Diamond Notes

What is in the Sun buyout for the MySQL person?

• Performance and Scaling (indicating that they will be working on running MySQL on higher-end hw)
• Support
• Marketplace (partner “ecosystem” with powerful sales channel)

Design Priorities

Reliability (bugs fixed in 5.1: 997 in 2007 plus 386 in 2008)

5.1 GA release by end of June

Performance

5.1.24rc shows an improvement of 10-15% in throughput versus 5.0

Ease of Use

MySQL Workbench GA today

Awards

Applications of the year

Facebook, Virgin Mobile France and Ebay

Partners of the year

Zmanda, Microsoft, and Computacenter

Community Members of the Year

Code contributer - Baron Schwartz

Quality contributer - Diego Medina

Community Advocate - Sheeri Cabral

Overall, much of the talk is general market talk.  There is quite a bit of talk about how a major Sun commitment to scale MySQL on larger servers.  This is the one thing that I would really like to Sun/MySQL follow through on.  Only time will tell.

The conference kicks off tomorrow morning.  Tonight we had the community dinner at a Mexican restaurant which was a great chance to meet with a number of people.  I would start listing them but I would forget people.  Jonathan Schwartz stopped by and Monty Widenius was there also.  It was really cool getting to meet so many people that you have only read about online.

Afterwards many people ended up back at the Hyatt where the conference center is located.  I finally rolled off to the room at midnight after talking to so many people that there is no way I can keep everyone straight in my head.  Oh well, I will try.

Tomorrow is tutorials and the sessions start Tuesday.  I am thinking about blogging from each session about the ongoing session.  If you aren’t here you should be!! If you are reading this from home it is not too early to begin planning for next year.

I came across this this morning:

http://www.cio.com/article/333613/Sun_Claims_Big_Leap_with_MySQL_Upgrade_Next_Week

This certainly seems to indicate the 5.1 will be released during the Users Conference as GA.

Ironically, Thursday night, while having dinner with Baron, Peter Z and Vadim (no..I wasn’t interviewing for Percona!!) we had a brief discussion about this very topic.  I think everyone agreed that we wouldn’t be surprised if it was released next week.

For the summer issue of MySQL Magazine (http://www.mysqlzine.net) I have a writer who has kindly volunteered to conducting a survey of current practices, job responsibilities and salaries. Before the survey is put online it would be very beneficial to get input on questions for the survey.

Sample questions:

* how many servers do you manage

* do you have any mysql certifications

The more input we get from the community at this stage the better the survey will be.  Please take the time to put some thought into this and post at least one possible question!

This is a little simpler, but iti s good to cover this system variable for the administrators who are just starting out. In your my.cnf (or my.ini on Windows) file you need to specify the maximum number of connections (clients) that are allowed to connect to your MySQL server at one time. You will want to set it at a reasonable level for your system load. Don’t over-inflate as it does use an (admittedly fairly small) amount of memory.

As an example, if you want to allow a maximum of 400 connections to your server the following would be in your [mysqld] section:

max_connections = 400

I haven’t been writing much lately. In fact, I think this may be the longest gap I have had in the last year between postings. And this isn’t some meaty MySQL post either. Two days ago I got back from a nice trip to Seattle with my wife and youngest child. So the two coast-to-coast flights in six days was preparation for my next trip tomorrow morning. I will be heading to Santa Clara/San Jose for a meeting (you know .. put on by the company some people think are paying me ) with Kickfire to take a long look at the MySQL data warehousing product they are bringing to market soon. This will be my first hands on experience with the product and I am looking forward to it. Afterwards I think I and the others involved will have a much better idea of what Kickfire is going to be able to produce.

So when I get home on the 18th I will have flow four times across the country in two weeks. Did I mention I just love being shoved in a long metal tube with more than a hundred people I don’t know with my knees shoved up around my neck and the person sitting next to me probably sick (oh wait..that has been me this time )?

Looking forward to the conference. Look me up if you want! Looking forward to meeting some of the readers of the magazine.

I finally get to talk a little about a company that I have been having discussions with since either December or November (can’t remember actually). I posted a small taste about Kickfire last week when it was revealed that they are one of the major sponsors of the MySQL Users Conference.

Well, I finally get to write a little more.

Kickfire will be bringing a revolutionary product out this year. It is a MySQL appliance that contains a new storage engine and the equivalent of a graphics accelerator chip for your SQL read queries. And yes, that is really what it is. The hardware component parallelizes query processing and brings massive performance gains to your reporting and data warehouse setup. The software component employs column store and compression to minimize disk I/O. It is a fascinating paradigm shift in thought about how we deal with large dataset issues.

I have seen tests comparing what will be their product to other data warehousing products. It is phenomenal the performance of the product, but what will really blow you away is the price differences between the competing products. While Kickfire hasn’t released their final pricing, testing results or a release date (in fact, their website isn’t even up yet) it won’t be much longer and it will be worth the wait.

They will be presenting their technology at the conference so it will be a good chance for any conference attendees to get a first hand look at Kickfire and their coming products.

Don’t forget on the 15th of this month the Spring issue of MySQL Magazine comes out. I have a full length article about Kickfire in the magazine.

Sometimes things go bump in the night and break. There are various ways to fix tables when this happens. From the mysql command line you can do the following:

> check table table_name;

This does a check of the table structure and contents. It works on both MyISAM and InnoDB tables.

> repair table table_name;

This will correct corrupted tables. It only works for MyISAM tables.

> analyze table table_name;

This updates information that the server stores about the tables. This information is used by the server optimizer when determining the best choice for query execution. This will work for both InnoDB and MyISAM.

> optimize table table_name;

The optimize table command will compact and optimize a MyISAM table by creating a new copy of the table on the filesystem. While it is doing this it updates index statistics, and sorts the index pages themselves if necessary. optimize table will work for InnoDB but simply maps to an alter table command which performs the same essential operations.

Recently I came across something new (for me anyways). There are times when it can be useful to temporarily turn off binary logging. You can disable it in the my.cnf file, but that requires a daemon restart. Coming from the Reference Manual:

“A client that has the SUPER privilege can disable binary logging of its own statements by using a SET SQL_LOG_BIN=0 statement”

As a brief example, if I am loading a large table it could be good to disable logging before beginning the import.

mysql> SET SQL_LOG_BIN=0;

mysql> LOAD DATA INFILE ‘honking_big_file’ INTO BIG_TABLE;

I don’t know about you, but more than once I have started a large import and had /var fill up because of logging. Just remember, if you need the table replicated to a slave server this will defeat replication.

Hope that is useful.