This week I was one of the presenters at the first Surge Scalability Conference in Baltimore. An event that focused not just on one technology but on what essential tools, technologies and practices system architects need to know about for successfully scaling web applications.

While MySQL is an important product in many environments, it is only one component for a successful technology stack and for many organizations is one of several products that manage your data.

My presentation was on the common MySQL scalability mistakes and how to avoid them. This is a problem/solution approach and is a companion talk with Successful MySQL Scalability which describes design for successfully scalability …

Seeing as it looks like 5.5 is shortly about to go GA I thought I’d give it a run and see how well it works. The only way really to test it is to give it a bit of load and look for things which break. That I did with the 5.5.6-rc community rpms, compared to the 5.1 advanced rpms I usually run.

My colleagues, Ben and Peter, found a horrible problem which means that I can’t use this even for any real usage on my real servers. See: bug#57095 for all the gory details. Thanks to them both for finding the problem and then digging down and figuring out the real cause. Sometimes developers work a long way from the database so their errors don’t translate into something I can really look at in the database. They delved into the problem and then found the cause and a nice easy test case which I could report to MySQL.

After a couple of days of running this was …

I was interviewed by Justin Kestelyn the OTN Senior Director about MySQL at Oracle Open World this week.

Some highlights of the questions asked:

• 0:55 Since the close of acquisition has there been any change in direction?
• 2:23 How have your clients and customers responded to the acquisition?
• 3:53 You mentioned that Oracle will bring added advantages and could infuse invocation.
• 5:15 InnoDB and MySQL are now both owned by Oracle. What do you see as the development advantages?
• 6:47 What were your thoughts on the first MySQL Sunday?
• 8:58 Forks?
• 11:04 Contact Details

You can view the Video online or play below.

Last night I was the invited guest at the SF MySQL Meetup. In my presentation “Successful MySQL Scalability” I talked about a set of principles to ensure appropriate system architecture, data availability and best practices to build an ideal solution for your business. The presentation was also live streamed and is available online.

Successful MySQL Scalability

DISCLAIMER: This post contains no technical MySQL content however it is good news for the MySQL Community.

MySQL content will be included for the first time with the LAOUC (Latin American Oracle Usergroups Council) Oracle tour that is being organized in conjunction with OTN (Oracle Technology Network).

I have no idea what MySQL user communities are in South America however if you live in any of the following cities, please feel free to contact me. I am happy to have additional discussion regarding MySQL or help in some way if there is interest in any cities.

This seven country tour includes:

• Oct 12 – Lima, Peru
• Oct 14 – Santiago, Chile
• Oct 16 – Montevideo, Uruguay
• Oct 18 – São Paulo, Brazil
…

I collect a lot of configuration values from my database servers and most of these values are stored by date.

So often I end up with values such as:


config_date config_value
2010-09-01  value_1
2010-09-02  value_1
2010-09-03  value_2
2010-09-04  value_3
2010-09-05  value_3
2010-09-06  value_3
2010-09-07  value_3
2010-09-08  value_4
2010-09-09  value_4
2010-09-10  value_1
2010-09-11  value_5
2010-09-12  value_5
2010-09-13  value_5
I´ve been unsuccessfully been trying to figure out how to convert this in SQL into something like the following:


config_from config_to   config_value
2010-09-01  2010-09-02  value_1
2010-09-03  2010-09-03  value_2
2010-09-04  2010-09-07 …

Next year will mark a significant change for the MySQL community. At least three major conferences will have dedicated MySQL content that is great for attendees getting the best information on how to use MySQL from the experts in the field.

O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo

The 9th Annual MySQL conference will be held at is usual home of recent years. Colin will again be back as committee chair for a 3rd year and this will be my 6th straight MySQL conference.

Date: April 11 – 14, 2011
Location: Hyatt Regency, Santa Clara, California
Website: There is no website at this time
Call for Papers: There are no details for call for papers
Program Chairs: Colin Charles from Monty Program AB and Brian Aker.

Collaborate 11

I was recently struck by a problem which is unusual. In order to keep an eye on the database server I use nagios, cacti, merlin and some local scripts to monitor the database instance and ensure that it is working properly.  That normally works fine.  The different monitor processes do various things, one of which is to monitor the replication status of a slave, and warn me if the replication is not working or if it’s behind. This is done with the command SHOW SLAVE STATUS.

The server I was looking at runs some large local batch jobs aggregating data. Unfortunately, I was experiencing that replication was interfering with these batch jobs so decided to see if things would perform better if I stopped replication and let the batch …

This has really been a long debate as to which approach is more performance orientated, normalized databases or denormalized databases. So this article is a step on my part to figure out the right strategy, because neither one of these approaches can be rejected outright. I will start of by discussing the pros and cons of both the approaches. Pros and Cons of a Normalized database design. Normalized databases fair very well under conditions where the applications are write-intensive and the write-load is more than the read-load. This is because of the following reasons: Normalized tables are usually smaller and...

With OpenSQL Camp and FrOSCon being over for almost a week now, it's time to come up with a short summary. I traveled home on Monday morning and then took Tuesday off, so I had some catching up to do...

As for the past years, FrOSCon rocked again! According to the closing keynote, they had around 1.500 (unique) visitors and I had a great time there. I really enjoyed meeting all the old and new faces of the various Open Source communities. The lineup of speakers was excellent, Jon "maddog" Hall's keynote about "Free and Open Source Software in the Developing World" was quite insightful and inspiring.

Most of the time I was busy with speaking at and …