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 …

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 …

"New Shimmer is both a floor wax and a dessert topping!" - Chevy Chase, Saturday Night Live

On a Saturday Night Live comedy skit, a husband is arguing that Shimmer is a dessert topping, while his wife insists that it’s a floor wax. Then the Shimmer spokesman-Chevy Chase-explains that it is both. While this juxtaposition is humorous, in many respects this is what databases have been doing for years. Instead of specializing on one specific task, most mainstream databases provide an acceptable combination of performance and capabilities across all use cases. The pluggable storage engine architecture is now changing this, ushering in an era of on-demand specialization.

MySQL allows you to select the storage engine not just for the application, but for each table used by the application. Let me use an analogy to describe how powerful this is. Consider an automobile that enables you to simply switch from one engine to another. You …

The spirit and intent of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and the GPL license are right on target. However, we must be careful to ensure that the GPL license is interpreted in a manner fulfills the spirit and intent behind its framing. Richard Stallman and associates set out to draft a license agreement that ensures that free software remains free. They didn’t want to see open source become corrupted with the insertion of proprietary code that would eat away at the freedoms they envisioned.

To protect the eternal purity of the open source software, they created constraints on how proprietary code can interact with the GPL code. Their one weapon in this battle is the automatic and forced expansion of their GPL license to any code that integrates with the base GPLed code. I often refer to this process as acting like a virus. I don’t use this term to infer nefarious intent any more than viral marketing infers nefarious intent. On the …

(Note: Review was done as part of our consulting practice, but is totally independent and fully reflects our opinion)

I had a chance to take look TokuDB (the name of the Tokutek storage engine), and run some benchmarks. Tuning of TokuDB is much easier than InnoDB, there only few parameters to change, and actually out-of-box things running pretty well.

There are some rumors circulating that TokuDB is ”.. only an in memory or read-only engine, and that's why inserts are so fast”. This is not actually the case, as TokuDB is a disk-based, read-write transactional storage engine that is based on special “fractal tree indexes”. Fractal Trees are a drop-in-replacement for a B-tree (based on current research in data structures by professors at Stony Brook, Rutgers, and MIT). I can't say exactly how it is improved, because the engine itself is closed source.

…

While Zack covered the storage engine and appliances sessions pretty well, I feel he’s missed out on a few important new engines (or engine related talks):

• DDEngine will be represented, speaking about Automated data versioning with a storage engine
• Long time MySQL Community Member Beat Vontobel, will be presenting on the SeqEngine, in Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine
• Kazuho Oku, from Cybozu Labs in Japan, will be talking about Q4M, a queuing engine for MySQL. Mixi.jp uses it for their Twitter like service, so I’d …