As the program chair for the recently announced MySQL Track at the ODTUG Kaleidoscope conference located in Washington DC we are also looking into an associated free community event for MySQL locals in addition to a dedicated track for 4 days.

Please let us know your name and email via the form at http://ronaldbradford.com/ODTUG/free-event/ so we can provide more details in the coming week as we try to finalize logistics.

Registration will be necessary for attendance however for now we just want to know who is local so we can provide more details soon!

Updated. Full details of the free Monday night sundown sessions and reception can be found at MySQL track with free event at …

I’m happy to announce that the MySQL community has been given the opportunity to speak at the upcoming Oracle Developer Tools User Group (ODTUG) Kaleidoscope conference in Washington DC. We will be releasing more details this week of the MySQL presentations and topics and we are finalizing details of possible options to include the local MySQL community during the event.

The various independent Oracle User Groups in North America that embody “by the community and for the community” have been very positive with including the MySQL community. With the Sun/MySQL now Oracle community team of Giuseppe Maxia, Lenz Grimmer, Kaj Arnö and Oracle ACE Directors Sheeri K Cabral and myself we have been happy with the openness and willingness to include us in the larger Oracle ecosystem.

We’ll announce the schedule when we finalize it, but we have had a great response from …

Let me premise this post with the statement I think the MySQL documentation is an excellent and highly accurate resource. I think the MySQL docs team do a great job, however like software and people, documentation is not perfect.

As members of the MySQL community you can always contribute to improve the process by reading the documentation and logging any issues as Documentation Bugs.

Some time ago in a discussion with a friend and colleague, we were talking about changes in historical defaults that had been improved finally in MySQL 5.4 The specific discussion was on the new default innodb_buffer_pool_size and we both agreed it increased significantly. One said 1GB, the other said 128MB. Who was right? Well we both were, and we were both inaccurate depending on versions.

Referencing the 5.4 Manual in …

One thing I have often wondered is just how many MySQL instances exist in the world and what MySQL versions and architectures are in use. We hear of 50,000 windows downloads per day but this is misleading because MySQL is basically bundled with Linux by default or installed from various repositories. Linux servers powers many websites.

In Drizzle we have a proposed plan, the Drizzle Census. From the productive Drizzle Developers Day recently at the 2010 MySQL conference we sat down and created a blueprint, and subsequent high level spec of what we considered this optional plugin should do. We didn’t get as far as I would have liked in a code …

I was installing the latest MySQL 5.5.4 on a new machine and I came across the following issues during installation, steps I generally perform on other versions without any incidents.

$ sudo su -
$ cd /opt
$ wget http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/MySQL-5.5/mysql-5.5.4-m3-linux2.6-x86_64.tar.gz/from/http://mysql.mirrors.hoobly.com/
$ tar xvfz mysql-5.5.4-m3-linux2.6-x86_64.tar.gz
$ cd mysql-5.5.4-m3-linux2.6-x86_64
$ scripts/mysql_install_db
Neither host 'barney' nor 'localhost' could be looked up with /usr/bin/resolveip
Please configure the 'hostname' command to return a correct hostname.
If you want to solve this at a later stage, restart this script with the --force option

Perform some checks

$ /usr/bin/resolveip
-su: /usr/bin/resolveip: No such file or directory

$ hostname
barney

$ head -2 /etc/hosts
127.0.0.1       localhost
127.0.1.1       barney

I was surprised to find that my Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx box had a …

I have uploaded my three presentations from the 2010 MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, California which was my 5th consecutive year appearing as a speaker.

• IGNITION – MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA – Volume I
• LIFTOFF – MySQLCamp for Oracle DBA – Volume 2
• 10x Performance Improvements – A Case Study

A full history of my MySQL presentations can be found on the Presenting page.

…

I hinted last week of my acceptance with Oracle before the formal announcement this week at the MySQL Users Conference, not for a job but as Oracle ACE Director. In today’s State of the MySQL Community keynote by Kaj Arnö I was one of the first three MySQL nominees that are now part of this program.

What exactly is an ACE Director? Using the description from the Oracle website.

Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates, with candidates nominated by anyone in the Oracle …

Edward Screven – Chief Corporate Architect of Oracle provided the opening keynote at the 2010 MySQL Users Conference.

Overall I was disappointed. The first half was more an Oracle Sales pitch, we had some product announcements, we had some 5.5 performance buzz. While a few numbers and features were indeed great to hear, there was a clear lack of information to the MySQL ecosystem including employees, alumni and various support services. I hope more is unveiled this week.

Some notes of the session.

• Oracle’s Strategy covers storage, servers, virtual machines, operating system, database, middleware, applications
• We build a complete technology stack that is “open” and “integrated” based on “open standards”
• products talk via open standards with the intention for customers to not feel locked in to any technology
…

There have been a number of April fools jokes today so I thought I’d add my own to the list. While this sounds unexpected it’s actually no joke.

I just accepted a position with Oracle yesterday but I can’t say any more about the details until the MySQL users conference in a few weeks.

A special thanks to Lenz, Kaj & Giuseppe that championed everything to make it all happen, I really didn’t have to do anything other then accept.

Using ROLLBACK with MyISAM is useless. A ROLLBACK command is used to undo any DML that occurs during a transaction (i.e. START TRANSACTION and COMMIT). The MySQL default storage engine MyISAM does not support transactions.

It is easy with the SHOW GLOBAL STATUS command to see if your application code uses ROLLBACK. By performing two samples you can look at the delta over time. The statpack utility is one product that provides a human friendly display of this delta. As seen below, the use of ROLLBACK in combination with the read/write ratio and the my.cnf –skip-innodb indicate unnecessary database work.

====================================================================================================
                    Variable    Delta/Percentage         Per Second              Total …