• Damien Seguy of Nexen Services presents
• easiest session of all (phew, that's a relief)
• clever SQL recipes
• tweaking SQL queries
• shows an example where SELECT is ORDERED by a column that is actually an enum.
  • an enum is both a string and a number
  • sorted by number
  • displayed as string
  • can be sorted by string if it's cast as string
• compact column
  • compacts storage
  • faster to search
  • if (var)char is turned into enum, some space can be saved, shows example
• random order
  • order by rand(1) - obviously
  • the integer parameter is actually a seed
  …

• Tom Hanlon of MySQL presents
• monitoring tool basics
  • SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST
  • SHOW GLOBAL STATUS
  • SHOW GLOBAL VARIABLES
• basic tools
  • mysqladmin is provided with the server
    • mysqladmin -i 10 extended status: will repeat the same command every 10 seconds. Pipe through grep "and smoke it" (bad pun, hah hah)
    • -r: show only changed values
  • MySQL Administrator
• cacti
  • rrdtool based network graphing tool
  • uses snmp
  • PHP apache and MySQL based solution
  • MySQL plugins, download and install
  • "poller" gathers data and populates the graphs
  • someone offers …

• Tom Hanlon of MySQL presents
• Benchmarking tools
  • mysqlslap (with MySQL 5.1)
  • sql-bench
  • supersmack - Jeremy Zawodny's tool
  • Apache Bench (combined with some sample PHP scripts)
  • MySQL's benchmark() function
  • …

• Paul McCullagh presents
• BLOB
  • invented by Jim Starkey
  • Basic Large OBject
  • Binary Large OBject
  • photos, films, mp4 files, pdfs, etc
• how MySQL handles BLOBs
  • mysql client send buffer -> receive buffer on the server (max_allowed_packet)
  • streaming a BLOB
    • continuous data stream
    • stream BLOB data directly in and out of the database
    • store BLOBs of any size (>4GB) in the database
    • create a scalable back-end that can handle any throughput and storage requirements. Wouldn't need to know in advance how big the database will get
    • provide an open system that can be used by all engines
    • provide extensions for …

• Jay Pipes, Tobias Asplund
• Finding out the number of rows that would have been returned (MyISAM and InnoDB)
  • SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and FOUND_ROWS()
  • COUNT(*)
  • MEMORY table
  • if query cache is on, then it makes no difference
  • if it's off
    • Memory MyISAM is fastest
    • FOUND_ROWS() is slightly slower than count(*)
  • more in the slides that I'll add later
• quite a lot of humor, these guys are fun
• query union vs index_merge union
  • SELECT … WHERE a UNION SELECT … WHERE b
    vs
    SELECT … WHERE a AND b
  • index_merge wins
• composite index vs index merge
  …

• Phil Hilderbrand of thePlatform for Media, Inc presents
• classic partitioning
  • old school - union in the archive tables
  • auto partitioning and partition pruning
  • great for data warehousing
  • query performance improved
  • maintenance is clearly improved
• design issues in applying partitioning to OLTP (On-Line Transaction Processing)
  • often id driven access vs date driven access
  • 1 big clients could be 80% of the whole database, so there's a difficulty selecting partitioning schemes
• partitioning is only supported starting from MySQL 5.1
• understanding the …

• Robert Hodges from Continuent presents
• About Continuent
  • leading provider of open source database availability and scaling solutions
• solutions
  • uni/cluster - multi-master database clustering that replicates data across multiple databases and load balances reads
  • uses "database virtualization"
• scale-out design motivation
  • protection from db and site failures
  • continuous operation during upgrades
• how come not everyone has it already?
• creating identical replicas across different hosts is hard
  • Brewer's conjecture
• trade-offs
  • DDL support
  • inconsistent reads between replicas
  • deadlocks
  • sequences …

Yesterday I presented “Best Practices for Database Administrators” at the MySQL User Conference and Expo. I was successful in streaming the live video on www.ustream.tv, and you can see it in totality at http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/352479.

The slides are available in pdf form. And here are some of the links I spoke about:

cacti
nagios
rt

MySQL 5.0 manual
…

Jonathan Schwartz’s Keynote at the 2008 MySQL Conference can be played directly in your browser or you can download the 147MB .wmv file. (Please do not download the movie on the conference wireless system!)

I finally realized who Jonathan Schwartz reminds me of:

That’s right, comedian and magician Penn Jillette.

Schwartz started by saying, “enough of this free software stuff!” It got lots of laughs. He started to talk about Sun’s agenda, and mentioned that MySQL and Sun had similar values, as well as similar dysfunctions as well — particularly that each engineer has his/her own opinion.

But Schwartz goes on in earnest to say “The …

• Suicide
  • having no backups
  • depending on slaves for backup
  • keeping backups on same SAN
  • having a single DBA - Frank didn't like this one at all
  • not keeping binlogs
• Restoring from backup
  • how much time?
  • uncompressed backup ready to mount?
  • separate network for recovery?
• In Fotolog, 1TB of data was severely hit.
  • first problem: backup was highly compressed (tar.gz)
  • uncompressing took hours
  • so keep uncompressed backups (at least last N days)
  • it should be mountable, rather than transferable
• Frank going over recovery modes at …