Ronald Bradford
MySQL Expert

MySQL Expert Ronald Bradford shares valuable input in MySQL Performance Tuning, MySQL Scalability and general MySQL Help from his two decades of working with MySQL, Oracle, Ingres and development technologies.

Archive for the ‘Conferences’ Category

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Upcoming MySQL Conferences

Monday, August 9th, 2010

Unlike previous years when the number of conferences with MySQL content diminishes after the O’Reilly MySQL and OSCON conferences (Open SQL Camp excluded), this year has a lot on offer.

This month:

Upcoming next month in September:

  • MySQL Sunday at Oracle Open World on September 18 in San Francisco includes 4 tracks and around 15 quality speakers. (Big numbers of attendees also rumored but yet unconfirmed).
  • The inaugural Surge Scalability conference in Baltimore will include presentations by myself and Baron Schwartz (Percona being sponsors) as well as talks from other popular sites using MySQL.

If your in SF for the MySQL Sunday you may also want to come for the SF MySQL Meetup on the preceeding Thursday night where I’ll be giving my talk on “Common MySQL Scalability problems, and how to fix them”.

In October:

  • Open SQL Camp in Boston from Friday, Oct 15th in the evening, ending Sunday Oct 17th

Europeans will be busy in November where you will find dedicated MySQL tracks with multiple speakers at DOAG and UKOUG. Other MySQL talks can be found at SAPO Codebits 2010 and BGOUG.

And for South America, stay tuned. October will be your month!

There is also a great event calendar maintained by the MySQL community team on the Forge.

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Posted in Conferences, Databases, MySQL, MySQL Events, MySQL Sunday at OOW 2010, Oracle, Oracle/MySQL Conferences, Professional, Surge Scalability 2010 | No Comments »

Beyond MySQL GA: patches, storage engines, forks, and pre-releases – FOSDEM 2010

Thursday, February 11th, 2010

Kristian Nielsen presented “Beyond MySQL GA: patches, storage engines, forks, and pre-releases”.
This included a history of current products:

Google Patches (5.0 & 5.1) included improvements in :

  • statistics/monitoring
  • lock contention
  • binlog
  • malloc()
  • filesorts
  • innodb I/O and wait statistics
  • SHOW …STATISTICS statements
  • smp scalability
  • I/O scalability
  • semisync replication
  • many more

Percona Patches (5.0) focus on

  • statistics/monitoring
  • performance/scalability
  • buffer pool content/mutexes
  • microslow patch

These have been ported to 5.1 and mainly integrated into XtraDB.

EBay Patches (5.0) have included:

  • variable length memory storage engine
  • pool of threads
  • Virtual columns

XtraDB storage engine (5.1) includes

  • Percona patches
  • Google patches
  • Innodb patches
  • Has XtraBackup for backup

Other engines/patches discussed included:

  • PBXT storage engine – community contribution
  • FederatedX – replacement to Federated
  • Sphinx storage engine
  • Pinba storage engine – Collects PHP statistics
  • Others OQGraph/Spider
  • Galera – Synchronous replication
  • Drizzle

Alternative packaging options for MySQL 5.0 and MySQL 5.1 including Our Delta, Percona and MariaDB.

FOSDEM 2010 MySQL Developer Room Schedule
FOSDEM 2010 Website
Brussels, Belgium
February 7, 2010

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Posted in Databases, FOSDEM 2010, MySQL, Professional, Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Multi-Master Manager for MySQL – FOSDEM 2010

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

The next presentation by Piotr Biel from Percona was on Multi-Master Manager for MySQL.

The introduction included a discussion of the popular MySQL HA solutions including:

  • MySQL Master-slave replication with failover
  • MMM managed bi-directional replication
  • Heartbeat/SAN
  • Heartbeat/DRBD
  • NDB Cluster

A key problem that was clarified in the talk is the discussion of Multi-Master and this IS NOT master-master. You only write to a single node. With MySQL is this critical because MySQL replication does not manage collision detection.

