"Should vegetarians open steakhouse restaurants?"

Though someone will probably give me several examples of why they should, I'll argue that they absolutely should not. How can someone who doesn't eat steak convince others to eat at their "steak-only" restaurant?

But this is something a "professional technology benchmarker" (PTB) struggles with on a regular basis. Hello, I'm Tim Callaghan, and I'm a PTB.
professional technology benchmarker, or PTB (noun) : One who compares two technologies as part of their job. One of these technologies is usually the product of the PTB's employer, the other is almost always not. In a past experience I was tasked with comparing the performance of a fully in-memory database with Oracle and MySQL on a "TPC-C like" workload. At the time I was an Oracle expert and working for the in-memory database company, but had never started a single MySQL server in my life. At …

If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

Since this is my first blog I feel it's necessary to introduce myself. I'm Tim Callaghan, I work at Tokutek (makers of TokuDB and TokuMX), and I love benchmarking. While some of the content on this blog will certainly be about Tokutek technologies, I plan on exploring a wide variety of others as well. These are strictly my own personal views and opinions, and comments/feedback are always welcome. Lets get started...

A few weeks ago I noticed an EnterpriseDB NoSQL Benchmark that measured Data Load, Insert, Select, and Size. It wasn't just a NoSQL benchmark, it was specifically calling out …

September 10, 2014 By Severalnines

If you are automating your infrastructure using Puppet, then this blog is for you. We are glad to announce the availability of a Puppet module for ClusterControl. For those using Chef, we already published Chef cookbooks for Galera Cluster and ClusterControl some time back.  

ClusterControl on Puppet Forge

The ClusterControl module initial release is available on Puppet Forge, installing the module is as easy as:

$ puppet module install severalnines-clustercontrol

If you haven’t change the default module path, this module will be installed under /etc/puppet/modules/clustercontrol on …

June 16, 2014 By Severalnines

MongoDB is great at storing clickstream data, but using it to analyze millions of documents can be challenging. Hadoop provides a way of processing and analyzing data at large scale. Since it is a parallel system, workloads can be split on multiple nodes and computations on large datasets can be done in relatively short timeframes. MongoDB data can be moved into Hadoop using ETL tools like Talend or Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle).

In this blog, we’ll show you how to integrate your MongoDB and Hadoop datastores using Talend. We have a MongoDB database collecting clickstream data from several websites. We’ll create a job in Talend to extract the documents from MongoDB, transform and then load them into HDFS. We will also show you how to schedule this job to be executed every 5 minutes.

Test Case

We have an application …

In my last post, I gave a technical explanation of the performance characteristics of partitioned collections in TokuMX 1.5 (which is right around the corner) and partitioned tables in relational databases. Given those performance characteristics, in this post, I will present some best practices when using this feature in TokuMX or TokuDB. Note that these best practices are designed for TokuMX and TokuDB only, which use …

In TokuMX 1.5 that is right around the corner, the big feature will be partitioned collections. This feature is similar to partitioned tables in Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, and Postgres. A question many have is “why should I use partitioned tables?” In short, it’s complicated. The answer depends on your workload, your schema, and your database of choice. For example, this Oracle related post states “Anyone with un-partitioned databases over 500 gigabytes is courting disaster.” That’s not true for TokuDB or TokuMX. Nevertheless, partitioned tables are valuable; it’s why we …

May 19, 2014 By Severalnines

Thanks to everyone who attended and participated last week’s joint webinar on ClusterControl 1.2.6! We had great questions from participants (thank you), most of which are transcribed below with our answers to them.

If you missed the sessions or would like to watch the webinar again & browse through the slides, they are now available online.

Webinar topics discussed: 

• Database Infrastructure Lifecycle
• Deploy, Monitor, Manage, Scale
• MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters
• ClusterControl Overview & Demo
• ClusterControl New Features in 1.2.6 & Demo
• Centralized Authentication using LDAP or Active Directory
…

Background: If you did not read my first blog post about why I am sharing my thoughts on the benchmarks published by Mark Callaghan on Small Datum you may want to skim through it now for a little context: “Thoughts on Small Datum – Part 1”

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Last time, in “Thoughts on Small Datum – Part 2” I shared my cliff notes and a graph on Mark Callaghan’s (@markcallaghan) March 11th insertion rate benchmarks using flash storage media. In those tests he compares MySQL outfitted with the …

May 7, 2014 By Severalnines

Following the release of ClusterControl 1.2.6 a couple of weeks ago, we are now looking forward to demonstrating this latest version of the product on Tuesday next week, May 13th.

This release contains key new features (along with performance improvements and bug fixes), which we will be demonstrating live during the webinar. 

Highlights include:

• Centralized Authentication using LDAP or Active Directory
• Role-Based Access Control
• OpenStack: Galera Deployment Automation
• Hybrid setups with Galera and Asynchronous MySQL Replication
• Manage single instance …