Not so long ago, in a galaxy not very far away... a middle-aged programmer battled to free memory from the dark side of the hibernate query cache.  He was successful, or so it seemed. For the query cache memory problems had risen from the ashes -- stronger and more bloated than ever...

What's With All This Garbage?
We hit a case at work (again), where the java server process came to a grinding halt.  It wasn't dead, it just wasn't making much forward progress either.  A quick look at the heap stats showed we were nearly at capacity and that garbage collection was eating all CPU time, thus not allowing any real work to happen.  Looks like it is time to whip out the ol' memory profiler.  This time I went with Eclipse's Memory Analysis Tool .  …

How would you like to use MySQL Sandbox to deploy and test any replication topology imaginable? Do you want to describe load balancer and proxy configurations, too? If you already love sandbox (or even if you don't), and you want to play with arbitrarily complex replication/proxy topologies... read on.

Sandbox Is Your Friend

MySQL Sandbox is a great tool. As of this writing, version 3 is feature complete -- and the new features are greatly desired. Replication support has been there a while for master/slave setups with as many slaves as you want and for replication rings of any size. Version 3 adds multi-level replication trees on a multi-sandbox using sbtool.

But what if the provided replication setups do not quite match what you need? Granted, I'll argue they are …

This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based …

Here are the slides from yesterday’s presentation about horizontal database scaling through sharding at the mySQL dev room at FOSDEM 2009.

I’ve got a ton of notes and remarks to these slides, which will become available here soon.

Everyone and their mother are throwing out their predictions for 2009 nowadays, itâ€s a new fad. Itâ€s like youâ€re not cool anymore if you donâ€t have twitter, a Mac, and a set of random predictions for the next 12 joyous months.

So I decided to throw in a few ideas of my own to be part of the cool crowd again (how much cooler can I be already, you might think, and I wouldnâ€t blame you).

Disclaimer (read it, tough guy)

What this post is:

• about the future of technology and the Internet, 2009 and beyond.
• my ideas on what is going to happen or should happen. If they happen to match someone elseâ€s ideas – it doesnâ€t mean I ripped them off, it just means we share the same opinions and theyâ€re more likely to come true.
• awesome.

What this post is not:

…

You Mean, Memory Is Not Infinite? We're working hard getting MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.0, featuring Query Analyzer, ready for release. As part of that, we started really ramping up the number of MySQL servers reporting in query data to see how we could scale. Not surprising (to me, anyway), the first efforts did not go so well. My old friend OutOfMemoryError reared its ugly head once again.
Query Cache -- It's More Than Just Results! We're big (ab)users of hibernate query caching, and more importantly to us the natural id optimized query cache. Firing up the profiler, I was not shocked to see that the second level (let's call it L2) and query caches were hogging the majority of memory. But, something didn't smell right...

What I was seeing was tons of …

I was doing some multi-threaded, multi-transactional testing for the backend of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor. I came across a weird failure, where it appeared I was able to successfully insert a row, and then (in the same transaction), a select from the same table did not return any rows.

Consider the following transactions:


mysql> create table t1 (id integer primary key auto_increment, name varchar(32) unique) engine=innodb;

a> begin;

b> begin;
b> select * from t1;

a> insert into t1 values(null, 'oldag');

b> insert into t1 values(null, 'oldag) on duplicate key update id=LAST_INSERT_ID(id);
(b blocks)

a> commit;

(b is released)
...
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.00 sec)
b> select * from t1;
Empty set (0.00 sec)


what, what, …

I was running an import script today taken from a mysqldump from another user, when I saw an error that looked like this:

ERROR 1005 (HY000) at line 123: Cant create table
 (errno: 150)

This is caused by a mysqldump or export process exporting tables in alphabetical order and not in the order in which they rely on one another. My tables had foreign keys which fail on import if the other table doesn't exist when you create the table with the key. In this case I was only importing six or eight tables so I simply opened the script in a text editor and re-ordered the import blocks. On a bigger scale a more technical solution might be required!

Lorna is an independent web development consultant, writer and trainer, open source project lead and community evangelist. This post was originally published at LornaJane

I work on the MySQL Enterprise Tools team, formerly of MySQL and now with Sun Microsystems. The 2.0 version of the Enterprise Monitor is well under way. As part of this, the Java server backend has been refactored to utilize Spring and Hibernate. Honestly, I didn't know either one of those technologies before starting this project. Oh, what a fun road it has been...

A big draw for using an off-the-shelf ORM was so that we didn't have to write our own (kind of bad and slightly wrong -- those darn transactions) caching implementations for the custom one-off ORM that existed previously. A lot of our internal meta-model is very static, so …

Yesterday I passed the CMCDEV exam.

I only used the study guide (previous entry) and the official manual to prepare for the exam.

The study guide is a good preparation for the exam.(Thanks to Roland Bouman and all other people involved with the book. The only minor issue with the book is that it didn't feel finished. Images which should've been printed in high quality and some phrases about a CD which is absent (All listed/fixed in the errata)

I filed a few bug reports while studying. (patched included :) )

So now let's wait for MySQL 5.1 to become GA.