My mind is playing "Suffering Succotash..."

I have been working on MySQL performance for a while now, and the team I am in have discovered that SysBench could do with a couple of tweaks for Solaris.

Sidebar - sysbench is a simple "OLTP" benchmark which can test multiple databases, including MySQL. Find out all about it here , but go to the download page to get the latest version.

To simulate multiple users sending requests to a database, sysbench uses multiple threads. This leads to two issues we have identified with SysBench on Solaris, namely:

• The implementation of random() is explicitly identified as unsafe in multi-threaded applications on Solaris. My team has found this is a real issue, with occasional core-dumps happening to our …

My mind is playing "Suffering Succotash..."

I have been working on MySQL performance for a while now, and the team I am in have discovered that SysBench could do with a couple of tweaks for Solaris.

Sidebar - sysbench is a simple "OLTP" benchmark which can test multiple databases, including MySQL. Find out all about it here , but go to the download page to get the latest version.

To simulate multiple users sending requests to a database, sysbench uses multiple threads. This leads to two issues we have identified with SysBench on Solaris, namely:

• The implementation of random() is explicitly identified as unsafe in multi-threaded applications on Solaris. My team has found this is a real issue, with occasional core-dumps happening to our …

…is the title of this post written by Tim Bray a few days ago in which he outlined the directions he would like to see his employer take to improve its fortunes.

He also invited others to continue the thought process. Many have already done so (I’ll include the best in tomorrow’s CAOS Links post) and given my recent constructive criticism of Sun’s open source strategy I feel compelled to provide some answers as well as questions.

I’m sure there are lots of things Sun should be doing with relation to storage and servers and processors and client devices, but I’m going to stick to what I know. What would I do?

Light a fire under MySQL
When Sun announced its acquisition …

Wikipedia is one of the world's most visited web sites (8th in the top 10, in fact), delivering an enormous breadth of content to an audience as vast as the internet.

But Wikipedia's evolved to become more than an on-line encyclopedia: they've become one of the world's largest search engines, they're a global source of real-time news, alongisde educational, political and health related content - and one of the world's most valuable brands and media properties.

Wikipedia's also a great example of a "redshift" application: a segment of the market that's growing faster than the technology industry's capacity to innovate. Technology companies have to pay special attention to such …

Currently I'm working hard to find and remove scalability
bottlenecks in the MySQL Server. MySQL was acquired by Sun
10 months ago by now. Many people have in blogs wondered what
the impact has been from this acquisition. My personal
experience is that I now have a chance to work with Sun
experts in DBMS performance. As usual it takes time when
working on new challenges before the flow of inspiration
starts flowing. However I've seen this flow of inspiration
starting to come now, so the fruit of our joint work is
starting to bear fruit. I now have a much better understanding
of MySQL Server performance than I used to have. I know fairly
well where the bottlenecks are and I've started looking
into how they can be resolved.

Another interesting thing with Sun is the innovations they have
done in a number of areas. One such area is DTrace. This is a …

One of the new features in the new release of MySQL Enterprise Monitor is Query Analyzer. As the name suggests, the Query Analyzer provides information about the queries that are running on your server, the response times and row and byte statistics. The information provided is great, and it doesn’t take very long to see from the query data supplied that there are places where you could improve the the query, or even reduce the number of queries that you submit.

The system works by using the functionality of the MySQL Proxy to monitor the queries being executed and then provide that information up to the MySQL Enterprise Service Manager so that the information can be displayed within the Query Analyzer page. To get the queries monitored, you have to send the queries through the agent which both monitors their execution and sends the information on up to the Manager, along with all the other data being monitored.

The team, …

As I mentioned earlier this week, I did a presentation on MySQL in OpenSolaris today.

The presentation (audio and slides) is now viewable online (and downloadable), and you can also get hold of the transcript of the questions: here (or download). The original presentation is here.

One minor difference from the presentation is that we …

Today, Martin "MC" Brown gave an overview of MySQL on openSolaris. Due to Yours Truly arriving late MC had to start a new Dimdim session (sorry for that!). So MC was the host and the presenter at the same time.

Interestingly (and annoyingly), this seemed to have a bad effect on sound quality. To most attendees, MC's voice sounded garbled. To me, he sounded like at least one octave too low. The sound recording, though, sounds all fine. I suspect that being the host of a Dimdim session has a bad effect on voice quality (the same thing has happened to me regularly, but I thought it was due to packet loss over my wifi or something). So, for the next MySQL University session on …

Entered 50 minute late (thanks to a wrong timezone calculation) into the MySQL University Session: MySQL and OpenSolaris by Martin MC Brown.


Incase you have missed it altogether, go grab the slides from the Wiki page.

Future and past univesity sessions are listed here at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University

Entered 50 minute late (thanks to a wrong timezone calculation) into the MySQL University Session: MySQL and OpenSolaris by Martin MC Brown.


Incase you have missed it altogether, go grab the slides from the Wiki page.

Future and past univesity sessions are listed here at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQL_University