Author: Keith Murphy

I had the chance to review the new Query Analyzer program from Sun over the last few days. I am very interested in how it performs as I have previously not had a chance to see the program in action (or the Enterprise Monitor program either for that matter). So, before getting into what the Query Analyzer can (and cannot) do let’s look at what Sun says it does.

Hello and welcome to the 133rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Sure, there are some big things. innodb_buffer_pool_size and key_buffer_size spring to mind. But all the little things add up too. On a busy system did you consider thread_stack? It defaults to 128k per connection. With 500 connections that’s 64 MB. You may dismiss that and and say its not much. But in the end it doesn’t take 64 MB to cause a crash of your serve.

We are planning the winter issue of MySQL Magazine. With the new GA release of MySQL server 5.1 last month, there is certainly plenty to talk about!
You can reach me with your ideas at [email protected] . I need to see all article proposals by the 15th of this month. Draft articles must be in by the 10th of January, so if I accept your proposal, you have a month to get things ready.

I was doing some research over the weekend on how transactions work “under the hood” in MySQL. I thought it might be enlightening if I wrote about what I found. Have a look.

For those of you who have been under a rock for the last several years, there is a buzz-phrase floating around—cloud computing. If you haven’t been paying attention, it is time to wake up. While I could spend an entire blog post—if not several—on a definition of cloud computing, I will be talking only about cloud computing in the sense of companies moving servers from their building or network operations center to running virtual servers in this computing cloud.

I have put up a poll on my personal blog, Diamond Notes asking whether you prefer Ubuntu or Debian as an operating system for MySQL server.

Welcome to the 121st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Recently I was working on a problem for a customer. They are converting a server with two InnoDB data files to innodb_file_per_table: I honestly don’t recall ever seeing (or hearing about) so large a data file. The method chosen for conversion boils down to this: stop and start the server to enable innodb_file_per_table, alter all tables to myisam, stop server and delete ibdata file, restart server, convert tables back to InnoDB, add foreign keys. This post isn’t about how we did it, or about whether or not it was the best way, or anything like that. This post is really about the the last two steps.

In many parts of the world times are uncertain. I live in the United States and we are in the middle of a financial meltdown that many fear may be as bad as the Great Depression. If you are involved with MySQL as a database administrator, or if you work directly with MySQL in some other aspect, you can probably breathe a little easier. Why is this? MySQL Server has grown in market penetration for a long time. It is now a significant section of the RDBMS pie.