For the past two months, I have been running tests on TokuDB in my free time. TokuDB is a storage engine put out by Tokutek. TokuDB uses fractal tree indexes instead of B-tree indexes to improve performance, which is dramatically noticeable when dealing with large tables (over 100 million rows).

For those that like the information “above the fold”, here is a table with results from a test comparing InnoDB and TokuDB. All the steps are explained in the post below, if you want more details, but here’s the table:

Since I started doing the occasional consulting job for Open Query, I've seen a lot of MySQL servers that have been installed once and then forgotten about. This gave me the idea to do a short presentation about some basic MySQL server configuration. The first go was at DrupalCampMelbourne and I recently tried (and failed) to cram it into a three minute lightning talk slot at the LUV September meeting.

The title of the talk is (now) MySQL > YourSQL. I chose this not because I think that MySQL is better than the $other_database you use or because I may or may not run a newer version of MySQL on better hardware, but because I use InnoDB and …

Mike Hogan, CEO of ScaleDB spoke at the Boston MySQL User Group in September 2009:

ScaleDB is a storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering. It has been described as the Oracle RAC of MySQL. Using ScaleDB, you can scale your cluster by simply adding nodes, without partitioning your data. Each node has full read/write capability, eliminating the need for slaves, while delivering cluster-level load balancing. ScaleDB is looking for additional beta testers, there is a sign up at http://www.scaledb.com.

Slides are online (and downloadable) at http://www.slideshare.net/Sheeri/scale-db-preso-for-boston-my-sql-meetup-92009

Watch the video online at …

Recently Mark observed that we now all need a storage engine independent test suite, Sun included! Well, as far as I know, there is such a thing at Sun, sort of. Apparently it has been used to test PBXT and other engines, but I've heard it is not in good enough shape to be released.

But my question is, why not release it anyway? We could turn it into an engine community project. I believe there are enough engine developers out there to get this moving forward.

The secret is to start small, and just get a few tests to run with all engines. Then additional tests can be added step by step. Engines need a way to specify that they want to skip a test entirely (e.g. transactional tests), and it should be easy to customize results for various engines.

An example of a simple and elegant solution can be found in Drizzle. As …

I was asked this question recently “I am wanting to create a simple MySQL database consisting of 5 tables”?

While it’s easy to tell people to RTFM, the question does warrant an answer for the MySQL beginner to provide a more specific guidance as to where to start, and what to do. As a expert in MySQL it’s easy to forget how you would describe what to do. Here are my tips to getting started.

Step 1. Download the MySQL 5.1 software for your platform (e.g. Linux, Windows, Mac etc) from MySQL 5.1 Downloads. There are many different versions of MySQL, MySQL 5.1 is the current production version.

Step 2. You will need to install the MySQL software. The MySQL reference manual is the place to go, Chapter 2 describes installing MySQL. You can also download a copy of the manual in …

This seems quite a trivial question, but developers don’t often know what a MySQL storage engine is and how to determine what storage engine is used for a table.

The first choice is to describe the table with the DESC[RIBE] command. Side Note: people often don’t realize that DESC is a short acceptable version here.

mysql> desc stats;
+---------+---------------------+------+-----+-------------------+----------------+
| Field   | Type                | Null | Key | Default           | Extra          |
+---------+---------------------+------+-----+-------------------+----------------+
| stat_id | int(10) unsigned    | NO   | PRI | NULL              | auto_increment |
| created | timestamp           | NO   |     | CURRENT_TIMESTAMP |                |
| version | tinyint(3) unsigned | NO   |     | NULL              |                |
| referer | varchar(500) …

This is the Sharding for the masses: Introducing the SPIDER storage engine by Giuseppe Maxia, given at OpenSQLCamp, at FrOSCon, in August 2009. These are somewhat live notes, and the slides are available too.

Sharding for the masses View more documents from Giuseppe Maxia.

Why sharding? Scaling, of course. The MySQL way to solve this, is replication (even Yahoo! and Google use this).

When the master doesn’t have enough resources to cope with what you do (i.e. large data sets), replication chokes.

You can use proxies for sharding. There exists …

RethinkDB is all the rage today, as its a Y Combinator funded startup, which also launched a developer pre-alpha today. So what is RethinkDB you ask? Yet-another-MySQL-storage-engine, that’s what. But this time, its tuned for solid-state drives (SSDs), which also happen to be all the rage these days.

Anyway, check them out more, and the materials currently tell me that they’re using append-only algorithms, which allow for live schema changes and hot backups, with instantaneous recovery from power failure. Those are just some of the exciting bits.

What didn’t excite me so much was the fact that you were only getting 32-bit or 64-bit Linux binaries, built against MySQL 5.1.31 and you’ll just install it via the INSTALL …

This is the first post in a new series of “Kickfire Basics” blog posts by myself and others here at Kickfire.  This series will review the basics of the Kickfire appliance starting from this post describing how data is stored on disk, to future posts on topics such as loading data into the appliance and writing queries which best leverage the capabilities of the SQL chip.

The Kickfire Equation
Column store + Compression + SQL Chip = performance

The Kickfire Analytic Appliance features the new KFDB storage engine which was built from scratch to handle queries over vast amounts of data.  KFDB is a column store in contrast to most MySQL storage engines which are row stores.  What follows is a description of our column oriented storage engine and how it improves performance over typical row stores.

This post concerns itself with the first part of the equation, the KFDB …

ScaleDB provides a pluggable storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering . Brian Akers once described ScaleDB as "the closest thing to Oracle RAC for MySQL." The ScaleDB storage engine turns MySQL into a clustered database, where all of the nodes share the same data. It eliminates the need to partition the data. It also allows you to add and remove nodes without interrupting the application. It will (in time) provide high-availability, but we can’t promise that for the beta version.

So we’re looking for companies with problems we can uniquely solve. We view the beta process as an investment on both sides, we invest in supporting you and making you successful and you invest your time using our software. I have found that beta testers will invest more time when you solve a problem that they cannot …