The MMM Cluster Elements are:

  • monitoring node
  • database nodes

And the Application Components are:

  • mon
  • agent
  • angel

MMM works with 3 layers.

  • Network Layer – uses a virtual IP address, related to servers, not a physical machine
  • Database Layer
  • Application Layer

MMM uses two roles for management with your application.

  • exclusive – also known as the writer
  • balanced – also known as the reader

There are 3 different statuses are used to indicate node state

  • proper operation
  • maintenance
  • fatal errors

The mmm_control is the tool used to manage the cluster including:

  • move roles
  • enable/disable individual nodes
  • view cluster status
  • configure failover

The Implementation challenges require the use of the following MySQL settings to minimize problems.

  • auto_increment_offset/auto_increment_increment
  • log_slave_updates
  • read_only

FOSDEM 2010 MySQL Developer Room Schedule
FOSDEM 2010 Website
Brussels, Belgium
February 7, 2010

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Posted in Databases, FOSDEM 2010, MySQL, Professional | 1 Comment »

10x Performance Improvements in MySQL – A Case Study

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

The slides for my presentation at FOSDEM 2010 are now available online at slideshare. In this presentation I describe a successful client implementation with the result of 10x performance improvements. My presentation covers monitoring, reviewing and analyzing SQL, the art of indexes, improving SQL, storage engines and caching.

The end result was a page load improvement from 700+ms load time to a a consistent 60ms.

10x Performance Improvements – A Case Study

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Posted in Databases, FOSDEM 2010, InnoDB, MySQL, Professional, Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

State of phpMyAdmin – FOSDEM 2010

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

Following the opening keynote “Dolphins, now and beyond”, Marc Delisle presented on “State of phpMyAdmin”.

phpMyAdmin is an DBA administration tool for MySQL available today in 57 different languages. This is found today in many distributions, LAMP stack products and also in cpanel. The product is found at http://phpmyadmin.net.

There are current two versions, the legacy 2.x version to support older php 3.x & 4.x, The current version 3.x is for PHP 5.2 or greater.

The current UI includes some new features including.

  • calendar input for date fields
  • meta data for mime types e.g images, which is great for showing the output as an image, otherwise blob data
  • Relational designer with the able to show and create foreign keys

The New features in 3.3 (currently in beta) include:

  • Replication support including configuring master/slave, start/stop slave.
  • Synchronization model showing structure and data differences between two servers and ability to sync.
  • New export to php array, xslx, mediawiki, new importing features including progress bar.
  • Changes tracking for changes on per instance or per table. Providing change report and export options.

FOSDEM 2010 MySQL Developer Room Schedule
FOSDEM 2010 Website
Brussels, Belgium
February 7, 2010

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Posted in Databases, FOSDEM 2010, MySQL, Professional | No Comments »

Dolphins, now & beyond – FOSDEM 2010

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

I had the honor of opening the day at the MySQL developer room at FOSDEM 2010 where I had a chance to talk about the MySQL product and community, now and what’s happening moving forward.

For those that missed the talk, my slides are available online at Slideshare however slides never due justice to some of the jokes including:

  • What do you consider? the Blue Pill, or the Red Pill
  • Why think two dimensionally, how about the Green Pill
  • Emerging Breeds with performance enhancing modifications
Dolphins Now And Beyond – FOSDEM 2010

Posted in Databases, FOSDEM 2010, MySQL, Professional | 2 Comments »

One advantage of Oracle/Sun/MySQL

Monday, April 27th, 2009

This weeks’ announcement Oracle to by Sun was a major talking point at the 2009 MySQL Conference & Expo. While it is too early to even speculate what the future holds with the official MySQL product, for myself a speaker on MySQL topics, Oracle Open World is now a target market.

In addition to many years of providing MySQL for the Oracle DBA Resources I have with the recent closure of call for papers submitted two sessions for consideration.

