Pythian Group

Hello and welcome to my Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. My name is Keith Murphy and I am the editor of MySQL Magazine, a free digital magazine with information for MySQL administrators and developers, released quarterly.  I am also a MySQL database administrator at Pythian.

I am losing count of how many of these Log Buffers I have done. If I recall correctly, this is number three. But then again, it could be number four. You know what they say though—the more the merrier!

This week’s Buffer features a great allegory about a database, some tips, feature requests, and breaking news. It seems that this week, people shared information that was relevant across database servers, so I recommend that no matter the database server you work on, you should read through each section today.

MySQL

Since the writer of the Buffer gets to choose the order of the stories, I will begin with my favorite db—MySQL. This week the MySQL world saw  some benchmarking of testing of recent improvements to the XtraDB storage engine. the discussion generated around what was done to improve the performance on a 16-core box was really interesting. I’m looking forward to working with the XtraDB engine.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

It’s that time again. Time for fame and fortune! Sorry, as usual there is no fortune, but the good news is that our readership continues to grow, so author fame is imminent. 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 bmurphy@paragon-cs.com . I need to see all article proposals by the 15^th of this month. Draft articles must be in by the 10^th of January, so if I accept your proposal, you have a month to get things ready. I should also mention that in the past we have used blog postings (with author permission and full credit of course). If you have blogged something recently that you feel is worthy of publishing in the magazine, send me the link and I will take a look.

Never heard of MySQL Magazine? It is a digital magazine designed for both database administrators and developers of the MySQL database server. All six back-issues are available for free download from the website.

Get it while it’s hot! The Fall 2008 issue of the MySQL Magazine is now available at http://www.mysqlzine.net. Issue 6 is chock full of 16 pages good stuff, including:

• “Decision Table”-Driven Development by Jonathan Levin
• Part I of a series on Transaction Time Validity in MySQL by Peter Brawley
• An Overview of Zmanda Recovery Manager by Pythian’s own Gerry Narvaja
• Keith Murphy, editor has a note about Drizzle.

Download the PDF directly or go to the MySQL Magazine page to download any and all of the 6 issues.

Hey everyone — it’s time to send in your article proposals for the next issue of MySQL Magazine, which is scheduled for release on October 15^th. The deadline is end-of-September, so don’t delay. You too can become rich and famous by writing for MySQL Magazine! Just send me your idea for an article to bmurphy AT paragon-cs.com.

For those who don’t know, MySQL Magazine is a quarterly publication, “by the community – for the community”, free and available for download from http://www.mysqlzine.net.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

The next issue of MySQL Magazine is now available for download. Get it while it is hot! At forty-two great pages it is our biggest and best issue yet.  This issue is anchored by the first annual MySQL Usage Survey results.

Downloads at the MySQL Magazine homepage: http://www.mysqlzine.net

Thanks to everyone who contributed.  I couldn’t have done it without you all!!

As an editor (of http://www.mysqlzine.net), I cringe at the title of this post. However, it is absolutely accurate.  Recently, we had a situation where we had two servers running Sun Solaris 10 on some high-end Sun hardware.  I don’t remember exactly, but it was one of Sun’s upper-end boxes with AMD procs. Nice boxes, really. The two servers are configured in a master-master circular replication setup.

Here is the problem.  On both servers, the error logs were being created incorrectly.  On one of them, it was creating an error log that was 154 megabytes in size.  FLUSH LOGS worked, but the newly-created error log would be the same size. While there was some data in the file that I could use the cat, head or string command to discern, the majority of the file was not text data.

After working on this for a bit, I logged into the secondary server and discovered that the error log on this server didn’t look right either  — the same characteristics of large size with almost no actual text data.  The only difference is that these error logs were around 20 megabytes in size. I googled around a bit and couldn’t discover anyone with a similar problem.

I can’t figure out what was causing this.  We checked everything we could think of, and during some other maintenance, restarted the mysqld daemon. That didn’t work either — when the server came back online it was experiencing exactly the same problem with the error log. Finally, during hardware maintenance to upgrade the memory, the servers were rebooted.  The next morning, I checked them, and found both error logs working exactly as they should. However, it took that server reboot to fix the problem.

I am at a loss to explain what was wrong.  If anyone has any thoughts or a similar experience, I would love to hear from you!

I just wanted to thank everyone who participated in the survey that Mark Schoonover and I created. My endless thanks goes to Mark who did a lot of work on this.

The results will be coming out in the Summer issue of MySQL Magazine which will be online July the 15th. I am putting together the articles now and it looks like it’s going to be a great one!