I have been silent on the topic of this year’s MySQL conference, and really, silent in nearly all ways anyway. Today, as the MySQL Users Conference Conference and Expo 2009 starts up, some people will be wondering where I am, so I ought to at least answer that: I am skipping the conference this year.

As my wife can tell you, this is not a decision I’ve taken lightly, and I’ve gone back and forth on it for months and then down to the final days leading up to now. I’ve decided after much internal and external debate just to skip it all this year, including the side conferences and other stuff. Why? The reasons are basically:

• It’s my opinion that the “state of the art” with MySQL has not changed, so I am not really missing much technical content to further myself. There’s a lot of interesting stuff going on with Percona and Google’s work, but I largely follow that through blogs and mailing lists and …

I’ve just successfully configured Drizzle with the PHP Extension and successfully retrieve data to present on a web page.

Qudos to Eric Day for his work. I was able to identify a problem with the current tar release, and a quick confirmation on #drizzle at IRC confirmed a fix had already been commited.

I’m looking forward to evaluating WordPress and Drupal, two popular and common LAMP stack applications that run on MySQL, and to provide any feedback to the community for future support of Drizzle.

What is open source, production-quality, supported by a large vibrant community, and comes with full enterprise support ? - GlassFish and MySQL.

Did you know that GlassFish ...

• is the only open-source Java EE 5 compliant Application Server
• can be used to deploy Rails, Grails, and Django applications
• has 13x better price/performance than Dell/HP, and therefore a much lower TCO
• has an easy-to-use and intuitive web-based administration console
• has enterprise features like clustering/high availability, .NET-interoperable Web services, ...

Are you attending MySQL Users Conference 2009 …

What is open source, production-quality, supported by a large vibrant community, and comes with full enterprise support ? - GlassFish and MySQL.

Did you know that GlassFish ...

• is the only open-source Java EE 5 compliant Application Server
• can be used to deploy Rails, Grails, and Django applications
• has 13x better price/performance than Dell/HP, and therefore a much lower TCO
• has an easy-to-use and intuitive web-based administration console
• has enterprise features like clustering/high availability, .NET-interoperable Web services, ...

Are you attending MySQL Users Conference 2009 …

What is open source, production-quality, supported by a large vibrant community, and comes with full enterprise support ? - GlassFish and MySQL.

Did you know that GlassFish ...

• is the only open-source Java EE 5 compliant Application Server
• can be used to deploy Rails, Grails, and Django applications
• has 13x better price/performance than Dell/HP, and therefore a much lower TCO
• has an easy-to-use and intuitive web-based administration console
• has enterprise features like clustering/high availability, .NET-interoperable Web services, ...

Are you attending MySQL Users Conference 2009 …

Like most people, and with just over a week to go before the conference, I’m putting the finishing touchs on my various presentations.

First up for me, on Monday afternoon, is my tutorial: Scale Up, Scale Out, and High Availability: Solutions and Combinations.

What will be doing?

Very simply: Looking at every potential solution for maximum scalability and availability for your database environment.

If you are attending, be prepared to:

• Expand your mind as we think about scaling up.
• Expand your horizons as we think about scaling out.
• Divide and conquer, as we think about high-availability.

We’re not not hands on in this session – but I will expect you to be brains on!

When you have to evaluate a MySQL System & Environment, what questions do you ask in order to determine critical information about the environment and evaluate the business success and viability. You don’t have to be a consultant to ask these questions, ask them of your own environment. Do any of the answers shock or concern you?

I was prompted to write about this from a conversation with a colleague about “accepting risk”. His comment was, “every IT server on the planet is vulnerable regardless of best practices.”

Here is my list of questions for you based on an immediate response from this discussion?

Technology

• What is your full technology stack, i.e. Operating System, Database, Application Server, Development Language(s) and other essential components?
• What are the versions of these technologies?
• What new technologies or versions of existing technologies are you …

Today, while on the MySQL manual page, I typed in ’select’ in the search manual box to confirm the SELECT syntax.

The result was not what I expected, the “SELECT” command. Instead I only got two options “Speed of SELECT …” and “Optimizing SELECT and …”.

Ok, well that’s not what I want, there is a suggestion box to the right so I pick the top option “mysql select”. Not only is this worse with “Type Conversion in …”, “Searching on Two Keys” I also get 3 totally useless “Keymatch” records

Download MySQL -http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/
MySQL Training - http://www.mysql.com/training/ KeyMatch
Buy MySQL Enterprise -http://shop.mysql.com/enterprise/

I know in the past just entering ‘SELECT’ worked, because I’ve been presently writing tests on JOIN syntax and I wanted to link in my blog …

A new feature to MySQL Version 5 was the introduction of SQL_MODE to support STRICT… or TRADITIONAL values.

This feature enabled a closer compatibility to other RDBMS products. MySQL by default performs a number of silent data changes which do not help in providing a level of data integrity if you come from a more traditional background. MySQL by default represents these as warnings, while with an appropriate SQL_MODE, these are in turn treated as errors.

How does Drizzle handle this? Very simple. There is no SQL_MODE. By default Drizzle handling a strict mode of producing errors for any invalid data. The following are some test case examples showing the varying conditions.

Test Case

select version();
create database if not …

Continuing on from CPU, we turn our attention to Memory. One of the first steps when addressing a MySQL performance tuning problem is to perform a system audit of the physical hardware resources, then identify any obvious bottlenecks in these resources.

In auditing, I start with the ‘free’ command, the already used ‘vmstat’ command, the /proc/meminfo and /proc/sys/vm/swappiness files to get an indication of memory and swap resources. While we are looking at the Memory, the configuration of Swap is also very important. I will discuss this in more detail later.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3955       3838        117          0        402       2366
-/+ buffers/cache:       1069       2886
Swap:         1027          0 …