Integrating MySQL into your Oracle DBA management processes

Most large enterprise organizations use more then one RDBMS product to service business requirements. With the increase in MySQL usage for web based applications such as self-service content, Oracle DBA’s need to understand and appreciate the minimum to ensure performance and availability meets client expectations.

Just how to you integrate MySQL into existing and existing Oracle database infrastructure and management monitoring process?
What are the critical monitoring components? How do these compare to current Oracle Best Practices.
Understand the various end user tools support multiple RDBMS products including Oracle and MySQL.

In this session, DBA’s will leave with the essential knowledge and appreciation of MySQL management.

An overview for evaluating migrating from Oracle to MySQL

MySQL is becoming increasing popular RDBMS for web based applications due to it’s ease of use, availability within the the LAMP stack and large number of open source applications. While implementing MySQL for a new development project may be easy, migrating existing databases, data and applications to use MySQL is not. In this presentation, we will answer questions including:

What are the major challenges to overcome to consider MySQL for some portion of your business?
What are the issues in application portability?
What are ideal applications to consider for migration?
Tools, Products and options for easy migration?
What Oracle features are not supported?

Learn how to read and write to MySQL directly via Oracle Heterogeneous services.

Posted in Conferences, Databases, General, MySQL, Oracle, Professional | 1 Comment »

A change in the MySQL Binary distributions

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

Yesterday was the surprise announcement of MySQL 5.4 at the 2009 MySQL Conference and Expo. It was unfortunate that the supporting information was not that forthcoming on the MySQL website. I tried for several hours to try and download, but no mirrors were initially available. Today I see some information on the mysql.com home page and finally able to get the binary.

What I found most significant with this new major version release is a change in the binary distribution, as seen on the Download page.

MySQL 5.4 is only available on 3 platforms:

  • Linux (AMD64 / Intel EM64T)
  • Solaris 10 (SPARC, 64-bit)
  • Solaris 10 (AMD64 / Intel EM64T, 64-bit)

I was also surprised that this beta release highlights the emphasis of community contributions (long overdue), yet the community and indeed many employees of Sun/MySQL were simply unaware of this work. This is clearly a change in involving the community. While I applaud the beta status, hopefully a more stable product to start with, it’s development was done in a very closed company model.

Posted in Conferences, Databases, General, MySQL, MySQL User Conferences, Sun, mysqluc09 | No Comments »

Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Presentation

Wednesday, April 22nd, 2009

On Tuesday at the MySQL Camp 2009 in Santa Clara I presented Setting up MySQL on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

This presentation assumed you know nothing about AWS, and have no account. With Internet access via a Browser and a valid Credit Card, you can have your own running Web Server on the Internet in under 10 minutes, just point and click.

We also step into some more detail online click and point and supplied command line tools to demonstrate some more advanced usage.

Getting started with MySQL in Amazon Web Services

Posted in Amazon, Amazon Web Services, Cloud Computing, Conferences, Databases, General, Linux, MySQL, MySQL Camp 2009, MySQL User Conferences, Open Source | 1 Comment »

Classic quotes – Community One East

Sunday, March 22nd, 2009

The CommunityOne East 2009 conference has finished up. There were a few classic statements made by the speakers during the day. They included.

“We have a community reception, that’s a long way to say free beer.”

“Google is the dial tone of the Internet, if it’s not there people start freaking out.”

“I am an insom-maniac, a late night hacker.”

“Having a successful catastrophic – Achieving your marketing goals, and your site crashes due to the load.”

“Ruby is a beautiful expressive fun language.”

(talking about cloud providers) — “Lock-in, it’s like marriage, it’s not necessarily a bad thing.”

“It wasn’t a red carpet, but it was carpeted.”

Event: CommunityOne East in New York, NY.
Article Author: Ronald Bradford

Posted in CommunityOne East 2009, Conferences, Professional, Sun | No Comments »

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