At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Monty Widenius spoke on "Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design ". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Architecture_of_Maria:_A_New_Storage_Engine_with_a_Transactional_Design

At the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, Sebastian Bergmann presented "Video: Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit". See all the blog posts others have written about the tutorial from the Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008TuesdayNotes#Testing_PHP.2FMySQL_Applications_with_PHPUnit.2FDbUnit.

Patrick Galbraith, former MySQL employee who helped write replication, came to the November 2007 Boston MySQL User Group and did a fantastic presentation on replication, including showing how to set up replication and walking us through the steps in real-time, setting up an example server.

Smaller, 320x240, 293M WMV file for download

References mentioned in the video:
Brian Aker's DBIx::Password

Giuseppe Maxia's article about federated tables -- I think that's the right one, feel free to comment if it's not.

read more

How do you teach a thinking pattern? In my previous job I worked with a data analyst, who was really good at thinking about how our data correlates among itself. He was good at the data analysis, good at thinking up relationships, and good at coming up with complex comparisons.

However, he wrote some pretty funky SQL. We had him take a course in basics of MySQL, and from time to time I’d take a gander in the slow query logs and pick a few queries and point out the good and bad things. Most of these are optimization tips, such as “Indexes don’t apply to columns when you’re applying a function to that column”.

But it’s hard to try to think outside of your own box, and even running EXPLAIN on every query won’t necessarily tell you how you can fix a query. The problem is that there’s no way to know if you have optimized the query as much as possible. Even experienced DBAs

I was often frustrated when repeating …

I have finally managed to watch and slightly edit the September 2007 Boston MySQL User Group presentation I did on the MySQL Proxy.

It's geared towards beginners, and has lots of examples, including explaining some of the examples that come bundled with the MySQL Proxy.

Direct Play

Download video (.wmv file, 612 Mb)
Download video (.wmv file, 76.10 Mb)

Enjoy!

Some resources:
Presentation Slides PowerPoint (ppt) or PDF or …

http://www.oracle.com/openworld/2007/appreciation.html

Now, Billy Joel is one of my all-time favorite pop musicians. I saw him in concert and nosebleed seats at the Boston Garden cost me USD $100 per ticket, and I bought 4 tickets (my twin brother is a die-hard Billy Joel fan, they were a holiday surprise 2 years ago!)

Billy Joel regularly sells out sports arenas. I can only imagine how much Oracle paid to have a concert with him.

And don’t get me wrong, the rest of the list is also stellar. Which only adds to my disbelief.

MySQL shows customer appreciation by not grossly overcharging.

MySQL: Because you’re smart enough to buy your own damn concert tickets.

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350. …

So, O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has published the “Top 10 MySQL Best Practices” at http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/07/11/MySQLtips.html. Sadly, I find most “best practice” list do not thoroughly explain the “why” enough so that people can make their own decisions.
For instance, #3 is “Protect the MySQL installation directory from access by other users.” I was intrigued at what they would consider the “installation” directory. By reading the tip, they actually mean the data directory. They say nothing of the log directory, nor that innodb data files may be in different places than the standard myisam data directories.  More »

So, at midnight I got a call from customer service saying our site was slow. I narrowed it down to one of our auxiliary databases, that seems to have gotten wedged just about midnight. Normal queries that took less than 4 seconds started taking longer and longer, moving up to 5 seconds and past 30 seconds in the span of a minute or so.

In the moment, I thought killing off all the queries would be a good move. My kill script, which consists of:


for i in `/usr/bin/mysql -u user -pPass -e ’show full processlist’ | grep appuser | cut -f1`
do
mysql -u user -pPass -e “kill $i”
done


This will attempt to kill any mysql connection owned by the appuser. I used it a few times, and it didn’t work. So I used a trick I learned when we bring our site down — sometimes there are straggling connections to mysql, so what I do is change the app user’s password by direct …

aka, “Better late than never”…..

Back in March 2007, the Boston MySQL User Group (http://mysql.meetup.com/137) watched and heard Brian DeLacey give a tutorial of Ruby on Rails, including its interaction with MySQL using ActiveRecord.

I knew absolutely nothing about Ruby on Rails before attending the presentation, other than Ruby was a language and people were saying that Rails made for easy development. After the presentation, I knew enough to start coding!

Brian is an excellent speaker, and this presentation is long overdue. (I’d tried creating the video before, during and after the MySQL Users Conference back in April, and my application kept crashing. I guess it just needed a break, because I fired it up today and it seemed to save the movie OK. Please let me know if you watch the presentation and something seems wrong).

Enjoy!

…