Bradley and I (Michael) gave the tutorial on Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Databases at the 6th XLDB Conference last month.

The tutorial was organized as follows:

• Module 0: Tutorial overview and introductions. We describe an observed (but not necessary) tradeoff in ingestion, querying, and freshness in traditional database.
• Module 1: I/O model and cache-oblivious analysis.
• Module 2: Write-optimized data structures. We give the optimal trade-off between inserts and point queries. We show how to build data structures that lie on this tradeoff curve.
• Module 2 continued: Write-optimized …

The core technology behind Tokutek is based on the academic research by our founders: Michael Bender, Bradley Kuszmaul and Martin Farach-Colton.  They are all still in academia, in addition to their work at Tokutek.

Back in March, the White House kicked off a new Initiative for Big Data.  Last week, the National Science Foundation announced the first interagency grants for this.  Eight awards were given, and our own Michael Bender and Martin Farach-Colton, along with Robert Johnson of Stony Brook University, received one of them.

Through their academic work, they hope to extend our …

Recently, our CTO, Martín Farach-Colton had a chance to talk about scaling MySQL and MariaDB with Roberto Zicari of ODBMS.

In the article, Martin states “While I believe that one size fits most, claims that RDBMS can no longer keep up with modern workloads come in from all directions. When people talk about performance of databases on large systems, the root cause of their concerns is often the performance of the underlying B-tree index.” He also notes how “Fractal Tree Indexes put you on a higher-performing tradeoff curve. Query-optimal write-optimized indexing is all about making general-purpose databases faster. For some of our customers’ workloads, it’s as much as two orders of magnitude faster.”

To read the full article, and to …

“While I believe that one size fits most, claims that RDBMS can no longer keep up with modern workloads come in from all directions. When people talk about performance of databases on large systems, the root cause of their concerns is often the performance of the underlying B-tree index”– Martín Farach-Colton. Scaling MySQL and MariaDB [...]

Recently, our CEO, John Partridge had a chance to talk about novel database technologies for “Big Data” with Peter Cohan of Forbes.

According to the article, “Fractal Tree indexing is helping organizations analyze big data more efficiently due to its ability to improve database efficiency thanks to faster ‘database insertion speed, quicker input/output performance, operational agility, and data compression.’” As a start-up based on “the  first algorithm-based breakthrough in the database world in 40 years,” Toktuetek is following in the footsteps of firms such as Google and RSA, which also relied on novel algortithm advances as core to their technology.

To read the full article, and to see how Tokutek is helping companies tackle big data, see …

TokuDB® is a proven solution that scales MySQL® and MariaDB® from GBs to TBs with unmatched insert and query speed, compression, replication performance and online schema flexibility. Tokutek’s recently launched TokuDB v6.5 delivers all of these features and more, not just for HDDs, but also for flash memory.

Originally Aired: October 10th
AVAILABLE ON DEMAND

TokuDB v6.5:

• Stores 10x More Data – TokuDB delivers 10x compression without any performance degradation. Users can therefore take advantage of much greater amounts of available space without paying more for additional storage.

• Delivers High Insertion Speed – TokuDB Fractal Tree® indexes …

Tokutek sponsored the Percona Live MySQL / New York 2012 Conference which took place this past Monday and Tuesday.  I spent much of the time at our booth discussing TokuDB with conference attendees but also managed to attend the following presentations:

• Understanding Performance through Measurement, Benchmarking and Profiling by Rene Cannao of PalominoDB.  Rene presented 3 hours of content covering his methodologies, toolbox, and tips & tricks to help identify performance bottlenecks. Rene has obviously been optimizing systems for some time as I’ve never seen such a comprehensive list of tools and techniques.  This …

We are excited to announce TokuDB® v6.5, the latest version of Tokutek’s flagship storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB.

This version offers optimization for Flash as well as more hot schema change operations for improved agility.

We’ll be posting more details about the new features and performance, so here’s an overview of what’s in store.

Flash

TokuDB v6.5 continues the great Toku-tradition of fast insertions. On flash drives, we show an order-of-magnitude (9x) faster insertion rate than InnoDB. TokuDB’s standard compression works just as well on flash and helps you get the most out of your storage system. And TokuDB reduces wear …

On Friday our CEO John Partridge was named a “Tech Luminary” in the 17th annual Innovation All Stars award, which is given jointly by Mass High Tech (MHT) and the Boston Business Journal (BBJ). As noted in MHT by the editor, Chris McIntosh, the Luminary designations “reflect deep accomplishment in various technology-related industries.”

For more than 20 years, Tokutek CEO John Partridge has worked with startups in both the Boston area and in Silicon Valley. He joined Tokutek from StreamBase Systems which John co-founded with database pioneer Dr. Michael Stonebraker. He started his career as a software developer …

At next week’s Strange Loop conference, I will give a talk on “Understanding Indexing”. The session is 10 am Monday, September 24th, and will be held in the Midland States Room.

Application performance often depends on how fast a query can respond and query performance almost always depends on good indexing. So one of the quickest and least expensive ways to increase application performance is to optimize the indexes. This talk presents three simple and effective rules on how to construct indexes around queries that result in good performance.

This is a general discussion applicable to all databases using indexes and is not specific to any particular MySQL® storage engine (e.g., InnoDB, TokuDB®, etc.). …