One of the great things about Percona Monitoring and Management (PMM) is its flexibility. An example of that is how one can go beyond the exporters to collect data. One approach to achieve that is using textfile collectors, as explained in  Extended Metrics for Percona Monitoring and Management without modifying the Code. Another method, which is the subject matter of this post, is to use custom queries.

While working on a customer’s contention issue I wanted to check the behaviour of InnoDB Mutexes over time. Naturally, I went straight to PMM and didn’t find a graph suitable for my needs. No graph, no problem! Luckily anyone can enhance PMM. So here’s how I made the …

This year at our Open Source Database Conference we’re celebrating open source database technologies that don’t fit into the MySQL®, MongoDB®, MariaDB®, or PostgreSQL realms by featuring them in their very own track. The glamorously-named Other Open Source Databases track! As unbiased champions of open source database solutions, we embrace all flavors of open source database, and pride ourselves at presenting one of the biggest events dedicated to any and all OSDBs.

Another innovation this year is the introduction of a Java programming for open source databases track. Maybe that would be of interest?

The conference takes place at the end of May in Austin, a fantastic place to visit, and state capital of Texas.

As mentioned in …

From time to time we detect query patterns that are not well fitted to the BTree+ structures provided by InnoDB. One such situation is when you need to traverse a hierarchy (tree) or graph structure with many nodes. Specialist databases exist for this such as Neo4J. However there exists a simple solution in the form of  OQGraph which is distributed with MariaDB and is documented here.

The OQGRAPH engine is based on an original idea by Open Query founder Arjen Lentz, and was developed in-house with Antony Curtis at Open Query.

A …

Persistence Smoothie: Blending NoSQL and SQL – see user feedback and comments at http://joind.in/talk/view/1332.

Michael Bleigh from Intridea, high-end Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultants, build apps from start to finish, making it scalable. He’s written a lot of stuff, available at http://github.com/intridea. @mbleigh on twitter

NoSQL is a new way to think about persistence. Most NoSQL systems are not ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Generally, most NoSQL systems have:

• Denormalization
  
• Eventual Consistency
  
• Schema-Free
  
• Horizontal Scale
  

NoSQL tries to scale (more) simply, it is starting to go mainstream – NY …