Reminder: Due to busy summer conference schedules, we are going to be publishing the podcast every other week.

This week we talk about a monitoring plugin from PalominoDB that uses caching (like the cacti templates) and allow for arbitrary calculations of thresholds based on status and system variables, and items from the PROCESSLIST.

Nagios
pnp4nagios - from the site, "PNP is an addon for the Nagios Network Monitoring System. PNP provides easy to use, easy to configure RRDTools based performance charts feeded by the performance data output of the Nagios Plugins."

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Show notes:

Previous backup series podcast:
Backup glossary [Backup series #1]

Feedback:
In the backup glossary we asked if anyone knew how to get logical data out of physical InnoDB files. Mike Hamrick of Blue Gecko wrote in to say that Percona's InnoDB recovery tool helps to do just that. He writes:

"The 'page_parser' tool will read ibdata files or individual .ibd files and turn them into a series of 16k page files suitable for processing with a tool called 'constraints_parser' which spits out a number of tab separated lines of table data suitable for a LOAD DATA INFILE.

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Special thanks to Tim Callaghan for giving a fantastic presentation of VoltDB at Monday's Boston MySQL User Group meeting. Even though the title was "for SQL developers" there was a lot of content for DBAs as well (how backups are done, what the data and server-level architecture is, etc). It was an EXCELLENT presentation on how VoltDB works, and what applications it is and is not appropriate for. The video is almost 2 hours long; there's a LOT of excellent information in it.

The slides can be downloaded (PPT format) from:
http://technocation.org/files/doc/2010_09_VoltDB.ppt

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2009 Boston MySQL User Group Videos:

Dec 2009 - Time Zones in MySQL (Sheeri K. Cabral) - video - PDF presentation - Description

Nov 2009 - How InnoDB works: Exploring SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS (Sheeri K. Cabral) - video - PDF presentation - Description

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Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke on Drizzle, Gearman and Narada at the July 2009 Boston MySQL User Group. This is part 1 of the video, which is about an hour long and is about Drizzle.

"We will explain what the Drizzle project is, what we aim to accomplish, and an overview of where we are at."

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.oddments.org/notes/DrizzleGearmanBoston2009.pdf

The User Group calendar item for this event is http://www.meetup.com/mysqlbos/calendar/10607736/

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Video for the presentation at the 2009 MySQL Camp:
Chasing Bottlenecks
by Morgan Tocker

Description:
The best way to performance tune a system is to find out what your bottlenecks are, and attacking those first. In the first part of this session, I'll be looking at some of the issues faced with common database workloads. From there, I'll then be showing how you can get more information out of MySQL and your Operating System to find out about your workload. This session is designed for beginner to intermediate MySQL users.

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So I got my hands on an HP mini 1000 last week. Not bad for $250 at Best Buy, although it has needed some help, namely:

- External USB hard drive - I got the Mini 1000 that comes with a 16 Gb SSD, and want this to be my primary computer (I'm not a gamer, just web surfing and *occasional* video editing). I bought a 320Gb Buffalo Mini Station, for about $60 at Microcenter.

- 2 Gb RAM - already had a stick, free for me (otherwise $20), easy to pop in.

- USB to VGA adapter - HP has a nice proprietary VGA port, to which they didn't have an adapter for a long time (6 months or so)....now, the adapters exist, but they're out of stock. I bought a USB to VGA adaptor at Microcenter for about $70.

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John Albin Wilkins presents "Making Drupal Dance: Techniques for Non-obvious Theme Manipulations at the 2009 Design 4 Drupal conference in Boston. Unfortunately the beginning is cut off; however there is still over 40 minutes of video and plenty of good information in the video.

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Giuseppe Maxia spoke at the May 2009 Boston MySQL User Group about MySQL 5.4 and what it can do, the new performance features, etc.

Video for the presentation at the 2009 MySQL Conference:

Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS
Allan Packer (Sun Microsystems), Neelakanth Nadgir (Sun Microsystems)

The official conference page is at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/7121

Watch the video at

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