I did some comparison of ZFS vs XFS last week to review the current state of the art in filesystems.

Long story short. XFS is still the reigning champion (at least on Linux). XFS beats out most filesystem benchmarks across the board. Reiser does well on directories with lots of small files but not enough to justify not using XFS.

Reiser FS is out of the picture honestly. First, it just doesn’t perform very well. Second, Hans Reiser is probably going to prison for murdering his wife and is selling the company to pay off his legal costs.

ZFS would have a shot on …

Some of the common conceptions of data storage seem to have been blown out of the water.

Two things I found interesting:

In their study they found that there was no correlation between disk failure rates and utilization, environmental conditions such as temperature, or age. This means that high disk utilization or age of the disk have no significant impact on the probability that it will fail.

…

They observed that older disks had a much lower failure rates then newer disks, where the newer disks in general were less expensive.

Which makes me think that buying used HDDs off Craigslist might not be a bad idea.

One could buy cheap 15k RPM low latency disks from a few years ago and forget about the storage capacity in exchange for FAST seek time.

Of course it depends on how …

Hurry up, submit a paper! The LinuxTag Call for Papers ends tomorrow, February 16th.

Short info about LinuxTag from the homepage:

LinuxTag 2007 opens doors from May 30 to June 2, 2007 on Berlin Expo Center under the Funkturm. We invite users and experts to learn at Europe’s leading conference and expo more about the potential of Linux, Open Source, and Free Software.

FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Software Developers' European Meeting will again take place in Brussels, Belgium on February, 24th & 25th. I went there last year and really had a great time. This year, I submitted a proposal for a lightning talk, which has been accepted! I've just been informed that the lightning talk schedule is now published. My talk "What's new at MySQL AB" will be on Saturday, at 17:00. I look forward to being there!

The following is what i wrote on “43people.com” about the boss. I thought it was worth keeping in my own archives, since it’s actually a story about my life as it pertains to Mr. Bezos.

Back a few years ago, I was taking some classes down in Edmonds. The one I’m thinking of in particular was on the care and feeding of unix. We were using red hat linux 6.0 or some crufty version that wasn’t so crufty at the time.

Anyway, the prof didn’t require that we buy any books, but he made some suggestions. And he also suggested that we buy them on this new fangled “Internet” thing through a few of his friends down south in Seattle at this place called Amazon.com.

And thus was my introduction to O’Reilly and Associates. I soon thereafter bought a book called “ …

I am happy to announce version 0.4 of mylvmbackup, a tool to perform consistent backups of a MySQL server's tables using Linux LVM snapshots.

For this release I'd like to especially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project, who contributed another batch of useful changes and informed me that mylvmbackup is now in productive use to perform backups of the MySQL databases that power the project's Bugzilla bug tracking system. I am always glad to read about such use cases - how do you utilize mylvmbackup in your environment?

• The option handling has been improved. mylvmbackup now starts by using the builtin defaults, followed by the default configuration file (/etc/mylvmbackup.conf, followed by an alternative configuration file (specified via CLI …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Everyone has heard of being slashdotted or maybe dugg. But have you ever been Yahoo!ed?

Phones started beeping, mayhem ensued. The first thing we looked at was the database. Is some MyISAM table locked? Is there a hung log processor running? The database was busy, but it looked odd. The web servers were going nuts.

As we soon discoverd, we (dealnews.com) were mentioned in an article on Yahoo!. At 5Pm Eastern, that article made it to be the featured article on the Yahoo! front page. It was there for an hour. We went from our already high Christmas traffic of about 80 req/s for pages and 200 req/s for images to a 130 req/s for pages and 500 req/s for images. We survived with a little tinkering. We have been working on a …

Recently I stumbled over a posting on the German MySQL Forum from a user that accidentally removed all table files from a MySQL Server's data directory with a misbehaving shell script. He was surprised to find out that the server happily continued to serve requests and his web site was still fully operational, even though /var/lib/mysql/<database> was completely emtpy! The reason for this in a nutshell: the rm command only removed the reference to the table files from the database directory, the files itself were not removed from the file system yet as the mysqld process still had the files opened. So as long as a process keeps a file open, the kernel will not release the disk space occupied by the file and it will remain intact, albeit no longer visible.

Of course, the user was now desperate to recover the deleted tables files and was …