NetMotion Wireless develops software to manage and secure wireless data deployments for organizations with mobile field workers. Founded in 2001, NetMotion Wireless is one of the fastest growing wireless and technology companies and the recipient of over 25 awards for outstanding technology.  NetMotion Wireless has over 2,500 customers, including Advocate Healthcare, Comcast, and Unilever.

NetMotion Wireless had used Microsoft SQL Server with Mobility Analytics, their mobile VPN product’s analytics module, but found it was too costly and lacked the platform and language flexibility to be a good [embedded] database. As a result, when the NetMotion Wireless product team was developing Locality, a cellular network management product, they decided to find an …

Baron has an interesting post about TokuDB. I agree with him that open-source TokuDB can be a big deal. I compared it with InnoDB using linkbench and the results are interesting. I used pure-disk servers with 1B rows in the link table (maxid1=1B), zlib compressed InnoDB tables and lzma compression for TokuDB. After running the test for a few days InnoDB used 710 GB on disk and sustained 501 QPS compared to 359 GB and 1147 QPS for TokuDB. 

TokuDB was marketed and perhaps even designed with pure-disk servers in …

Baron has an interesting post about TokuDB. I agree with him that open-source TokuDB can be a big deal. I compared it with InnoDB using linkbench and the results are interesting. I used pure-disk servers with 1B rows in the link table (maxid1=1B), zlib compressed InnoDB tables and lzma compression for TokuDB. After running the test for a few days InnoDB used 710 GB on disk and sustained 501 QPS compared to 359 GB and 1147 QPS for TokuDB. 

TokuDB was marketed and perhaps even designed with pure-disk servers in …

We’ve told you all about MySQL mult-master replication’s limitations. If you write to two masters it is bound to fail for myriad reasons. Now what? Do what the pros do that’s what. A. Don’t write to both masters Using multi-master replication works great as long as you do so in active-passive mode. Never write to [...]

Software Carpentry is running a 2-day software skills boot camp in Boston, June 24-25th 2013, for women in science, engineering, medicine, and related research
areas. Registration is $20.

Boot camps alternate short tutorials with hands-on practical exercises. You are taught tools and concepts you can use immediately to increase your productivity and improve confidence in your results. Topics covered include the Unix shell, version control, basic Python programming, testing, and debugging — the core skills needed to write, test and manage research software.

This boot camp is open to women at all stages of their research careers, from graduate students, post-docs, and faculty to staff scientists at hospitals and in the public, private, and non-profit sectors.

When you setup a monitoring system for SQL Server, you often use thresholds to determine when an instance is healthy. You might say that you want to be alerted when CPU use is over 90% or when there’s only 10% of disk space left. The trouble with these thresholds is that they will often throw off false positives, or send you an alert when really nothing is wrong. Simple thresholds often have to be tuned to the individual instance, since a server with 10 TB still has 1 TB of space left at 90% disk use.

Baron Schwartz blogged about this issue in an article and he’s been creating software that monitors MySQL beyond simple thresholds, after stating that they do not work in most cases. He makes a good …

The world's largest producer of casual games has selected MySQL Cluster to power its real-time recommendations platform.

High velocity data ingestion, low latency reads, on-line scaling and the operational simplicity delivered by MySQL Cluster has enabled Big Fish to increase customer engagement and deliver targeted marketing, providing a more personalized experience to its users.

You can read the full Big Fish Games and MySQL Cluster case study here - and a summary below

BUSINESS NEED

The global video gaming market is experiencing explosive growth. Competition is intense, …

“Best Practices for MySQL Scalability.”

If you have not already done so, I encourage you to register for my “Best Practices for MySQL Scalability” Webinar which will take place on May 1st at 10 a.m. PST. This will be an overview presentation, led by me and providing a high-level look at the components of MySQL scalability: application architecture, MySQL version and configuration, choosing hardware and operating systems. For each area we’ll investigate the most important best practices. Talk to you on Wednesday, and remember to prepare your questions in advance to get the most value out of the Webinar!

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More info: MySQL scalability depends on getting many things right including …

Today I downloaded Fedora 19 alpha to give it a spin. Some quick notes.

You can get MySQL by asking for the package community-mysql-server. This is 5.5.31. If you ask for stock “mysql” (i.e. yum install mysql-server), you automatically get MariaDB 5.5.30 (mariadb-server).

Fedora 19 runs systemd, so there is no longer /etc/init.d/mysql to start/stop/restart. So just do systemctl enable mysqld.service. Then perform: systemctl start mysqld.service. Replace start with: stop/status too. You can disable it too if you want.

MariaDB 10.0.2 compiles cleanly on Fedora 19 with gcc-4.8. Just perform: yum install bzr gzip tar gcc gcc-c++ make libtool bison ncurses-devel zlib-devel automake autoconf cmake. Get the source code (I just downloaded it). Do BUILD/compile-pentium64-max. Wait. Run make test. Enjoy. Refer to …

I am doing a reporting proof-of-concept (POC) for my company. Business intelligence (BI) is often the last thing that gets thought of during an application’s life cycle because it’s only really necessary after you get customers. Before that, the main focus is on application features. Soon after launch, your coworkers and your customers start asking questions about usage and adoption, and customers start to ask for summary information on their data as well as just dumping their data. If you’re the only guy in charge of the database, this is often overwhelming.

Thankfully, we now have many options for what’s called self-service BI. The developer or DBA sets up the basic data models (say Orders) in an automated tool like SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) and then allows an information worker to select the columns, perform joins, and add filters to create reports. This basically cuts down miscommunication that can often happen between …