Mark Leith, on of the MySQL Support Team managers wrote some time ago a very nice utility I use often called Statpack.

My use of Statpack is very simple. Take two snaphots of SHOW GLOBAL STATUS and compare to produce a text based version of the statistics.

Over time I’ve grown to love it’s simplicity, but notice a number of shortcomings. Being open source there is always the ability to modify, improve and give back. This post is more about detailing those little annoyances that I’d like to improve, or see improved. It is also a means to collate points into one location that I often forget about over time.

I welcome any input, and specifically help in this open source venture.

Here is my wish list that I can currently remember. I do plan to action, time permitting.

1. In Statement Activity, the total percentages are great to …

Baron got a great amount of response from his 50 things to know before migrating Oracle to MySQL. I’m glad I invited him as a fellow MySQL colleague to my presentation to the Federal Government on Best Practices for Migrating to MySQL from Oracle and SQL Server for his inspiration.

Oracle will always be a more featured product then MySQL. There are however features that MySQL has that Oracle does not. While I’ve got a draft of a list of my own, I have several hundred incomplete drafts.

One of these features I was able to demonstrate to a client is the ability to have multiple VALUES clauses for a single INSERT statement. For example.

INSERT INTO t1(c1) VALUES (1), (2), (3), (4), (5);

…

Recently I came across another configuration option I’d not heard of before. I profess to not know them all, however I do know when I find something unusual. If you are a beginner DBA, learn what is normal and expected, and identify what is out of the normal, investigate, research and question if necessary.

I gave away a MySQL Administrator’s Book based on seeing a configuration with safe-show-database, an option I’d not seen before, and then requesting people giving basic configuration options in that situation.

The latest is max_tmp_tables. So, what does the manual say for this option. I quote:

The maximum number of temporary tables a client can keep open at the same …

I have been working recently with Matt Yonkovit to get Waffle Grid cloud enabled with Amazon Web Services (AWS).

An initial version of Waffle Grid Cream - Version 0.5 release is now available.

We have elected to create one AMI for now, that is ready to be configured as either a MySQL Server, a memcached server, or as in the following example both. For this first version, we have also not configured MySQL or memcache, but rather provide a virgin Waffle Grid ready server for developers to experiment and benchmark with.

Future releases will include custom AMI’s and the automated ability to register new memcached servers with the Waffle Grid enabled MySQL server.

Instance Creation

We assume you have created an …

I discovered while compiling Wafflegrid today that by default, the Ubuntu binaries for memcached are not-multithreaded.

Following the installation of memcached from apt-get and libmemcached I ran memslap for:

$ memslap -s localhost
    Threads connecting to servers 1
    Took 1.633 seconds to load data

$ memstat -s localhost
Listing 1 Server

Server: localhost (11211)
     pid: 23868
     uptime: 54
     time: 1244575816
     version: 1.2.2
     pointer_size: 32
     rusage_user: 0.90000
     rusage_system: 0.120000
     curr_items: 10000
     total_items: 10000
     bytes: 5430000
     curr_connections: 1
     total_connections: 3
     connection_structures: 2
     cmd_get: 0
     cmd_set: 10000
     get_hits: 0
     get_misses: 0 …

Seem’s the year Sun had for improving MySQL, and with an entire new 5.4 branch the development team could not fix the autoconf and compile dependencies that has been in MySQL for all the years I’ve been compiling MySQL. Drizzle has got it right, thanks to the great work of Monty Taylor.

I’m working on the Wafflegrid AWS EC2 AMI’s for Matt Yonkovit and while compiling 5.1 was straight forward under Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid, compiling 5.4 was more complicated.

For MySQL 5.1 I needed only to do the following:

apt-get install -y build-essential
apt-get install libncurses5-dev
./configure
make
make install

For MySQL 5.4, I …

XtraBackup is an Open Source online (non-blockable) backup solution for the InnoDB and XtraDB storage engines. It works with both MySQL 5.0 and 5.1 (and possibly 5.4 as well) and is distributed under the GPLv2.

Some weeks ago Vadim announced the availability of xtrabackup-0.7, stating that they consider it stable enough now to label this version a "Release Candidate". I've been maintaining RPM packages of xtrabackup on the fine openSUSE Build Service for quite some time now, RPMs of 0.7 for a number of distributions are now …

The OpenSQL Camp 2009 web site is now ready for business, I've updated various pages and added some more information about the call for papers. I've also set up a Twitter account (no way without one nowadays, right?), which might also play an important role in the voting/rating of talks later on (Giuseppe came up with an interesting proposal for that).

So we're now seeking your input! Let me quote from the web pages directly:

OpenSQL Camp is a free conference of, by, and for the open-source database community of users and developers. The first OpenSQLCamp 2008 took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, …

Today I received a confirmation that I will be giving a talk about "Working for a virtual company" in the main conference track of the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) in St. Augustin, Germany (August 22nd+23rd). Yay! I've been giving talks at every FrOSCon since its inception in 2006, so I am happy that I will be able to continue this tradition. FrOSCon is really a gem among the various Linux and Open Source Conferences in Germany — it takes place at a nice venue, the weather is usually warm and sunny and the conference organization is just great. And they of course always have a good lineup of speakers and OSS projects! As for the last years we (Sun/MySQL) will support the event by sponsoring and we will likely have a booth there as well. My colleague Joerg Moellenkamp also …

For any production MySQL Database system, running RAID is a given these days. Do you know what RAID your database is? Are you sure?. Ask for quantifiable reproducible output from your systems provider or your System Administrator.

As a consultant I don’t always know the specific tools for the clients deployed H/W, but I ask the question. On more the one occasion the actual result differed from the clients’ perspective or what they were told, and twice I’ve discovered that clients when asked if their RAID was running in a degraded mode, it actually was and they didn’t know.

You can read about various benchmarks at MySQL blogs such as BigDBAHead and MySQL Performance Blog however getting first hand experience of your actually RAID …