TokuDB is a transactional, fully ACID-compliant storage engine that uses fractal trees for data and indexes, instead of MySQL's standard B-tree implementation. Combined with TokuDB's message-based architecture, TokuDB data and indexes do not fragment, have completely online column and index addition and removal and unlike InnoDB and XtraDB, do not fall apart when indexes no longer fit into memory.

We spoke with Martin Farach-Colton, co-founder and Chief Scientist of Tokutek about the TokuDB storage engine, including the new features in TokuDB 5.0, which was announced on Tuesday.

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Previous podcasts in the backup series:
Backup Series #1: Backup Glossary
Backup Series #2: Backup Tools You Already Have (mysqlhotcopy and mysqldump)
Backup Series #3: Looking Through the Lenz (snapshots including LVM)
Backup Series #4: Advanced Logical Export Features (advanced mysqldump)

Special Guest Valentine Gostev, QA engineer at Percona, talks about Percona's Xtrabackup, an open source tool for consistent online physical backup of InnoDB and XtraDB.

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This week, Giuseppe Maxia joins us as a special guest and we complete our 2-part series on what we always put in our configuration files, and why.
Part 1 in the series.

strings man page
MySQL manual page about defaults-group-suffix
Giuseppe's article about the hidden options file trick

Logging:
log_error

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Nick Pisarro, aka @highenergybeams, suggested we do a podcast about the MySQL defaults we recommend always having, as MySQL's pre-configured option files are not particularly helpful. So we have put together a 2-part podcast on the options that we change.

About the Configuration File
Location and precedence of configuration files for Windows, Unix and Mac OS X:
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/option-files.html

Note: We use the term "directive" to refer to the groups of options that begin with [groupname]. Upon reading the manual page again, we realized that the term is actually "option group". (Sheeri takes complete blame for this -- "directive" is actually the term for what !includedir and !include are...)

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Previous podcasts in the series:
Backup Series #1: Backup Glossary
Backup Series #2: Backup Tools You Already Have (mysqlhotcopy and mysqldump)
Backup Series #3: Looking Through the Lenz (snapshots including LVM)

ERRATA:
Giuseppe Maxia points out via twitter "The mysqldump option to skip table creation is not '--no-create-table' but '--no-create-info' " -- he's right!

Feedback/News:
We had some great feedback on the snapshots podcast, and we explain how to get some swag from us.

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We talk about the Collaborate conference, including comparisons to the O'Reilly MySQL conference.

Show notes:
Collaborate - http://collaborate11.ioug.org/
Sunday, April 10th through Thursday, April 14th in Orlando, Florida.
$200 off with code: MYSQ
Pricing can be found at http://collaborate11.ioug.org/Home/Registration/tabid/82/Default.aspx#rates

MySQL Community Dinner East at Maggiano's Little Italy on Sunday, April 10th at 5 pm. RSVP at http://2011mysqlcommunitydinnereast.eventbrite.com/

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It is hard to keep track of what is evolving in the MySQL environment. But there are three quick things you can do to help keep yourself up to speed.

1. Podcasts

Sheeri K. Cabral and Sarah Novotny put together a weekly podcast that you need to be hearing. The February 11th edition was an in depth look at using logical volume snapshots with my colleague Lenz Gimmer. If you use LVM or are looking for a way to snapshot your instance, this is a master class on the subject.

2. Webinars

Upcoming free seminars on MySQL Administration Tools, the new Enterprise backup product, and the latest on cluster are going to be presented in the next few weeks.

3. …

For those of you not aware of it, Sheeri K. Cabral and Sarah Novotny are doing a great job running the "OurSQL" Podcast. A great and convenient way to learn more about various MySQL topics.

Episode 33 is about "Looking through the Lenz"...that is, Lenz Grimmer, MySQL Community Manager at Oracle and long time MySQLer.

Lenz talks about snapshot backups in general, MySQL backups with snapshots, and mylvmbackup, a script he wrote and maintains to easily take consistent MySQL snapshot backups. Check it out!

Keep up the good work, Sheeri and Sarah!

The OurSQL podcasts will eventually make it into the Blue Gecko blog.  But, in the mean time, I’d like to summarize what Sheeri Cabral and I have been getting up to.  As I mentioned in the OurSQL revival post we are working to bring you a podcast every week about something technical or community related.  Since mid-December, we’ve recorded and published eight podcasts.

OurSQL Episode 26: Zombies!

MySQL 5.5 release and our favorite updates to our favorite database

OurSQL Episode 27: To SQL or No[tto]SQL, …

Noticed the new navigation item in the MySQL Developer Zone?

Sarah Novotny and Sheeri K. Cabral have picked up the OurSQL Podcasts again which were on hiatus for a while (well, they have now been back again for a while as well). The Podcasts are available on several resources:

• The OurSQL Podcasts page
• Technocation, Inc.
• iTunes
• …