So I’ve been doing a fair number of automated load tests these past six months. Primarily with Sysbench, which is a fine, fine tool. First I started using some simple bash based loop controls to automate my overnight testing, but as usually happens with shell scripts they grew unwieldy and I rewrote them in python. Now I have some flexible and easily configurable code for sysbench based MySQL benchmarking to offer the community. I’ve always been a fan of giving back to such a helpful group of people – you’ll never hear me complain about “my time isn’t free”. So, let me know what you want in an ideal testing environment (from a load testing framework automation standpoint) and I’ll integrate it into my existing framework and then release it via the BSD license. The main goal here is to have a standardized modular framework, based on sysbench, that allows anyone to compare their server performance via repeatable tests. It’s fun to see …

As the top MySQL expert in New York it is great to join the team at Percona for the upcoming Percona Live in New York City on May 26th. As an invited speaker I am joining a select list of expert speakers including Harrison Fisk from Facebook, Kurt von Finck from Monty Program and Monty Taylor from the core Drizzle team.

My presentation will be on Improving Performance with Better Indexes where I will not only show how to apply indexes to improve query performance, but how to apply better indexes and provide even greater performance gains via a great technique known as a covering index.

On Tuesday I will be speaking in New York at the Effective MySQL Meetup group where I will be giving the presentation “MySQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite”. For more information and to register, check out the Meetup Event. There are just 10 seats left.

To promote the upcoming Percona Live event in New York, for attendees to the Meetup there will be a draw for a FREE ticket to the May 26th event.

Effective MySQL New York is the only MySQL group now operating in New York. Please join our group for the latest information and events for the MySQL community.

In the press in the last two days has been the reported outage of Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) in just one North Virginia data center. This has affected many large website includes FourSquare, Hootsuite, Reddit and Quora. A detailed list can be found at ec2disabled.com.

For these popular websites was this avoidable? Absolutely.

Basic scalability principles if deployed in these systems architecture would have averted the significant downtime regardless of your development stack. While I work primarily in MySQL these principles are not new, nor are they complicated, however they are fundamental concepts in scalability that apply to any technology including the …

Two themes emerged at this week's MySQL conference: Mix your relational database with less formal solutions and move to the cloud. Naturally, the event included many other talks of a more immediate practical nature: data warehousing and business intelligence, performance (both in MySQL configuration and in the environment, which includes the changes caused by replacing disks with Flash), how to scale up, and new features in both MySQL and its children. But everyone seemed to agree that MySQL does not stand alone.

The world of databases have changed both in scale and in use. As Baron Schwartz said in his broad-vision keynote, databases are starting to need to handle petabytes. And he criticized open source database options as having poorer performance than proprietary ones. As for use, the databases struggle to meet two types of requirements: requests from business users for …

Memcached is one of the technologies that holds the modern Internet together, but do you know what it actually does? Brian Aker has certainly earned the title of Memcached guru, and below he offers a peek under the hood. He'll also provide a deeper dive into Memcached in a tutorial at the upcoming 2011 MySQL Conference.

What problem is Memcached meant to solve?

Brian Aker: In an operation like a database or an application …

Many people have a master/slave MySQL environment of various different topologies, and many use the slave as a backup.
Is your slave schema identical to your production schema? As long as an SQL statements completes without an error, your slave schema can differ. Common examples are different indexes or storage engines for example. However if you use the slave as backup, you want to ensure when you recover, you are recovering a production environment, not a slave environment.

While the changes may be small, the can lead to different results. For a client I found that the default value of a price field was 10.00 in one schema and 0.00 in another. Not withstanding using defaults for important fields and not defining in an INSERT is a different issue, it highlighted the different schemas can easily exist.

My tool of choice is SchemaSync. The reason why I like this command is …

A new healthcare project in Zambia is trying to integrate supervisors, clinics, and community healthcare workers (CHW) into a system that can improve patient service and provide more data about the effectiveness of care. Because of the technical challenges in an extreme rural setting, unique solutions are required. According to Cory Zue, chief technology officer of Dimagi, CouchDB went a long way toward keeping a consistent set of records under extreme circumstances. The full story will be laid out in Zue's talk at the upcoming MySQL conference, but here's a sneak peak.

You're involved with a …

How this happens or who does it is obviously a larger and more complex conversation however it is better then involving innocent animals.

How is it that trivial $#*! gets voted and has a string of comments I can not explain, however Planet MySQL should have practical MySQL related content. I would vote for the front page and RSS feed to show only moderated content, and content that did not pass the cut (and there is a lot of this) can be available on a less important page if necessary.

Rather then complaining like many open source communities, let us propose a way to improve the system we use.

Running a MySQL backup and ensuring it completed successfully and backup files exist is not enough. In my B&R Quiz from Checked your MySQL recovery process recently? one important step is “Do you review your backup logs EVERY SINGLE day or have tested backup monitoring in place?”

This is what I found when reviewing a backup log for a client today.

mysqldump: Got error: 1142: SELECT,LOCK TABL command denied to user 'root'@'localhost' for table 'cond_instances' when using LOCK TABLES
mysqldump: Got error: 1142: SELECT,LOCK TABL command denied to user 'root'@'localhost' for table 'cond_instances' when using LOCK TABLES

The backup script was completing, backup files were in place (and are listed in the log file) however these errors were occurring.

Further investigation was less then one minute of …