There are ways to scale databases, unfortunately some are limited, some introduce complexities, some are do not fit the cloud...

By scaling solution I mean a solutions that help me scale my existing environment, my existing RDBMS. Some magic or technology that will take my existing Oracle or MySQL for example, to the next level, without porting to a new DB engine/vendor and without completely recoding my app.

Let's try to organize things a bit in this very summarized table, just to get the hunch of it. I can't imagine to cover it all in 1 table or even 100 pages, but that should be a start of a meaningful discussion to continue in next posts:

In my heart, I'm a DBA, always was and always will be. People say I'm a database guy by the way I think, keep my car, and file my music and also bank statements... However I did great deal of development, design, architecture on the apps side. I (hope to) have some perspective.

Applications come and go. The second programming language I've ever learned and worked on was COBOL, some still say most of the world's lines of code are written in this language, maybe so, but anyway I since then have known and written in dozens of programming languages, from Assembly to Force.com, from Pascal to Delphi, from functional C to Object Oriented SmallTalk, C++, Java and , from compiled C/CGI to interpreted Perl, ASP and Ruby back to compiled node.js... My first applications ran on Main-Frame with green screen, later I created beautiful graphic client-server applications, later I had to create hideous white web applications …

MariaDB-5.5.21-beta is the first MariaDB release featuring the new thread pool. Oracle offers a commercial thread pool plugin for MySQL Enterprise, but now MariaDB brings a thread pool implementation to the community!

If you are not familiar with the term, please read the Knowledge Base article about it.

The main design goal of the thread pool is to increase the scalability of the MariaDB server with many concurrent connections. In order to test and demonstrate this, I have run the sysbench OLTP RO benchmark with up to 4096 threads to compare the new pool-of-threads and the traditional thread-per-connection scheduler:

Benchmark description:

• sysbench multi table OLTP, readonly
• 16 tables, totaling 40 mio …

This is a cross-post from the MySQL Performance Blog. I thought it would be interesting to users of PostgreSQL, Redis, Memcached, and $system-of-interest as well.

For about the past year I’ve been formulating a series of tools and practices that can provide deep insight into system performance simply by looking at TCP packet headers, and when they arrive and depart from a system. This works for MySQL as well as a lot of other types of systems, because it doesn’t require any of the contents of the packet. Thus, it works without knowledge of what the server and client are conversing about. Packet headers contain only information that’s usually regarded as non-sensitive (IP address, port, TCP flags, etc), so it’s also very easy to get access to this data even in highly secure environments.

I’ve …

Read the original article at Scalability Rules for managers and startups

Abbott and Fisher’s previous book, The Art of Scalability received good reviews for shifting the way we think about scalability from merely splitting databases and adding servers, to include the human factors that weigh heavily on its success. Together with the authors’ distinguished pedigree (PayPal, Amazon, and eBay between them), I picked up a copy of their second book, Scalability Rules - 50 Principles for Scaling Web Sites without a second thought.

If Art was about laying a strong foundation for a scalable organization then Rules is the …

Read the original article at What Ops doesn’t tell you about your MySQL Database

MySQL is a very scalable platform which has proven robust even in the most dense and complex data environments. MySQL’s indispensable replication function is ‘sold’ as being fail-safe so you have little to sweat about as long as your backups are running regularly. But what the ops guys aren’t telling you is MySQL performs replication with tiny margins of error that could cause big problems in times of disaster.

The Scenario

Imagine the scene, you use replication to backup your data. Your secondary database is your peace of mind. It’s the always-on clone of your crown jewels. You even perform backups off of it so you don’t impact your live website. …

One of the great things about the HTTP protocol, besides status code 418, is that it's stateless. A web server therefore is not required to store any information on the user or allocate resources for a user after the individual request is done. By that a single web server can handle many many many different users easily, and well if it can't anymore one can add a new server, put a simple load balancer in front and scale out. Each of those web servers then handles its requests without the need for communication which leads to linear scaling (assuming network provides enough bandwidth etc.).

Now the Web isn't used for serving static documents only anymore but we have all these fancy web apps. And those applications often have the need for a state. The most trivial information they need is the current user. HTTP is a great protocol and provides a way to do authentication which …

Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

It looks like a star, with the rays extending from the master to the slaves. This is the basis of most of the replication going on mostly everywhere nowadays, and it has few surprises. Setting aside the …

Read the original article at Book Review – Effective MySQL

Effective MySQL: Optimizing SQL Statements by Ronald Bradford No Nonsense, Readable, Practical, and Compact I like that this book is small; 150 pages means you can carry it easily.  It’s also very no nonsense.  It does not dig too deeply into theory unless it directly relates to your day-to-day needs.  And those needs probably cluster [...]

For more articles like these go to iHeavy, Inc +1-212-533-6828

Read the original article at 5 Tips to Cache Websites and Boost Speed

Often when we think about speeding up and scaling, we focus on the application layer itself.  We look at the webserver tier, and database tier, and optimize the most resource intensive pages.

There's much more we can do to speed things up, if we only turn over the right stones.  Whether you're using WordPress or not, many of these principals can be applied.  However we'll use WordPress as our test case.

Test Your Website speed

There are web-based speed testing tools that will help with this step.  Take a look at Webpagetest , …