The latest from the MySQL community

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

See part 1 for the introduction and talking about power and hardware. This part will go over the 2nd “P”, partitioning. Learning about Oracle’s partitioning has gotten me more interested in how MySQL’s partitioning works, and I do hope that MySQL partitioning will develop to the level that Oracle partitioning does, because Oracle’s partitioning looks very nice (then again, that’s why it costs so much I guess).

Partition – …

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. My impression, which was confirmed by folks in the Oracle world, is that she knows her way around the Oracle optimizer.

These are my notes from the session, which include comparisons of how Oracle works (which Maria gave) and how MySQL works (which I researched to figure out the difference, which is why this blog post took a month after the conference to write). Note that I am not an expert on data warehousing in either Oracle or MySQL, so these are more concepts to think about than hard-and-fast advice. In some places, I still have questions, and I am happy to have folks comment and contribute what they know.

One interesting point brought up:
Maria quoted someone (she said the name but I did not grab it) from …

At Kscope this year, I attended a half day in-depth session entitled Data Warehousing Performance Best Practices, given by Maria Colgan of Oracle. In that session, there was a section on how to determine I/O throughput for a system, because in data warehousing I/O per second (iops) is less important than I/O throughput (how much actual data goes through, not just how many reads/writes).

The section contained an Oracle-specific in-database tool, and a standalone tool that can be used on many operating systems, regardless of whether or not a database exists:

If Oracle is installed, run DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO:

SET SERVEROUTPUT ON
DECLARE
lat INTEGER;
iops INTEGER;
mbps INTEGER;
BEGIN
-- DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO(<DISKS>, <MAX_LATENCY>,iops,mbps,lat);
DBMS_RESOURCE_MANAGER.CALIBRATE_IO (2, 10, iops, mbps, lat); …

Welcome to Log Buffer, the weekly roundup of DBA industry happenings.

Read on for the latest updates in Log Buffer #193. Don’t forget, we’re always looking for volunteer editors to publish and host an issue of Log Buffer. If you’d like this to be you, contact the Log Buffer coordinator.

ODTUG/Kaleidoscope 2010 roundup:

Sheeri …

Ronald Bradford and I produced a successful MySQL track at Kaleidoscope (hereinafter referred to as Kscope). With a speaker list of Philip Antoniades, Josh Sled and Craig Sylvester of Oracle, Laine Campbell of PalominoDB, Patrick Galbraith of Northscale, Sarah Novotny of Blue Gecko, Padrig O’Sullivan of Akiba, Dossy Shiobara of Panoptic.com and Matt Yonkovic of Percona, we knew the …

Updated: 29-Jun-2010, 30-Jun-2010.

For me, ODTUG Kaleidoscope 2010 started on Friday with the ACE Directors briefing. Best practices topic was touched there slightly and I twitted about it. I decided that the feedback deserves a blog post so I’m simply quoting the conversation here. If you have anything to add, you know where to find the comment box.

alexgorbachev:
best practices should be forbidden or rather renamed to blue-prints #ACED …

Today at Kaleidoscope I will be doing a 90-minute session comparing MySQL’s SQL syntax to the ANSI/ISO SQL:2003 standard, entitled What Do You Mean, “SQL Syntax Error”?

You can download the PDF slides now.

For those that may be following along the presentation later today (4 pm Eastern time), here are some links that I may throw out during the session:

• SQL 2003 standard – actually it is “Information taken from the Final Committee Draft (FCD) of ISO/IEC 9075-2:2003″ but it’s extremely close to the actual standard. The actual standard is a document that costs a non-trivial amount of money to get, and cannot be republished.
  
• …

It is time… Time for one more very special conference for me. Why special?

1. I have never been to ODTUG Kaleidoscope before. I always like new conferences — new experience.
2. Unlike Sheeri, I do not speak! This is one of those rare conferences where I come to slack off, meet old friends and make new ones, go to lots of sessions and actually learn stuff.
3. Coming from the DBA background, it’s not often that I come to development oriented conferences and I think I should do more of that.
4. It’s in Washington, DC. I lived there for some time and have number of good friends there. I’m really excited to see them again!

So what am I going to do there? I just arrived and right in time for the Oracle ACE Directors’ briefing that will run for the whole days of …

By now you know that there is a MySQL Track during next week’s ODTUG Kaleidoscope in Washington, DC. Ronald Bradford and I organized the schedule at the last minute (Ronald did a lot of the work!). It was difficult to fill a schedule with 19 sessions that are either 1 hour or 1.5 hours long, and to do it I ended up with three presentations.

At each presentation I will be giving away a copy of The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, so be sure to show up! All MySQL track sessions are in Maryland C, and all times are Eastern.

On Monday, June 28th from 4 pm – 5:30 pm I will be presenting …

Several things to think about in the next 10 days leading up to Kaleidoscope.

1. The Marriott Wardman Park is out of rooms. If you’re attending and haven’t reserved a room yet, you may get lucky with a cancellation, but there are several hotels on the Metro line that should have openings. The conference and location is very popular, and while I wish we could accommodate everyone, it’s not going to be possible. Here’s a good suggestion: when next year’s conference dates and location are announced, register and reserve your room as soon as possible (hint – these announcements will be made at our general session on Monday, June 28 starting at 8:30 AM).

2. The Java Bus is coming! Monday afternoon/evening, June 28, the Java “Code to …