Last few days one of our customers (one of the largest Ruby on Rails sites on the Net) was struggling to solve some really strange problem - once upon a time they were getting an error from ActiveRecord on their site:

They have innodb_lock_wait_timeout set to 20 seconds. After a few hours of looking for strange transactions we were decided to create s script to dump SHOW INNODB STATUS and SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST commands output to a file every 10 seconds to catch one of those moments when this error occurred.

Today we’ve got next error and started digging in our logs…

After a couple of hours of looking in logs, parsing binary logs from MySQL …

Thanks to MySQL community members we’ve got really great collection of media files from the recent mysqluc. Thanks to Seeri for all that work he’s done to collect everything in one place so we could watch/listen/read information from this great event.

So, if you did not attended mysqluc07, then you definitely should visit Technocation page, dedicated to this conference.

P.S. I’m going to post links to these videos and descriptions for the sessions on the Best Tech Videos soon, so If you are not sure to watch some video or not, just wait while I’m merging these links with information from mysqluc site.

My slides from the tutorial are posted on the Develooper talks page. I'll add a link to Jays slides when he posts them.

I am giving a tutorial ("Real-world MySQL Performance Tuning") at the MySQL conference Monday afternoon. I giving it with Jay Pipes and I think it's going to be pretty fun. We are covering quite ways to think about similar problems (and when we have overlap we often disagree! Talk about getting a "two-for-one"! :-) I did a trial run of my longer version for la.pm a month ago and I think I figured out how to pace the length, but we'll see on monday. It's tricky! I had the 45 minute version down pretty well, but in December I gave a one hour version at the Web Builder conference in Las Vegas and that was too little time for the version I had there to be as fun as it should be.

Uh oh, our tutorial is …

On Tuesday (March 20th) I am doing a talk on "Real World Web Scalability" for the Los Angeles Perl Mongers. The talk isn't specific to Perl at all, so if you are in the area and work with web technologies it's likely it'd be worth a couple of hours of your time. I've been doing variations on this talk for a few years and if I may say so myself it's getting pretty good.

I am giving a tutorial next month with Jay Pipes (oops, I got his name swapped with another Jay in an earlier edition of this post - sorry Jay!) at the MySQL Conference with similar content but where I have 90 minutes for it rather than the usual 45-55. I'm excited about that because it means I'll have time to a) slow down a little bit, b) add more content and c) take questions at the end! …