Yesterday I saw an announcement in the MySQL internals@ list, about a new storage engine being released. DDengine has created a revision engine, a sort of embedded proxy inside MySQL that keeps track of the changes you do to your data.
The idea is clever. You write to your table, update and delete without any concern, and the revision engine stores your changes in the background.
I wanted to tried the engine on my laptop (Mac OSX), but there was no binary available for this architecture. I contacted the authors and I received prompt assistance until I had the product installed. Unfortunately, it crashes immediately. Well, it's to be expected for a version 0.1.
I then tried on Linux, and also here I received very quick assistance from Peter Benjamin Volk, Project Head at DDengine.
It now works on Linux, …

It's been over a month (and three hurricanes in America) since I've posted a blog. More than a few of you've noticed - thanks for the prodding...

It's been a busy summer, on nearly every front. Customer activity hasn't slowed down, and the good news surrounding the (otherwise unfortunate) economic crisis embroiling many customers (especially those in the financial services industry, a heavy concentration for Sun) is that it's whipping up the winds of change. Customers facing spending pressure, or tiring of vendor price increases have new options, and there's a new appetite to explore those options (nothing like mandates from the CEO to reduce spending by 50%).

One of my more interesting recent meetings wasn't with a customer, though, it was with an equity analyst from a global financial institution. Equity analysts publish research that feeds the investment community - their (free) research and financial analysis accompanies …

MySQL 5.1.24-rc ships with a EXAMPLE storage engine which is basically a dummy storage engine and serves as a useful source to start writing your own custom storage engine.

However, it is not available for use, by default. You can verify this as follows:

mysql> show engines;

+------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | Engine     | Support | Comment                                                   | Transactions | XA | Savepoints | +------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | …

MySQL 5.1.24-rc ships with a EXAMPLE storage engine which is basically a dummy storage engine and serves as a useful source to start writing your own custom storage engine.

However, it is not available for use, by default. You can verify this as follows:

mysql> show engines;

+------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | Engine     | Support | Comment                                                   | Transactions | XA | Savepoints | +------------+---------+-----------------------------------------------------------+--------------+----+------------+ | …

There are only two kinds of storage devices - those that have failed, and those that are about to fail. That's the view most datacenters have about the traditionally mechanical devices pejoratively referred to as "spinning rust." All disk drives fail, cheap drives fail faster.

If the average time to fail is five years, you and your laptop can make do with the occasional backup. But when an average enterprise has 100, or 1,000, or increasingly 10,000 or 100,000 individual disk drives, failure is a daily, if not hourly occurrence. Mechanical devices fail.

And with failure comes the potential for losing data - using commodity disks to save your boss $500,000 does her no good if she's fined $50,000,000 for violating data retention regulations. Stock transactions, medical images or feature length movies - take your pick, some data has to be perfect. Not a decimal point or pixel out of place.

That's exactly why, years …

About a month ago, Network Appliance sued Sun to try to stop the competitive impact of ZFS on their business.

I can understand why they're upset - when Linux first came on the scene in Sun's core market, there were some here who responded the same way, asking "who can we sue?" But seeing the future, we didn't file an injunction to stop competition - instead, we joined the free software community and innovated.

One of the ways we innovated was to create a magical file system called ZFS - which enables expensive, proprietary storage to be replaced with commodity disks and general purpose servers. Customers save a ton of money - and administrators save a ton of time. The economic impact is staggering - and understandably threatening to Net App and other proprietary companies. As is all free innovation, at some level. …