The MySQL developer tools team announces the availability of version 5.2.41 of the MySQL Workbench GUI tool. This version has significant improvements in several parts of the tool and also includes the new Migration Wizard plugin.

The new Migration Wizard presents an easy to use GUI for migrating databases from third party products to MySQL. In this initial release, support for Microsoft SQL Server is included, in addition to other products that support ODBC, such as PostgreSQL.

Other improvements include:

• More than 100 bug fixes
• Code completion in the SQL Editor (beta)
• Better handling of schema synchronization in modeling

For a full list of issues fixed in this release, see  http://dev.mysql.com/doc/workbench/en/changes-5.2.x.html

Please get your copy from our Downloads …

1. Percona Toolkit
Percona Toolkit (aka Maatkit and Aspersa) is must have collection of advanced command-line tools which helps in performing tasks that are too difficult or complex to perform manually.

2. Mydumper
Mydumper is a high-performance multi-threaded backup/restore tool for MySQL. It’s up to 10x faster compared to mysqldump, can take consistent snapshots and provides File compression on-the-fly. Though it’s still under active development but is well tested/used in production on some large installations.

3. MySQL Master HA
This tool helps to maintain your Master-Slave replication setup. A primary objective is automating master fail-over and slave …

Read the original article at $1000 per hour Servers, Anyone?

Amazon's spot market for computing power is set up as an open market for surplus servers. The price is dynamic and depends on demand. So when demand is low, you can get computing instances for rock bottom prices. When you do that you normally set a range of prices you're willing to pay. If it goes over your top end, your instances get killed and re-provisioned for someone else. Obviously this wouldn't work for all applications, like a website that has to be up all the time, but for computing power, say to run some huge hedge fund analytics, it might fit perfectly.

A recent post on SEO MOZ alerted us to an interesting story where spot instances spiked to $1000 per …

It’s been some time now that we’ve been talking about devops, the pushing together of application development and application deployment via IT operations, in the enterprise. To keep up to speed on the trend, 451 CAOS attended PuppetConf, a conference for the Puppet Labs community of IT administrators, developers and industry leaders around the open source Puppet server configuration and automation software. One thing that seems clear, given the talk about agile development and operations, cloud computing, business and culture, our definition of devops continues to be accurate.

Another consistent part of devops that also emerged at PuppetConf last week was the way it tends to introduce additional stakeholders beyond software developers and IT …

Last week was a banner week for MySQL at OSCON. We had many MySQL developers meeting with the MySQL community, conducting technical sessions, leading BOF sessions, working the exhibit hall, and confirming Oracle's leadership in the technical evolution of MySQL.  The highlight of the week was the unveiling of even more 5.6 early access InnoDB and Replication features that are now available for early adopters to download, evaluate and shape via labs.mysql.com.  

InnoDB is one of MySQL's "crown jewels" and beginning in 5.5 is now the default storage engine.  The following 5.6 feature improvements are in direct response to community and customer feedback and requests.  The new 5.6 early access features include:

• Full-text search
  
• REDO log files max size extended to 2 TB
• UNDO logs on their own tablespace …

I had earlier written a post on tuning the MySQL server configuration which was more geared towards the MyISAM storage engine. While that is not because I didn't intend on ignoring InnoDB but because I had planned a whole post on tuning InnoDB related configuration. So this post is the post that I had planned, I have discussed the major configuration parameters in here that should help you out most of the times.

MySQL 5.5 has created a lot of hype and its not just hype, there are major performance enhancements not only in the MySQL server itself but in the newer InnoDB plugin shipped with MySQL 5.5. That's exactly the reason why I have myself upgraded to MySQL 5.5 (The server running this blog run MySQL 5.5). Now since I haven't come across a guide to help in upgrading to MySQL 5.5, I thought why not make one myself

A couple of question I get a lot from MySQL customers is “how will this hardware upgrade improve my transactions per second (TPS)” and “what level of TPS will MySQL perform on this hardware if I’m running ACID settings?” Running sysbench against MySQL with different values for per-thread and global memory buffer sizes, ACID settings, and other settings gives me concrete values to bring to the customer to show the impact that more RAM, faster CPUs, faster disks, or cnf changes have on the server. Here are some examples for a common question: “If I’m using full ACID settings vs non-ACID settings what performance am I going to get from this server?”

Let’s find out by running sysbench with the following settings (most are self explanatory – if not the man page can explain them):

• sysbench –test=oltp –db-driver=mysql –oltp-table-size=1000000 –mysql-engine-trx=yes –oltp-test-mode=complex …

If you’ve been reading up on the various NoSQL offerings and have wanted to try out one but don’t know how to get started, this is one of the easiest ways. I chose MongoDB for this example because I’m going to start using it for a project that needs features that MySQL isn’t as fast at: namely denormalized data with billions of rows. MongoDB has plenty of drivers for other scripting and high-level languages but I’ll focus on the PHP driver today. If there is interest I can do a write up on Python usage later. This example is limited to CentOS, Fedora, and Redhat 5 servers that use the yum package management system. For more information you can reference their download page: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads

First install the prerequisites:

• sudo yum install gcc php php-pear

Then install the mogo php extension via …

Saw this interesting paper about highly concurrent programming methods and figured the word should be spread! It’s not new material but it’s a good read. See the full article here: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/

“Highly concurrent applications such as Internet servers and transaction processing databases present a number of challenges to application designers. First, handling large numbers of concurrent tasks requires the use of scalable data structures. Second, these systems typically operate near maximum capacity, which creates resource contention and high sensitivity to scheduling decisions; overload must be handled with care to avoid thrashing. Finally, race conditions and subtle corner cases are common, which makes debugging and code maintenance difficult.

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