At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Farhan Mashraqi spoke about "Optimizing MySQL and InnoDB on Solaris 10 for World's Largest Photo Blogging Community". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008ThursdayNotes#Optimizing_MySQL_and_InnoDB_on_Solaris_10_for_World.27s_Largest_Photo_Blogging_Community

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Baron Schwartz spoke on "The MySQL Query Cache". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#The_MySQL_Query_Cache

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Phil Hildebrand spoke on "Applied Partitioning and Scaling Your Database System". Download the slides, see people's notes, and more on the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Applied_Partitioning_and_Scaling_Your_Database_System.

At the 2008 MySQL User Conference and Expo, Robert Hodges spoke on "Portable Scale-out Benchmarks for MySQL". Download slides and see links to blog postings at the MySQL Forge Wiki at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008WednesdayNotes#Portable_Scale-out_Benchmarks_for_MySQL

Welcome to the 72nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.
Oracle OpenWorld (OOW) is over, and Lucas Jellema of the AMIS Technology blog notes the OOW Content Catalog has been updated with most of the presentations available for download.
On his way home from OOW, Chris Muir of the appropriately titled One Size Doesn’t Fit All blog notes how OOW and the Australian Oracle User Group Conference and OOW compare with regards to 99% fewer attendees in AUSOUG Perth conference - from 45k down to 350. …

So, O’Reilly’s ONLamp.com has published the “Top 10 MySQL Best Practices” at http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2002/07/11/MySQLtips.html. Sadly, I find most “best practice” list do not thoroughly explain the “why” enough so that people can make their own decisions.
For instance, #3 is “Protect the MySQL installation directory from access by other users.” I was intrigued at what they would consider the “installation” directory. By reading the tip, they actually mean the data directory. They say nothing of the log directory, nor that innodb data files may be in different places than the standard myisam data directories.  More »

So, the article at:
http://mysql-dba-journey.blogspot.com/2007/11/mysql-and-vmware.html says:
Don’t get seduced to the dark side unless you understand all the issues.
And that’s wonderful and all, but….what are all the issues? What are some of the issues? Is it related more to VMware, or more to MySQL, or more to MySQL on VMware? Is it something like “VMware isn’t stable” or more like “load testing on vmware isn’t always going to work because you won’t have full resources”?  More »

Please share good ideas implemented poorly you have seen.

For example, in the past 24 hours I have come across 2 such beasts:

1) A company doing vertical scaling based on username. Unsurprisingly, they found that 70% of their users had usernames beginning with 1 of 2 letters. A better idea? Do it by last 2 digits of a user id. That way, even though users are created and perhaps deleted all the time, the distribution is effectively random. Language is not.

With 2 significant figures, you can divide vertically many different ways — 1 large table of all the uids, 2 tables of uids ending in 00-49 and 50-99, 4 tables, 10 tables, 25 tables, 50 tables, 100 tables. This eliminates the need for a separate table for each user.

For example, the online dating site I work for uses this method for messaging. So a user’s inbox is just one part of a table. If the user has uid 12345, their “Inbox” is the result of …

SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS shows current InnoDB status, including deadlocks. I was thinking a while back it would be nice to have a log of all deadlocks. Well, I got my answer:

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/innodb-monitor.html

To cause the standard InnoDB Monitor to write to the standard output of mysqld, use the following SQL statement:

CREATE TABLE innodb_monitor (a INT) ENGINE=INNODB;

The monitor can be stopped by issuing the following statement:

DROP TABLE innodb_monitor;