Maximize your strengths, minimize your weaknesses. You can apply this approach to many things in life, I apply it to describing and using MySQL the product, and it’s components. The Query Cache like many features in MySQL, and indeed features in many different RDBMS products (don’t get me started on Oracle *features*) have relative benefits. In one context it can be seen as ineffective, or even detrimental to your performance, however it’s course grain nature makes it both trivial to disable dynamically (SET GLOBAL query_cache_size=0;), and also easy to get basic statistics on current performance (SHOW GLOBAL STATUS LIKE ‘QCache%’;) to determine effectiveness and action appropriately.

Mark Callaghan tests the query cache. "The query cache has had an interesting history with MySQL. I don't have much experience with it. I might want to use it in the future so I enabled it during a run of sysbench readonly on an 8-core server. The results are fascinating."

Informative post about backup and restore procedures, disaster recovery plans and load balancing tips.

Install isolated side-by-side MySQL instances right the first time with this time-saving virtual manager. Jeremy Zawodny tests MySQL Sandbox with a thorough description.

Giuseppe Maxia speaks at the April 2009 Los Angeles MySQL User Group about MySQL Sandbox and how to use it for simple and complex sandbox scenarios.

SPIDER Storage Engine: Database Sharding by Storage Engine by Kentoku SHIBA (ST Global.,Inc) The official conference page is at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/6837 Download the presentation file (zip archive) at http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/21/SPIDER%20Storage%20Engine_%20Database%20Sharding%20by%20Storage%20Engine%20Presentation.zip

Presented at the April 2009 Los Angeles MySQL User Group (see http://www.meetup.com/lamysql/calendar/9882984/ for more details) BIO: Andrew Aksyonoff is a Russian geek who created Sphinx back in 2001 and has been working on the code base ever since. Fluent in C++, less so in human speak, but keeps trying. He lives in Russia. TOPIC: Sphinx Just how do you implement keyword search through that 10-million-row InnoDB table? Meet Sphinx, a blazing fast open source engine that makes it a breeze. We'll talk about what it is, how it works, and when and why use it. INTERESTING FACT: Meetup search is powered by Sphinx.

The Boston MySQL User Group got Keith Murphy to speak at the June User Group meeting, about backups. Direct play the video at:http://technocation.org/node/559/playDirect download the video (351 MB) at:http://technocation.org/node/559/downloadLinks referred to in the presentation:MyLVMBackup by

Presented at MySQL Camp 2009 by Ewen Fortune of Percona. XtraDB is a storage engine for MySQL based on the InnoDB storage engine, designed to better scale on modern hardware, and including a variety of other features useful in high performance environments. It is fully backwards compatible, and so can be used as a drop-in replacement for standard InnoDB. XtraDB includes all of InnoDBs robust, reliable ACID-compliant design and advanced MVCC architecture, and builds on that solid foundation with more features, more tunability, more metrics, and more scalability. In particular, it is designed to scale better on many cores, to use memory more efficiently, and to be more convenient and useful. The new features are especially designed to alleviate some of InnoDBs limitations. We will talk about current status of XtraDB and directions of development.

Optimizing MySQL Performance with ZFS by Allan Packer (Sun Microsystems), Neelakanth Nadgir (Sun Microsystems) The official conference page is at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/7121 which includes the description

presented at MySQL Camp 2009.

Giuseppe Maxia and Sheeri K. Cabral give an introduction to what MySQL is. A PDF of the slides can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Tour.pdf (21 Mb). Links referred to in the presentation, or related to the presentation: The MySQL forge can be found at http://forge.mysql.com, which contains the Wiki (http://forge.mysql.com/wiki) as well as the worklog, code snippets and tools for use with MySQL. Planet MySQL is an aggregate of MySQL-related blogs, including Giuseppe's and mine -- http://planet.mysql.com The website for the 2009 MySQL User Conference and Expo is at http://mysqlconf.com. MySQL Camp is a free conference at the same time as the User Conference. The details, including the schedule, are at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLCamp2009Sessions. A collection of User Group videos is at http://technocation.org/category/areas/user-group. All the videos, including User Group ones, are  []

