While I prepared for my Hands-On Lab about the Performance Schema at MySQL Connect last year, one of the things that occurred to me was how difficult it was quickly getting an overview of which consumers, instruments, actors, etc. are actually enabled. For the consumers things are made more complicated as the effective setting also depends on parents in the hierarchy. So my thought was: “How difficult can it be to write a stored procedure that outputs a tree of the hierarchies.” Well, simple enough in principle, but trying to be general ended up making it into a lengthy project and as it was a hobby project, it often ended up being put aside for more urgent tasks.

However here around eight months later, it is starting to shape up. While there …

I will be hosting a Birds of a Feather Session at MySQL Connect on Saturday, Sep 29, 7:00 PM – 8:00 PM – Hilton San Francisco – Golden Gate 8. This is an open discussion with you about what you would like to see from the MySQL Community Team, MySQL, and Oracle in the future. After it concludes, we can hit the Community Reception.

The original description of the Community BOF as provided to the Content Committee.

Come meet with the MySQL Community Team for a discussion about MySQL and the MySQL Community. This is an open session, so you can make suggestions, ask the questions you are having trouble getting answered, provide feedback, network, and help direct where the future of the MySQL Community will go. You will be able to interact with the Community Team on everything from contributions to downloads. How can we best support …

The improved Performance Schema in MySQL 5.6 provides a new way of investigating issues in the database. Many issues that previously required tools such as strace, dtrace, etc. can now be investigated directly from inside MySQL in a platform independent way using standard SQL statements.

The Performance Schema is enabled by default starting from the latest milestone release, 5.6.6. You have instruments which are the things you can measure, and consumers which are those that use the measurements. Not all instruments and consumers are enabled out of the box, however once the plugin is enabled, individual instruments and consumers can be switched on and off dynamically.

As an example take the case mentioned in What’s the innodb main thread really doing? where the main InnoDB thread appears to be stuck in “doing …

Register today, SPETEMBER 7th, to save $200 on the registration for the MySQL Connect Conference. This will be the biggest technical conference on MySQL. There will be tracks on Application Development, Architecture and Design, Cloud Computing, Database Administration, High Availability, and Performance and Scalability. Please check out the content catalog and register today!

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When you have a non-trivial database installation, you will inevitably sooner or later encounter performance related issues ranging from a query not executing as fast as desirable to complete meltdowns where the database does not respond at all.

Until MySQL 5.5 the tools available to investigate what is going on inside MySQL were somewhat limited. Some of the tools were:

• The slow and general query logs
• The status counters available through SHOW [SESSION|GLOBAL] STATUS
• Storage engine status, e.g. SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS
• The EXPLAIN command to investigate the query plan of a SELECT statement
• SHOW PROFILE to profile one or more queries
• The MySQL error log

All of these tools are very useful, but also have their limitations, for example the SHOW STATUS mainly consists of counters that does not provide much insight into what is happening …

In the last weekend of September, MySQL Connect 2012 will take place in San Francisco as part of Oracle OpenWorld. MySQL Connect is a two day event that allows the attendees to focus on MySQL with the possibility to add on to Oracle OpenWorld or JavaOne.

I will be running the Hands-On Lab session Improving Performance with the MySQL Performance Schema (HOL10472) with the following abstract:

The Performance Schema is a tool first introduced in MySQL 5.5. It gives access to information about …

Congratulations to David Swain and Antoniya Statelova who won passes to the MySQL Connect Conference at the Boston MySQL Users Group meeting tonight.

Did you ever wonder how the big companies run things behind the scenes? Come to the MySQL Connect Conference and learn from the best. There are over seventy sessions and the following session are from MySQL customers. And please note the early registration discount window is closing!

• Sheeri Cabral — Database Scaling at Mozilla andGoogle-Hacking MySQL
• Bradley Kuszmaul Chief Architect , MIT — Solving the Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL
• Andrew Aksyonoff Sphinx Technologies Inc — Full-Text Search with MySQL and Sphinx
• Daniel Austin Chief Architect , PayPal, Inc. — Big Data Is a Big Scam (Most of the Time)
• Eric Grancher DBA , Cern — CERN’s MySQL “as a Service” Deployment with Oracle VM: Empowering Users
• VADYM TKACHENKO Percona Inc — MySQL and Solid-State Drives: Usage …

MySQL Connect is approaching and I started making note of the sessions I am going to want to attend. There are 77 great sessions and the following ten caught my interest. Hopefully I will see you in some of the following:

1. BOF8978 – MySQL Cluster: From Zero to One Billion in Five Easy Steps

   Bernhard Ocklin – Director MySQL Cluster, Oracle
   Andrew Morgan – MySQL Senior Product Manager, Oracle
   Matthew Keep – MySQL Product Manager, Oracle

   Of course it takes more than five steps to scale to more than one billion queries per minute, but the new configuration …