Ok, they aren’t like the 2012 nonsense or anything but they are interesting articles that will be important topics in the near future for expanding our knowledge and usefulness in the job market. Being a DBA does not limit you to relational database systems. I expect to see more requests for non-relational or No-SQL type of data stores as they can have many advantages over an RDBMS. Stability, scalability, simplification of administration, higher performance on lesser hardware for larger datasets, and many other items make no-sql engines very interesting. Here are some useful links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NoSQL

http://www.linux-mag.com/cache/7579/1.html

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9135086/No_to_SQL_Anti_database_movement_gains_steam_

http://www.viget.com/extend/nosql-misconceptions/

How can I pass up talking about the various Cloud

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Sun recently rolled out a new Business Intelligence (BI) solution that uses Open Storage at its core. There are several things that are different about this solution that make it stand out from the crowd.

1) It is based on Open Source software.

This solution uses the commercial versions of open source software from Pentaho and Infobright to provide the BI and Datawarehouse (DW) functions respectively and both use the MySQL database. Also, this solution uses Sun's Open Storage products as the core storage component which are built using Open Source software and industry standard components. Combine those with an Open Source operating system like Solaris or

  [Read more...]

Sun recently rolled out a new Business Intelligence (BI) solution that uses Open Storage at its core. There are several things that are different about this solution that make it stand out from the crowd.

1) It is based on Open Source software.

This solution uses the commercial versions of open source software from Pentaho and Infobright to provide the BI and Datawarehouse (DW) functions respectively and both use the MySQL database. Also, this solution uses Sun's Open Storage products as the core storage component which are built using Open Source software and industry standard components. Combine those with an Open Source operating system like Solaris

  [Read more...]

Sun recently rolled out a new Business Intelligence (BI) solution that uses Open Storage at its core. There are several things that are different about this solution that make it stand out from the crowd.

1) It is based on Open Source software.

This solution uses the commercial versions of open source software from Pentaho and Infobright to provide the BI and Datawarehouse (DW) functions respectively and both use the MySQL database. Also, this solution uses Sun's Open Storage products as the core storage component which are built using Open Source software and industry standard components. Combine those with an Open Source operating system like Solaris

  [Read more...]

Yesterday I merged the BlitzDB tree with Drizzle‘s trunk for the first time in a long time (yeah…) and discovered some interesting changes made to the storage subsystem while I was away.

Previously all functions that caused an action to the storage engine was a member of the handler class but various things like table creation and transaction related functions have now moved to the StorageEngine class. These changes are somewhat drastic but makes good sense for Drizzle to grow further since it makes the subsystem easier to understand and frees Drizzle from the interface design that was strongly affected by MyISAM. For those that are interested, the StorageEngine class is located in “drizzled/plugin/storage_engine.h”.

For me it was pretty

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Something I’ve added to BlitzDB recently that was pretty high on my todo list is support for variable width tables. So what is a variable width table? it is a table that contains columns that can vary in size, namely BLOB and TEXT types.

Going back to the basics, when a new row is to be written, a storage engine is given a pointer to the row data in MySQL format that it must somehow store for later lookup/retrieval. By meaning “somehow”, the storage engine is given the freedom to do whatever it likes with the row.

Writing a row for a fixed length table (a table with columns that are always the same size) is deadly easy. A storage engine can choose to not temper with the row and simply write or copy the data to it’s storage mechanism. This is because the storage engine is given a row that

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Using a write cache protected by battery (BBWC) is well known and one of the best practices in RDBMS world. But I have frequently seen situations that people do not set write cache properly. Sometimes they just forget to enable write cache. Sometimes write cache is disabled even though they say they set properly.

Make sure that BBWC is enabled. If not enabled, you will be able to easily get better performance by just enabling it. The following is a DBT-2 example.

Write cache is disabled:

# iostat -xm 10
avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
        21.16    0.00    6.14   29.77    0.00   42.93

Device:         rrqm/s   wrqm/s   r/s   w/s    rMB/s
sdb               2.60   389.01 283.12 47.35     4.86
wMB/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz   await  svctm  %util
2.19    43.67     4.89   14.76

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I’ve decided to start a series of blog entries on not-so-obvious findings that I’ve found while working on my new project. By archiving the findings, I’m hoping that I can help those that are looking into developing a storage engine for the MySQL family in the future.

Accumulating these mini-knowledge would also be useful for me since I can refer back to it when I forget something. Also, once I write enough entries I’m planning on summarizing them and making it available on the Drizzle Wiki. If MySQL (http://www.mysql.com) is interested in updating the engine documentation, I would be more than happy to help there too.

So to begin with, I’ll describe something trivial that I stumbled across while trying to catch an error on duplicate primary key insertion to

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I will be hosting a webinar on May 7 about how companies like Wikimedia and Smugmug are using Open Storage and MySQL to deliver rich media (photos, videos) to their users. You can view the webinar live or on demand here (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-337.html).

I will be hosting a webinar on May 7 about how companies like Wikimedia and Smugmug are using Open Storage and MySQL to deliver rich media (photos, videos) to their users. You can view the webinar live or on demand here (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-337.html).

I will be hosting a webinar on May 7 about how companies like Wikimedia and Smugmug are using Open Storage and MySQL to deliver rich media (photos, videos) to their users. You can view the webinar live or on demand here (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-337.html).

Lately I’ve been having lots of fun going through Drizzle and InnoDB‘s sourcecode to get a grasp of how auto increment is processed internally. I think I now have a fairly good grasp of what’s going on so I’m writing this entry as a note for myself. I’m also hoping that this will be helpful to those that are interested in this topic too.

So in MySQL and Drizzle, the storage engine (in this case InnoDB) is responsible for computing the auto increment value. Here’s an abbreviated execution path for a simple INSERT statement to a table with an auto increment column:

mysql_parse() -> mysql_execute_command() -> mysql_insert() ->
write_record() -> handler::ha_write_row() -> ha_innobase::write_row() ->

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Last week, I was at the NetApp office in North Sydney for the presentation on NetApp SnapManager for Oracle. It was good opportunity to learn more about NetApp snapshots while working on a project for one of our clients in Sydney. It was an especially interesting topic as I have some experience using Veritas Checkpoints (see my presentation on test systems refreshes), and it was interesting to see what’s different and new in the NetApp implementation. But I digress.

I learned that NetApp can provide access to the same LUNs via either Fiber-Channel (FC) or iSCSI. And this is when the interesting argument surfaced. Apparently, some companies aim to

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