Vadim Tkachenko published interesting benchmark results with PCI-E based SSDs here. I recently got a chance to benchmark FusionIO’s 320 GB PCI-E drive. It was really impressive. My results, done on Windows with sqlio, are consistent (not identical, of course, but in the same ballpark) with what Vadim reported in that blog post, done with sysbench on Linux.

sqlio is a popular IO throughput testing tool from Microsoft. I didn’t get to test the throughput when the SSD is close to full. The key takeaways that I learned from my testing are:

1. I can confirm that there is no difference between random and sequential IO, contrary to the traditional spindle based hard disks;

2. Read is significantly faster than write. Reads and writes with 64 threads can achieve around 1.4 GB/S and 400 MB/S …

Last fall, before I joined Zendesk, I took a role as an Executive-in-Residence at Scale Venture Partners. A lot of people asked me about this, so I've written an article at GigaOm that describes my thought process and what I ended up working on.

While there are as many variations on the EIR position as there are venture firms, there are two flavors, generally speaking: Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Executive-in-Residence. Most firms have some experience with Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Essentially, they give office space, coffee and food to a proven entrepreneur so he or she can spend a few months researching or prototyping a new …

I’ve done this in the past, but thought this time I’ve got to take notes. It can be used as a crude check list in the future. Don’t underestimate the power of a practical, down-to-earth check list! Perhaps documents like this should be kept in a wiki page, for easy updating to avoid being stale, a proeblem with blog entries, it seems.

P in LAMP here stands for php, not Python or Perl. L is CentOS (I used CentOS 5.5) or Red Hat Linux. I am not covering moving all databases in a MySQL instance, just a select few or just one.

I’d appreciate your comments or suggestions.

Software install and configuration
MySQL:
MariaDB or Percona.

MariaDB can be had here.

For Percona server and client tools, it’s best to have direct access to Percona’s repository:

yum install gpg
rpm -Uhv …

From a stock/standard/typical/desktop install of Linux, it seems these are required in order to build MySQL/MariaDb/Percona forks:

gcc
gcc-c++
automake
libtool
bison
ncurses (Thanks Justin!)

Do apt-get, yum, rpm, emerge, or whatever to get them before doing configure, make and such. I am missing one, and I think it has “curse” or something like that in its name. Will update this post when I find that out.

I only recently found out about GigaOm's upcoming Net:Work conference.  It's held December 9 at UCSF Mission Bay conference center.  While the name of the conference is a bit ambiguous, the actual area of focus is very clear: how will we collaborate in the 21st century?  

The impact of smartphones, tablet computing, social networks, Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing is just starting.  As a result, I think there are tremendous opportunities for startup companies to disrupt existing markets with more modern, lightweight applications that foster collaboration inside the company as well as with partners, vendors, consultants and customers.  

…

Rapid Application Development (RAD) is a way of developing computer software applications with less effort than the traditional means.

RAD tools focus on providing code generation and automated testing capabilities with the use of convention over configuration to provide a streamlined workflow to create applications.

Even with the most advanced and easiest to use RAD tools, there are times which the traditional enterprise and the business software development vendors which are having their own implementations and in-house built frameworks are continuously refusing to adopt them.

Most of the misconceptions on the RAD are based on FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) which has been created around the internal complexity of the RAD tools.

…

I wrote a guest column for GigaOm on how open source software, cloud and software as a service are helping to bring about the consumerization of IT: namely bringing simplicity where complexity reigned.  I cited some examples including New Relic, Box.net and Apple.

Open source has gone a long way toward putting power back in the hands of developers, who can download, install and deploy software without having to go through any kind of convoluted sales or budget approval process.  You want MySQL?  You can download and install in 15 minutes, and you don’t have to …

We’re happy to announce the latest maintenance release of MySQL Connector/Net 6.3.5.

Version 6.3.5 maintenance release includes:

• Fixes to some installer bugs related to .NET Framework 4.0
• Fixes for several other bugs

For details see http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/connector-net-news-6-3-5.html

MySQL Connector 6.3.5 :

1. Provides secure, high-performance data connectivity with MySQL.
2. Implements ADO.NET interfaces that integrate into ADO.NET aware tools.
3. Is a fully managed ADO.NET driver written in 100% pure C#.
4. Provide Visual Studio Integration

If you are a current user, we look forward to your feedback on all the new capabilities we are delivering.

As always, you will find binaries and source on our …

It seems obvious that given the decreasing cost of storage and computation, there's going to be a significant increase in the volume of data that organizations accumulate over the next 10 years.  But the type of data being accumulated may be different from the areas where traditional DBMSs dominated.  It's not just about transactions; it's search patterns, on-line behavior, click-thru data, events fired off by smartphones, messages over Twitter & Facebook, log data of various kinds.

If an organization can figure out a better way identify prospects, or deliver more targeted ads, or optimize pricing decisions by analyzing terrabytes of data, they'd be crazy not to. Over the long term, companies that don't develop these capabilities will be at a competitive disadvantage.

As to what the implications are from a …

Mixing up some MySQL and SQL Server hacking activities can be fun. I’ve also noticed that when you work with different database platforms, it can bring additional clarity to certain concepts and techniques. One reason for that, I think, is that different terminologies and ways of explanations are used for people practicing on different platforms, and that tends to re-enforce or otherwise bring clarity to things that you may not have a good grasp to begin with.

Anyway, I am following Baron Schwartz et al’s High Performance MySQL book and thought the example of building your own hash index for URL lookup looks really useful and clever. On the topic of hash collison, the book discussed using words in /usr/share/dict/words as an example. By the way, High Performance MySQL 2nd Edition is a fantastic book, …