I feel a sense of pride when I think that I was involved in the development and maintenance of what was probably the first piece of software accepted into Debian which then had and still has direct up-stream support from Microsoft. The world is a better place for having Microsoft in it. The first operating system I ever ran on an 08086-based CPU was MS-DOS 2.x. I remember how thrilled I was when we got to see how my friend’s 80286 system ran BBS software that would cause a modem to dial a local system and display the application as if it were running on a local machine. Totally sweet.

When we were living at 6162 NE Middle in the nine-eight 292, we got an 80386 which ran Doom. Yeah, the original one, not the fancy new one with the double barrel shotgun, but it would probably run that one, too. It was also …

Whatever Google intended to do with the latest update, I personally think there was some collateral damage done to sites like mysqljoin.com . Since this is only a site I created to show people how joins can be used within MySQL (for free), I never spent money to a SEO agency or something. All I did was installing a SEO Plugin for WordPress. Am I guilty of “over optimizing” now?

The site is approx. 1,5 years old and it grew slowly. The first few month nothing really happened, then people somehow started to link to us , people on stackoverflow.com started to reference us and things like that. To me, this looks really organic. However, the traffic dropped overnight from approx. 1500 unique visitors per day to approx. 300 unique visitors.

If this update works to fight again spammy sites in the organic results, I’m fine with it. Even though I have no idea why Google …

At Collaborate, and on the Web, come on and join us and F2F with the tech-saavy! COLLABORATE Social Media Hour  Tues, 4/24, 1–2 pm Exhibit Hall-IOUG Booth There’s no 140 character limit for this meet up! Stop by the IOUG … Continue reading →

Today I switched my blog from wordpress to serendipity, because I was dissatisfied about the quality of some wordpress plugins. Serendipity apparently provides a smaller range of plugins with a higher quality. This site will be under construction for the next time and I will not publish the tutorials and howtos from my old blog.

This site will be under construction for the next time.

Again, I have moved to a new hosting provider after my free-tier with Amazon EC2 expired.  As usual I was looking for a good VPS provider with a decent price, providing good support and in particular a provider supporting FreeBSD, my favorite OS for server (for desktop I still prefer GNU/Linux.)

This time I have carefully reviewed many options and have finally settled with RootBSD, one of the reputed VPS hosting providers if you are choosing FreeBSD as your server OS.  One of the prime reasons for choosing FreeBSD is its performance, stability and the FreeBSD ports system.

Although my …

There is a huge amount of buzz around NOSQL, and we at ScaleBase are happy to see companies making the move to NOSQL. Despite what some people might think, we consider it a blessed change. It is time for applications to stop having a single data store – namely a relational database (probably Oracle) – and start using the best tool for the job.

In the last couple of years, since NOSQL technologies broke into our world, a lot of experience has been gathered on how to use them. Mainly, we see NoSQL technologies used for one of the following scenarios:

• Queries that require a very short response time
• Storing data without a well-defined schema, or storing data with a frequently modified schema

Now, I’m not in any way saying that NOSQL solutions are not used for other scenarios as well; I’m only saying that from our experience here at ScaleBase ,  these are the most common scenarios.

ScaleBase Releases Database DBT2 Performance Results

Technology achieves unprecedented transaction speed for a MySQL database at a low cost

Boston, Mass., December 12, 2011 – ScaleBase, Inc. today announced the results of its MySQL database benchmark, based on the industry-standard DBT-2 test. ScaleBase has achieved an unmatched 180,000 Transactions per Minute – the highest result for a MySQL database – while running on an Amazon RDS environment. Cost per Transaction was reported to be 50 cents, which demonstrates the cost-effectiveness of the ScaleBase solution on the Amazon EC2 cloud. Full details of the benchmark can be found at …

There are several ways to implement sharding in your application. The first and by far the most popular, is to implement it inside your application. It can be implemented as part of your own Data Access Layer, database driver, or an ORM extension. However, there are many limitations with such implementation, which drove us, at ScaleBase, to look for an alternative architecture.

As the above diagram shows, ScaleBase is implemented as a standalone proxy. There are several benefits to using such an architecture.

First and foremost, since the sharding logic is not embedded inside the application, third party applications can be used, be it MySQL Workbench, MySQL command line interface or any other third party product. This translates to a huge saving in the day-to-day costs of both developers and system administrators.

Backup can be executed via the proxy, and so allows users to consistently backup a sharded environment – not …

The ScaleBase Analysis tool gives a schema a grade between 1 and 100 for being “sharding compatible”. It’s a neat feature, but many ask me how the grade is calculated. Well – here goes.

First of all, a good schema is one that is easy to shard. Database Normalization is usually a good thing when sharding. It means that finding the sharding key is easy, relationships between tables are clear, and the queries themselves are usually much simpler. So we try to give a grade on how well the schema is normalized.

After the sharding configuration is determined (see here on how this should be done), we review your MySQL General Log, to understand the value you can expect from the sharding configuration:

• Statements that run on sharded tables, and hit a …