Yep. I see this too at work. InnoDB is in my opinion really good at handling concurrent workloads. So good I was surprised when I eventually found a project that was having locking issues. SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS showed queries had been waiting for hours on some locks they would never get. Yeah, it's a large and busy database, but it took me by surprise nevertheless.

It turns out, while InnoDB handles concurrent UPDATEs very efficiently, a combination of transactions that DELETE and INSERT rows - even just in the same general area of a table - will make the transactions wait for each other. Hence a workload that does a lot of inserts and deletes may get you into trouble. The solution is to change to READ COMMITTED or even READ UNCOMMITTED mode.

A week ago I again had the pleasure to give a guest lecture at Tampere University of Technology. I've visited them the first time when I worked as MySQL pre-sales in Sun.

To be trendy, I of course had to talk about the cloud. It turns out every section has the subtitle "...and why it is more difficult for databases". I also rightfully claim to have invented the NoSQL key-value development model in 2005.

Links to performance numbers posted wrt various NoSQL solutions:

A top 20 global website announced they have migrated from MySQL to Redis. There will be a keynote and everything. It doesn't say how big the Redis Cluster is, but they serve 100M pages / day, and clock 300k Redis queries / second.
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/redis-db/d4QcWV0p-YM

Btw, they mention that MySQL remains as the master data store from which the Redis indexes are generated.
(The reason I don't mention the name of this Redis user is simply I feat my mom is sometimes reading my blog...)

Today I'm coming out of the closet. Since I'm a professional database expert I try to be like the mainstream and use the commercial MySQL forks (including MySQL itself). But I think those close to me have already known for some time that I like community based open source projects. I cannot deny it any longer, so let me just say it: I'm a Drizzle contributor and I'm very much engaged!

I've been eyeing the Drizzle project since it started in 2008. Already then there were dozens of MySQL hackers for which this project was a refuge they instantly flocked to. Finally a real open source project based on MySQL code that they could contribute to, and they did. It was like a breath of fresh air in a culture that previously had only accepted one kind of relationships: that between an employer and an employee. Drizzle was more liberal. It accepted also forms of engagement already common in most other open source projects that are based on relationships between 2 or more consenting contributors.

But in 2008 I wasn't yet ready to engage with Drizzle. Like I said, I worked in a role where I would go to database users and help them use MySQL in demanding production settings. So as much as I admired Drizzle already back then, I needed something that could give me good releases, and support me when needed.

An annual tradition of the upcoming MySQL user conference is the awards ceremony. Last year we introduced the opportunity for everyone in the community to nominate candidates and this was a big success. Now is the time to start nominating deserving winners for the awards for 2012, in the 3 categories named below.

The winners will be selected by a community panel (see below) and winners will be announced on Wednesday, April 11th at the Santa Clara Convention Center, as part of the evening Community Reception.

How:

Please send in your suggestions for deserving winners
to: mysql.awards [at] gmail.com
no later than: 23:59 Sunday February 29th (Pacific time)

Good news to all of you who are going or were thinking of going to the Percona Live MySQL Conference and Expo. Yesterday two great addon events were announced, both happening on Friday April 13th, right after the main conference:

Drizzle Day 2012

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have been more natural to build those needs on top of MySQL. You could have had a key-value store (HandlerSocket, Memcache API...), sharding (Spider) and clustering (Galera). You could have had a graph storage engine (OQGraph engine isn't quite it, I understand it is internally an InnoDB table still?). There could even have been MapReduce functionality, although I do think the Hadoop ecosystem targets problems that actually are better solved without MySQL.

The program for this year's MySQL conference is now published.

As regular readers will remember, I served on the program committee this year and was one of those who appealed for people to send in great proposals. I would now like to thank all of you that sent in proposals. On my quick count we had over 250 proposals, and if I look at my own ratings I'd say about 180 of them were really good, conference worthy talks (and this already excludes some pretty good talks). A related piece of trivia was that this might have been the first year ever that the deadline for the Call for Proposals wasn't extended, which possibly took some of you by surprise. We simply got so many good talks by the deadline, that there wasn't any need to.

In my previous post I explained why I believe the production of RPM and DEB packages should be more integrated with the rest of your development process. Now it's time to look into how you can put the RPM build scripts inside your main source code repository, and in particular how I did that to produce RPM packages for Drizzle.

Last weekend I released rpm files for the latest Drizzle Fremont beta (announcement). As part of that work I've also integrated the spec file and other files used by the rpmbuild into the main Drizzle bzr repository (but not yet merged into trunk). In this post I want to explain why I think this is a good thing, and in a follow up post I'll go into what I needed to do to make it work.

(And speaking of stuff you can download, phpMyAdmin 3.5.0-alpha1 now supports Drizzle!)