OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! Not many folks have blogged about what they learned there….if you missed it, all is not lost. We did take videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded).

All the videos have been processed, and I am working on uploading them to YouTube and filling in details for the video descriptions. Not all the videos are up right now….right now all the lightning talks are up.

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• All the lightning talks belowin one continuous video (just over 54 minutes total)
  
• The Graph Engine (Antony Curtis)
  
• …

That’s right — get your free 10-day trial! All the information I know is here:

http://bit.ly/37E9ld

But the basics are: No access to Rough Cuts or Downloads, for new subscribers only. It’s one of those “sign up and if you do not cancel after 10 days, we bill you” — and at $42.99 a month, that’s not a mistake you want to make. Must sign up by Nov. 24th.

To sign up now: https://ssl.safaribooksonline.com/tryitfree

I was asked to send this information along, so I am…Now’s your chance to skim High Performance MySQL, among other high quality books!

For the past two months, I have been running tests on TokuDB in my free time. TokuDB is a storage engine put out by Tokutek. TokuDB uses fractal tree indexes instead of B-tree indexes to improve performance, which is dramatically noticeable when dealing with large tables (over 100 million rows).

For those that like the information “above the fold”, here is a table with results from a test comparing InnoDB and TokuDB. All the steps are explained in the post below, if you want more details, but here’s the table:

Debian Linux (the underlying foundation of Ubuntu) manages the startup/shutdown of MySQL quite differently from the ways I am used to. I am a long-time user of both the MySQL binary provided by Red Hat/SuSE (along with Fedora and clones like CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux) and the official binary from mysql.com. After the successful restore of a cold backup, I started mysqld using the Debian provided init script. The script said that mysqld failed to start up, but in reality it did start up. Similarly, stopping mysqld fails.

The output below demonstrates the outputs and the behavior seen on a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server:

root:~# ps -ef | grep mysqld
root     20165 19926  0 15:12 pts/4    00:00:00 grep mysqld
root:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld                                            [fail]
root:~# ps -ef | grep …

Last night at the Boston MySQL User Group I presented on how to get a consistent snapshot to build a slave, how to use mk-table-checksum to check for differences between masters and slaves on an ongoing basis, and how to use tools such as mk-table-sync and mysqldump to sync the data if there are any discrepancies.

The slides are online at http://technocation.org/files/doc/slave_sync.pdf.

The video can be watched on youtube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un0wqYKmbWY or directly in your browser with the embedded player below:

For very personal reasons that don’t belong in this article, I decided a few weeks ago that it’s time for me to move on. The year and a half that I worked for Pythian have been a wonderful experience, and this is article is my tribute to this great company.

The MySQL Team

Being able to work side by side with two MySQL experts like Sheeri Cabral and Augusto Bott has been a great experience. I have learned a lot, not only about MySQL, but also about what a great DBA should be like. Both of them are recognized MySQL Community members and regular speakers at the MySQL Users Conference and other events. Sheeri has been named MySQL Community Member of the Year twice in a row. Both are a guarantee of excellent service.

My Predictions For Pythian

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As pointed out by Schlomi Noach on my last blog, MySAR was already taken by a project related to Squid reports with MySQL. I decided then to look for a new name, and as I posted initially, I want to keep the sar prefix to describe the script’s purpose by association with the OS utility of the same name. I brainstormed many names. I liked Dave Edwards’s suggestion: SARkila, but it sounds too close to tequila, so I settled with Sheeri Cabral’s suggestion: sar-sql.

The title of the Launchpad page already reflects the change. What remains to be done is: a) change the name of the Perl script and documentation; and b) change the Launchpad URL. It is likely that I will change the name of the script when I release version 1.x (see below). I’m not sure of all the implications in Bazaar …

People often ask “what’s the best hardware to run a database on?” And the answer, of course, is “it depends”. With MySQL, though, you can get good performance out of almost any hardware.

If you need *great* performance, and you have active databases with a large data set, here are some statistics on real life databases — feel free to add your own.

We define “large data set” as over 100 Gb, mostly because smaller data sets have an easier time with the available memory on a machine (even if it’s only 8 Gb) and backups are less intrusive — InnoDB Hot Backup and Xtrabackup are not really “hot” backups, they are “warm” backups, because there is load on the machine to copy the data files, and on large, active servers we have found that this load impacts query performance. As for how active a database is, we’ve found that equates to a peak production load of over 3,000 queries per second on a transactional …

This week the Log Buffer is a little more challenging for two reasons: a) Oracle Open World 2009 and b) the controversy around Monty Widenius‘ opposition to Oracle owning MySQL due to the Sun acquisition, so let’s go straight to the articles.

Oracle – Oracle Open World 2009

There is so much material about OOW09, that I’m giving a full subtitle to it.

Let’s start with a quick recap of the keynotes by Scott McNealy and Larry Elison in this article by Andrew Clarke: The return of The Scott And Larry Show. The recap suggests that the presentations aimed to show how …

I’m sure that most people have at least one of the tools listed in Ronald Bradford’s article: Monitoring MySQL Options. Many of these tools, such as Nagios and Cacti, also monitor the operating system. However, in the same way that a quick look at sar‘s output can give you some insight on the OS, with MySAR you can do the same for the MySQL server. This is especially useful when  it is not possible to access a monitoring tool’s graphic interfaces.

What Was Going On Around 2:30pm?

This is a question a customer asked us. To answer it we ran MySAR for a few days and queried the results for analysis. Looking at the data, we determined that the number of INSERT operations was significantly higher than any …