This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based …

Here are the slides from yesterday’s presentation about horizontal database scaling through sharding at the mySQL dev room at FOSDEM 2009.

I’ve got a ton of notes and remarks to these slides, which will become available here soon.

The MySQL Developers Room at FOSDEM was a success. There was a full room (about 80 seats, and many sitting on the floor) throughout the day. We started at 9am with a talk on PBXT, and ended at 17:00. My talk had a large audience and was very well received.

The enthusiasm was quite high also because of a stunt I did during the presentation. It was a creative way of explaining the difference between physical and logical partitioning. I will repeat this stunt at the MySQL Users Conference, during my Tutorial on Partitioning.
Those who were attending today know about it. For the attendees at the …

The MySQL Developers Room at FOSDEM was a success. There was a full room (about 80 seats, and many sitting on the floor) throughout the day. We started at 9am with a talk on PBXT, and ended at 17:00. My talk had a large audience and was very well received.

The enthusiasm was quite high also because of a stunt I did during the presentation. It was a creative way of explaining the difference between physical and logical partitioning. I will repeat this stunt at the MySQL Users Conference, during my Tutorial on Partitioning.
Those who were attending today know about it. For the attendees at the …

The MySQL Developers Room at FOSDEM was a success. There was a full room (about 80 seats, and many sitting on the floor) throughout the day. We started at 9am with a talk on PBXT, and ended at 17:00. My talk had a large audience and was very well received.

The enthusiasm was quite high also because of a stunt I did during the presentation. It was a creative way of explaining the difference between physical and logical partitioning. I will repeat this stunt at the MySQL Users Conference, during my Tutorial on Partitioning.
Those who were attending today know about it. For the attendees at the …

Do you remember Guy Adams? He was one of the winners of the “5.1 Use Case Competition”, ending up on position #2. Guess what: He has a webinar coming up tomorrow, by the title Deploying MySQL in a High Performance Satellite Network Management Environment by Parallel.
 
Guy works with Parallel Ltd. in Milton Keynes in the UK. You may also want to read up on Guy’s DevZone article. This is what you can expect of the webinar:

Join us for this informative technical webinar with Guy Adams, CTO at Parallel, whose flagship product SatManage is the worldwide …

I have been using partitioning in MySQL 5.1 since it has been in late beta, and with the odd bump I’ve been quite satisfied with its stability and ease of use. Perhaps the days of maintaining nasty application logic to maintain tables like table_yyyymm manually are finally over!

While some control freaks out there might still prefer the painful approach of manually keeping dated tables and using merge tables/views to link them together, you still have a lot of flexibility in how you manage individual partitions with the ALTER TABLE REORGANIZE/CHANGE/ADD PARTITION commands.

One trick i’ve discovered to work pretty well, is that you can swap in and out partitions right out from under MySQL’s nose. This can be useful in some situations.

WARNING!! This is not supported by MySQL to the best of my knowledge, and possibly is a risky, bad idea. Proceed only if you think you know what you’re doing!

…

Listening to Sheeri's presentation on MySQL 5.1, I saw that there are a few questions left unanswered. I am listing here some of the questions that I found interesting, plus a few from an early webinar on the same topic.

Q: does Partitioning physically split data?

A: No. Some engines (MyISAM, Archive) do a physical split, but this is not necessary, as you see if you apply partitioning to a InnoDB table. Partitioning is a logical split of data, for easy retrieval. It is completely transparent to the user.

Q: Can you set partitions to different servers?

A: No. Partitions are logical parts of one table within one server. Partitioning through the Federated engine is not supported.

Q: How efficient are Row-Based …

In a nutshell: What’s New in MySQL 5.1.

Release notes: Changes in release 5.1.x (Production).

And yes, very early on (at about two minutes in), I talk about my take on Monty’s controversial post at Oops, we did it again.

To play the video directly, go to http://technocation.org/node/663/play. To download the 146 Mb video to your computer for offline playback, go to http://technocation.org/node/663/download. The slides …

The tutorial will cover the basics, several practical scenarios, tips and tricks, and some sneak peeks of the latest enhancements being developed.