At the March 2009 Boston MySQL User Group meeting, Jacob Nikom of MITs Lincoln Laboratory presented Optimizing Concurrent Storage and Retrieval Operations for Real-Time Surveillance Applications. In the middle of the talk, Jacob said he sometimes calls what he did in this application as real-time data warehousing, which was so accurate I decided to give that title to this blog post. The slides can be downloaded in PDF format (1.3 Mb) at http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/Concurrent_database_performance_02.pdf. This talk discussed how to do real-time retrieval operations while doing concurrent high volume insertion, including: * How to keep up with 1.5 Mb/second per server incoming data stream * * server hardware comparison between a multi-core AMD Opteron and a multi core Intel Xeon * MySQL/Postgres comparison * schema design * design of the storage/retrieval benchmark *  []

The 2009 MySQL Camp keynote speech was delivered by Brian Aker and entitled "The State of Open Source Databases".

Beginner's Guide to Website Performance with MySQL and memcached Adam Donnison (Sun Microsystems) Download the slides in .ODP format at http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/21/Beginner%27s%20Guide%20to%20Website%20Performance%20with%20MySQL%20and%20memcached%20Presentation.odp The description, taken from the official conference page is at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/7009 Memcached is a distributed memory object caching system that is getting a lot of press at the moment for its ability to provide a high-performance front-end for database applications. Sure, memcached can do wonders, but where is it most effective and what are the pain points? When a site grows the site administrator starts to worry about how to maintain performance as the hit count rises. Should extra hardware be thrown at the problem synchronisation issues start to rear their heads. Writing caching code is  []

Starring Sakila: Data Warehousing Explained, Illustrated, and Subtitled Roland Bouman (XCDSQL Solutions / Strukton Rail), Matt Casters (Pentaho Corp.) Slides are at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/Starring_Sakila_-_A_Data_Warehouse_Mini-Tutorial From the official conference description at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/7016 MySQL is increasingly being adopted for Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DWH) purposes. Although the technology as such is far from new, there is still quite noticeable confusion and misunderstanding among MySQL Developers and DBAs surrounding key BI/DWH concepts such as denormalization, dimensional modeling, ETL, and OLAP. Even if the concepts are clear, it is still not clear what the purpose is of a datawarehouse, and what problems it can solve. The Sakila database is a simple, publicly available sample database of a DVD rental business,  []

Part 2 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial. Part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Uv_4I9gus The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf. From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682: We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method. Examples: Understanding the query_cache% system variables and Qcache% status variables helps us learn about the query cache—what it is, when it is used, how to examine query cache efficiency, how to tune the query cache. This relates to the GLOBAL_VARIABLES and GLOBAL_STATUS system  []

Part 1 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial. Part 2 is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3IBVsYGdtA The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf. From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682: We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method. Examples: Understanding the query_cache% system variables and Qcache% status variables helps us learn about the query cache—what it is, when it is used, how to examine query cache efficiency, how to tune the query cache. This relates to the GLOBAL_VARIABLES and GLOBAL_STATUS system  []

Tricks and Tradeoffs of Deploying MySQL Clusters in the Cloud Thorsten von Eicken (RightScale, Inc) The slides at http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event/21/Tricks%20and%20Tradeoffs%20of%20Deploying%20MySQL%20Clusters%20in%20the%20Cloud%20Presentation The official conference page is at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/6912 Unfortunately, this video was cutoff at the beginning, but most of the presentation is available.

Presented at the 2009 MySQL Camp: Grand Tour of the Information Schema and its Applications by Roland Bouman Description: The following topics will be covered: - Introduction of the information schema and its components - How to generate WIKI documentation from the information schema - Generating code (triggers, SPs) to maintain a rich history database - Creating a stored procedure to check violated foreign key constraints - Creating a stored procedure to create federated tables