CPTN Holdings unmasked. Oracle updates MySQL. And more.

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“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Florian Mueller reported that the Novell patent acquiring CPTN Holdings is Microsoft, Apple, EMC and Oracle.

# The VAR Guy told the (previously) untold story of Novell’s sale to Attachmate.

# Attachmate committed to support the existing roadmaps and release schedules for Novell and SUSE products.

# Oracle …

Percona Server version 5.1.53-11.7 is now available for download.

The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona stable release to the latest version of MySQL 5.1.

Functionality Added or Changed

•  Percona Server 5.1.53-11.7 is now based on MySQL 5.1.53.
•  New Features Added: None
•  Other Changes: None

Bugs Fixed

• Bug #643149 - Slow query log entries were not being done in the usual parsing format. (Alexey Kopytov)
• Bug #677407 - The innodb.innodb_information_schema test could fail sporadically due to flawed logic in the INFORMATION_SCHEMA.INNODB_LOCKS caching mechanism. (Alexey Kopytov)

Release Notes for this and previous releases can be found …

Just wanted to highlight that Percona Server has now added HandlerSocket to its most recent release, being the first "MySQL fork/distribution" to ship it in easy to consume binary downloads.

HandlerSocket brings NoSQL to MySQL, and does so with a vengeance! It was developed at DeNa, by Akira Higuchi and is already used in production in their MySQL servers. The announcement on my former collague Yoshinori Matsunobu's blog flaunts a 7x performance improvement over the standard SQL interface in MySQL. The most astonishing part is that their MySQL is now faster than Memcached, even if the latter doesn't store anything to disk, so with this NoSQL-for-MySQL solution it makes sense to remove the caching layer completely! …

Just yesterday we released Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3 which includes HandlerSocket. This is third-party plugin, developed Inada Naoki, DeNA Co., Ltd and explained in Yoshinori Matsunobu's blog post.

What is so special about it:

• It provides NOSQL-like requests to data stored in XtraDB. So in the same time you can access your data in SQL and NOSQL ways. This is first open source solution which allows that.
• It has persistent storage (XtraDB is persistent)
• It handles really high load. In my tests using 2 dedicated web servers ( using perl clients) I reached 200,000 req/sec and the clients were real bottleneck, while Percona Server was busy only 5-7%. I did not have more clients in my lab to put …

Percona Server version 5.1.52-12.3 is now available for download.

The main purpose of this release is to update the current Percona release candidate to the latest version of MySQL 5.1. The release also includes the HandlerSocket plugin, which provides NoSQL features in Percona Server.

Functionality Added or Changed

• Percona Server 5.1.52-12.3 is now based on MySQL 5.1.52.
• New Features Added:
  • HandlerSocket plugin support has been added to all RPM and Debian packages. This is an experimental feature. (Inada Naoki, DeNA Co., Ltd.)
  • …

Percona XtraBackup 1.5-Beta is now available for download.

This release adds additional functionality to Percona XtraBackup 1.4, the current general availability version of XtraBackup.

This is a beta release.

Functionality Added or Changed

• Support for MySQL 5.5 databases has been implemented. (Yasufumi Kinoshita)
• XtraBackup can now be built from the MySQL 5.1.52, MySQL 5.5.7, or Percona Server 5.1.53-12 code bases (fixes bug #683507). (Alexey Kopytov)
• The program is now distributed as three separate binaries: 
  • xtrabackup - for use with Percona Server with the built-in InnoDB plugin
  • xtrabackup_51 - for use with MySQL 5.0 & 5.1 with built-in InnoDB
  • xtrabackup_55 - for use with MySQL 5.5 (this binary is not provided for the …

Understanding how well your tables and indexes fit to buffer pool are often very helpful to understand why some queries are IO bound and others not - it may be because the tables and indexes they are accessing are not in cache, for example being washed away by other queries. MySQL Server does not provide any information of this type, Percona Server however adds number of tables to Information Schema which makes this information possible. It is just few queries away:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> SELECT `schema` AS table_schema,innodb_sys_tables.name AS table_name,innodb_sys_indexes.name AS index_name,cnt,dirty,hashed,round(cnt*100/index_size,2) fit_pct   FROM (SELECT index_id,count(*) cnt,sum(dirty=1) dirty ,sum(hashed=1) hashed FROM innodb_buffer_pool_pages_index GROUP BY …

By this definition, when someone who doesn't work at the MySQL project distributes a package that is based on MySQL code but differs …

We had some technical difficulties with Webex today which prevented from all registered attendees to be able to join webinar. I personally would be very upset having booked my time to attend event, pre-registered to ensure there is a space available and when unable to join at the time of event (which is frankly exactly what happened to me).

As result we have scheduled Migrating MyISAM to Innodb webinar to run again on Tuesday, December 7 at 9AM Pacific (Same Time). Here is direct link if you would like to register.

Note we also Webinar on Percona Server, Xtrabackup and XtraDB next week which is great if …

We've had such a large number of signups to our Migrating MyISAM to InnoDB webinar, that we decided to hold one more before the year is out:

December, 8th 9AM PST: Introduction to Percona Server, XtraDB and Xtrabackup.

As the title suggests: this presentation is an introduction.  We will be running through the main aspects that change, and where you can expect to get the most benefit.

This will be a technical talk, but perhaps less technical than some of …