Last week I was at LinuxTag in Berlin. It was a great event. This time it was my second year there. I really enjoyed the first year and so I did this time as well. I spoke to many people, learned new interesting stuff and my todo list got again somehow longer And I believe that I also showed some interesting stuff to the people at our booth. I was speaking about GNOME Shell to anybody who happened to be nearby and everybody liked it! Good work, GNOME guys!
I’m glad I was able to be there and I want to share few pictures from the event with you, so even if you couldn’t make it there, you’ll see at least a little bit of what we were doing. We had a lot of fun

This isn’t really a problem with iostat(1M) – it’s a great tool for system administrators to understand the usage of their resources. But the applications are far, far away from the disks – and have a complex file system in-between. For application analysis, iostat(1M) may provide clues that disks could be causing issues, but you really want to measure at the file system level to directly associate latency with the application, and to be inclusive of

As announced, I held a short talk on switching from MySQL community edition (especially 5.1) to MariaDB (currently 5.2.6) at this years LinuxTag in Berlin.

Here are the (German) slides for reference:

(In case you cannot see the embedded presentation, you can also click here)

Please note: There are a lot of good English slides around. If you want give a talk on MariaDB, the “Beginner’s Guide” might be a good start:

A Beginner’s Guide to MariaDB Presentation

Why would one want to do this, you may ask?  Well, for starters, it makes a great ‘canary-in-the-coal-mine‘ in regards to backwards compatibility!

For Drizzle, we’ve created some tables (via the randgen’s data generator if you are curious), saved a copy of the datadir, and then created a test case that uses said datadir for the test server.  The test executes some simple SQL queries to make sure we can read the tables properly.  This way, if we ever do something to either the server or .dfe format (data format exchange – had a most enlightening conversation with the team about this

At Open Database Camp in Sardinia last week, there was a hackfest to try to get replication working from MySQL to MongoDB. In only 2 hours and 45 minutes, a small group of hackers did it! This week I interview Flavio Percoco, the MongoDB guru on the team, who talked about getting replication from MySQL to MongoDB working via Tungsten Replicator (which we talked about on last week's podcast).

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It has only been a few days since the 0.2.0 release of mydumper but there have been some big changes since then.  I will try and go over them all here.

Mydumper 0.2.1

Mydumper 0.2.1 has been released today, many thanks for all those who have been testing the trunk source, the feedback has gone a long way to making fixes and improvements to mydumper.  You can download the source for it here.

Myloader

A few days ago Mark Callaghan asked about restoring mydumper backups.  There is of course the great

Please note that when upgrading from a version previous to 4.5  to this one, it is required that MONyog detects the replication topology of registered servers before the ‘registered servers’ page can display. This may take a few minutes with a large number of registered servers. Please be patient for as long. Note that this delay will only happen once.

Changes (as compared to 4.5) include:

Features:
* This release focuses on improving performance of the MONyog built-in HTTP daemon. You will find up to 10 times performance improvements for most MONyog pages. This has been achieved by internal code optimizations, use of compression (if browser supports) and minification/optimization of HTML, Javascript, CSS and graphics.

Bug fixes:
* Prepared statements were not

https://code.launchpad.net/~stewart/drizzle/json-interface/+merge/59859

Currently a very early version of course, but it’s there in trunk if you want to play with it. Just have libcurl and libevent installed and you can submit queries via HTTP and JSON. Of course, the next steps are getting a true non-sql interface going and seeing how people go with it.

I’ve used Vertica, a commercial column-based database storage engine, and was reasonably impressed. During O’Reilly MySQL conference last month, I checked out Infobright’s vendor booth and talked with some users. I became curious and wanted to test it out. Infobright has a free community version (ICE Infobright Community Edition)of its column-based storage engine that works with MySQL, which was what I used for my testing. I have no relationship with Infobright whatsoever, I happen to think that column-based storage can be a potentially disruptive technology in the BI/DW field. I’d love to hear your comments/experiences.

Here are some noteworthy points:

1. Setup is pretty easy. You can follow steps here. Note that the package has most relavant MySQL tools.

I just sent an e-mail to the MariaDB announce list (a low-traffic list to which you should subscribe if you’re only interested in important news) the release announcement for MariaDB 5.2.6. The announcement has much more information, as do the release notes and changelog.

Much of the project’s focus over the past weeks has been on the 5.3 and 5.5 series, as beta releases are something we’d like to do very soon. Add to this the continued discussions of potential 5.6 work initially started in Lisbon and the

The quiz presented poses with an uncommon, though valid SQL syntax: one is allowed to use quoted name aliases. Thus, it is valid to write:

SELECT Name AS 'n', Continent AS 'c' FROM countries

But what does the above mean? Let’s see the results of our three questions:

Question #1

SELECT
  id,
  Name AS 'n',
  Continent AS 'c'
FROM
  countries
ORDER BY
  c
;
+----+--------------------------+---------------+
| id | n                        | c             |
+----+--------------------------+---------------+
| 15 | North Korea              | Asia          |
| 12 | Nepal                    | Asia          |
| 11 | Norway                   | Europe       

Here’s a quiz for you. The real query I witnessed was very complicated. I’ve simplified it, but kept a confusing alias. Can you answer the following three questions? Are they even valid?

Given the following countries table data:

+----+------+--------------------------+---------------+------------+
| id | Code | Name                     | Continent     | Population |
+----+------+--------------------------+---------------+------------+
|  1 | ANT  | Netherlands Antilles     | North America |     217000 |
|  2 | MNP  | Northern Mariana Islands | Oceania       |      78000 |
|  3 | NAM  | Namibia                  | Africa        |    1726000 |
|  4 | NCL  | New Caledonia            | Oceania       |    

If you happen to be around at this years LinuxTag 2011 in Berlin/Germany, you are invited to attend my short talk on MariaDB as a drop-in replacement for MySQL. The talk focusses on differences between MySQL Community Edition and MariaDB (e.g. XtraDB, Aria, userstats), shows some features live and explains how to switch. I’ll probably post the slides here afterwards.

The talk will be held in German and is scheduled for Friday, the 13th of May, 16:30. The official announcement can be found here.

Yesterday I posted results from some MySQL benchmarks I had been doing on a large server. In this post I'd like to list 4 important fixes that were done to avoid bad performance:

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