CREATE TABLE `sbtest` (
  `id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
  `k` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
  `c` char(120) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  `pad` char(60) NOT NULL DEFAULT '',
  PRIMARY KEY (`id`),
  KEY `k` (`k`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB ROW_FORMAT=COMPRESSED KEY_BLOCK_SIZE=8;

The table is populated with 10M rows with average row length being 224 bytes. The tests are performed for Compact, Dynamic and Compressed (8K and 4K)  row formats using MySQL-5.1.24 with InnoDB plugin-1.0.0-5.1 on Dell PE2950  1x Xeon quad core …

KAs during last year's MySQL Conference, we invited Julian Cash to take pictures of some attendees. I managed to get my picture taken in last second - the hotel staff was already complaining that they need to redecorate the room for the next event...

The results of this foto session are now on Julian's photo stream on Flickr - I am really impressed by the results! This puts a whole new meaning to the term "MySQL Luminaries"

Kaj's pictures are pretty funny, too - is this an interpretation of "MySQL Community" vs. "MySQL Enterprise"?

…

Earlier, I noted that Julian Cash was to do some “light painting” at the MySQL Users Conference. And boy, did he do it!

He had a normal conference room, the Bayshore at the MySQL Conference, made a bit darker. Not pitch dark, but let’s say too dark to read. Then, he had us sit down on a chair in front of a neutral background, and took the pics with his camera mounted on a tripod. A picture took perhaps 30 to 60 seconds. After opening the shutter, the object was supposed to sit still. Julian then lit up our faces, in my case with blue and red light sources (”mini-torches”) which he moved top-down. Then, he sprinkled in some additional stray light in various colours.

I had asked for a picture …

I read very nice post by Matt today and it has many good insights though I can't say I agree on all points.
First there is a lot of people out where which put it as disk is everything. Remember Paul Tuckfield saying "You should ask how many disks they have instead of how many systems they have" on MySQL UC2008 Scalability Panel ? Indeed disks MAY be the most important part in your system performance or it may not be. Different people get to deal with different systems and so acquire different feeling about percentage of cases when disk would be the problem.

However it is not always the case. There are whole classes of systems where Disk performance is not that important - consider for example systems where most of the database fits in memory. These days we can get 64G of memory for pretty commodity prices and this allows you to get a lot of data in. Many …