Pythian Group

This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!

This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.

This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. Doug’s Oracle Blog has a series of posts about Hotsos. If all this talk about conferences has gotten you excited, Joshua Drake notes that 14 days and the hotel is almost full for postgresql conference east which is March 25th-28th in Philadelphia. And the Oracle database insider notes that the Oracle OpenWorld call for papers is now open.

According to Susan Visser this week (ending tomorrow) is also read an e-book week. So if you have not already done so, read an e-book! She links a coupon for an e-book in the post.
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Persistence Smoothie: Blending NoSQL and SQL – see user feedback and comments at http://joind.in/talk/view/1332.

Michael Bleigh from Intridea, high-end Ruby and Ruby on Rails consultants, build apps from start to finish, making it scalable. He’s written a lot of stuff, available at http://github.com/intridea. @mbleigh on twitter

NoSQL is a new way to think about persistence. Most NoSQL systems are not ACID compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability).

Generally, most NoSQL systems have:
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Most of this stuff is not PHP specific, and Python or Ruby or Java or .NET developers can use the tools in this talk.

The session on joind.in, with user comments/feedback, is at http://joind.in/talk/view/1320.

Slides are at http://talks.php.net/show/confoo10

“My name is Rasmus, I’ve been around for a long time. I’ve been doing this web stuff since 1992/1993.”

“Generally performance is not a PHP problem.” Webservers not config’d, no expire headers on images, no favicon.

Tools: Firefox/Firebug extension called YSlow (developed by yahoo) gives you a grade on your site.
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subtitle: Monetizing Social Media

Why is social media and social networking essential to you and your business? (because it will drive sales, but there’s very few analytics for ROI on social networking and social media)

Relying on advertising is no longer working for print newspapers and television. So why do we think it will work on internet media?
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What is confoo? It is the sequel to the PHP Quebéc Conference (2003 – 2009). This year PHP Quebec decided to team up with Montreal-Python, W3Quebéc and OWASP Montréal to produce confoo.

And now, on to Mark Pilgrim of Google speaking on HTML5.
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If you do not know what International Women’s Day is: http://www.internationalwomensday.com/

Start planning your blog posts for Ada Lovelace day now (March 24th, http://findingada.com/ Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.)

To that end, I would like to point out all the women currently in science and tech fields that I admire and think are doing great things. I think it would be great if everyone, male or female, made a list like this:
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Baron makes an excellent point in Why you should ignore MySQL’s key cache hit ratio — ratio is not the same as rate. Furthermore, rate is [often] the important thing to look at.

This is something that, at Pythian, we internalized a long time ago when thinking about MySQL tuning. In fact, mysqltuner 2.0 takes this into account, and the default configuration includes looking at both ratios and rates.

If I told you that your database had a ratio of temporary tables written to disk of 20%, you might think “aha, my database is slow because of a lot of file I/O caused by writing temporary tables to disk!”. However, that 20% ratio may actually mean a rate of 2 per hour — which is most likely not causing excessive I/O.

To get a sense of this concept, and also how mysqltuner works, I will show the lines from the mysqltuner default configuration that deal with temporary tables written to disk. Read the rest of this entry . . .

Applying binary logs to a MySQL instance is not particularly difficult, using the mysqlbinlog command line utility:

$> mysqlbinlog mysql-bin.000003 > 03.sql
$> mysql < 03.sql

Turning off binary logging for a session is not difficult, from the MySQL commandline, if you authenticate as a user with the SUPER privilege:

mysql> SET SESSION sql_log_bin=0;

However, sometimes you want to apply binary logs to a MySQL instance, without having those changes applied to the binary logs themselves. One option is to restart the server binary logging disabled, and after the load is finished, restart the server with binary logging re-enabled. This is not always possible nor desirable, so there’s a better way, that works in at least versions 4.1 and up:
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Just the facts:
What: MySQL user community dinner
Who: me, you, and many MySQL community members
When: Monday, April 12th – Meet at 6:30 at the Hyatt Santa Clara or at 7 pm at the restaurant
Where: Pedro’s Restaurant and Cantina – 3935 Freedom Circle, Santa Clara, CA 95054
How: Comment on this blog post to add your name to the list of probable attendees

I was sad that last year there was no community dinner, and I missed the one the year before when Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green made an appearance. This year I am determined not to miss it, and so I am calling for a community (pay-your-own-way) dinner on Monday, April 12th, at Pedro’s – a Mexican restaurant that has vegetarian and vegan options. I think Monday is a better time because many folks arrive Sunday evening, or even Monday morning (there are tutorials on Monday, but not everyone attends).
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There are those that are very adamant about letting people know that using INFORMATION_SCHEMA can crash your database. For example, in making changes to many tables at once Baron writes:

“querying the INFORMATION_SCHEMA database on MySQL can completely lock a busy server for a long time. It can even crash it. It is very dangerous.”

Though Baron is telling the truth here, he left out one extremely important piece of information: you can actually figure out how dangerous your INFORMATION_SCHEMA query will be, ahead of time, using EXPLAIN.

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