Meeting the MySQL Team at UKOUG (ICC Birmingham, December 3-5 | 2012)

If you're planning to attend UKOUG in Birmingham on Dec 3-5, here's your guide to know more about Oracle's MySQL.

There's a MySQL stream on Monday 5th and we've a great list of sessions, including:

• Rich Mason's keynote on how to Deploy, Scale and Save with Linux, Virtualization and MySQL
• Keith Hollman on stage to discuss how to Embrace Database Diversity
• Mark Swarbrick's lecture on Tips & Tricks for MySQL Replication
• Mario Beck's talk on Performance Schema
• My two slots on how to Leverage Oracle (and MySQL) Data Management Solutions together and then on the High Availability Options available with MySQL

I'd like also to mention Dr. David Harper, from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, on Better Living Trough Metadata: Harnessing the Power of MySQL Information Schema.

Want to meet myself or my team at the UKOUG? Feel free to get in touch via LinkedIn or Twitter.

Want to come prepared? Here's what you can read beforehand:

• MySQL Connect Presentations Available (blogs.oracle.com)
• New Options for MySQL High Availability (blogs.oracle.com)
• What's new in MySQL 5.6 Release Candidate (dev.mysql.com)
• New MySQL Cluster 7.3 Previews: Foreign Keys, NoSQL Node.js API and Auto-Tuned Clusters (dev.mysql.com)

MySQL Enterprise Monitor, my super powers and my life

Last week I had an enlightening experience. It may sound strange, but I found I have super powers... let me explain.

I had a meeting with a big customer of mine to show the value of MySQL Enterprise and Cluster CGE and to share with them the latest and greatest features available in our commercial offerings. During the discussion I said: "Imagine if your MySQL database has a problem at 3pm. Thanks to My Oracle Support and MySQL Enterprise Monitor you can quickly resolve your issues and restore the service".

MySQL Enterprise Monitor

Well, this is exactly what happened at 2.50pm... I missed the prophecy by just 10m and found I have super powers!

You could imagine how happy the customer was about my incredible abilities ;)
However, thanks to MySQL Enterprise Monitor, I'm still alive and I'm here to tell the story.

By using correlated graphs we've been able to filter all the events running at that time and quickly diagnose the problem. For those of you who're curious, they had an issue on their advertising network and, at that particular time, all the banners pointed to the portal bringing the number of active MySQL connections to 8000+ and putting a lot of pressure on the database. In the troubleshooting process we also found some regular spikes in the charts, probably related to batches they weren't aware of and they started an internal discussion to find the cause.

At the end I've learned a few things:

• MySQL Enterprise Monitor is an amazing troubleshooting tool and could also be used to start a conversation between DBAs and DEVs
• Never mention, during a customer visit, that the database might have a problem... or this could really happen
• I've a debt of gratitude with the my colleagues in the MySQL Enterprise team at Oracle. Guys, the next time we meet, drinks are on me ;)

That's it... thanks for taking the time to read this life-changing story ;)

MySQL Events that I don't want to miss

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!

MySQL Cluster 7.2 -- Unlimited Possibilities

We've recently seen some great announcements of MySQL Cluster delivering amazing results for both selects and updates. The posts (see related articles below) are full of juicy technical details and proofs, but today I'd like to change the perspective a bit. Let's compare those figures with real-world data and imagine what could be done. Please note that I'm not using any scientific method here, just dreaming about the unlimited opportunities offered by MySQL Cluster today.

MySQL Cluster 7.2.7 -- 1B+ Writes per Minute

Cluster can deliver 1B+ selects per minute with 8 nodes and 1B+ updates per minute with 30 nodes.

Our planet is getting quite populated and interconnected. World population is 7B+ and 2B+ of us are using internet. Let's assume that, due to time-zones, only 1/3 of the total internet population is online at a given time (700M+) and that a single action generates one update and one select on the database.

What kind of services can we offer then?

With such scalability and performance, MySQL Cluster offers endless opportunities to develop something new that can support the exponential growth of the web and offer always-on services to everyone, for example:

• Hellos from the world -- a website where everyone can say hello to the world, whenever they want. MySQL Cluster can handle the entire online population in less than 1 minute;
• Let's shop together -- a global eCommerce website selling everything with 100% market share. If everyone would buy an item per minute, MySQL Cluster could easily fulfill the needs of the entire internet population with 30 nodes;
• Like everything you like -- a like button that can be attached to everything in order to collect statistics on users' favorite things. MySQL Cluster could easily sustain the total online world assuming they'd like 1 thing per minute;

Furthermore, MySQL Cluster could handle updates from all of Zynga's 60M active daily users in 3 seconds or all of Facebook's 900M+ active users in less than a minute. All of that giving you ACID compliance and synchronous replication to ensure no data loss.

The Oracle MySQL engineering team did a great job with Cluster: let's build the next big thing with it!

Related articles

• Where would I use MySQL Cluster?
• MySQL Cluster 7.2.7 achieves 1BN update transactions per minute
• 1 Billion Queries Per Minute - MySQL Cluster 7.2 is GA!
• Challenges in reaching 1BN reads and updates per minute for MySQL Cluster 7.2

Changing Name and Improving Focus

You might have noticed that this blog changed name and URL. Instead of having one single blog for everything, I decided to split my blogging activities in two separate blogs.

If you're interested in MySQL, Oracle, Databases, Business Intelligence, Open Source, Cloud, etc. this is the place to be. Blog's new name is Data & Co.
A big "Thank you!" to David Stokes who moved all the planet.mysql.com references to the old blog to this new one.

On the other hand, if you'd like to read about communication, marketing, advertising, PR, soft skills, etc. feel free look at Publicime.  Please see the introduction of my new blog here. I've moved non-technical articles to this one to make sure my posts on Data & Co are exclusively technology-centric.

This will result in better focus for both blogs and I won't annoy you with topics you're not interested in. The old url is redirecting to Data & Co. by default.