While wearing my hat of Sales Engineer, I have been asked several times what is the difference between InnoDB and MySQL Cluster/NDB and when it makes sense to use one storage engine or the other. Some may probably think that this is a trivial question: the two engines are so different that there is really no point to compare them. The reality is not so clear though: there are many situations where I have found InnoDB stretched to the point where MySQL Cluster would have been a perfect fit, and other occasions were users implemented a solution based on MySQL Cluster and InnoDB would have been the perfect choice.

This is the reason behind my talk at the MySQL User Conference in Santa Clara: InnoDB vs NDB. I will co-present the session with my good old friend and ex-colleague Johan Andersson – if you know Johan, you may guess who will take the part for NDB!

Rest assured it will be a serious and fair comparison between the two …

It's now 2 hours until I depart for San Francisco and then Santa Clara for this year's MySQL Conference. Can't wait to meet everyone and to learn about cool new things (2 solutions for parallelizing replication, Drizzle, Xtrabackup...)

This year I am involved in two BoF sessions: Severalnines ClusterControl with Johan Anderson and Xtrabackup Manager with Lachlan Mulcahy. Both of these are about brand new topics, this being the first time they are presented, so I'm excited to be working with these guys.

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Planning for MariaDB 5.6 at the MySQL Conference 2011

A couple of weeks ago we had a Monty Program Ab and MariaDB developers meeting in Lisbon.

MariaDB 5.3 / 5.5 are now almost in beta (the last features will be pushed directly after the MySQL conference) and it was time to start considering what features should be in the next MariaDB release.

The meeting was open to anyone and we were lucky to have several other companies than just Monty Program Ab involved in the discussions!

During the meeting we created a list of features we would like to see in the MariaDB 5.6 release.

Some of the features are already allocated to developers. Others are waiting for developers willing to do the development or sponsors willing to pay for getting …

Hello everyone!

During next week I'll be at Collaborate 11 conference in Orlando, Florida!

Together with my colleagues and friends, I'll be talking about MySQL replication on a session named "INTRODUCTION TO MYSQL REPLICATION (Tutorial)". On April 13th (from 10:15 AM - 1:00 PM) I'll be on the Oracle demo pod.

Hmm... This is also the first post on this blog, so "here be dragons".

Enjoy!

As someone noted in a blog, the NDB API is a NoSQL API that was designed 15 years ago. When I wrote my Ph.D thesis (which is the design document that NDB Cluster is based on) I called it Design and Modelling of a Parallel Data Server for Telecom Applications. The important name I used here is Data Server. It was never intended as a pure SQL DBMS. It was always intended for any needs of Data Storage. The requirements on this Data Server was also written up in my thesis for those who care to read it and included HLR's (the telecom database used to keep track of your mobile phone), News-on-Demand, Multimedia Email, Event Data …

Why do B-trees need “Tricks” to work?

Marko Mäkelä recently posted a couple of “tips and tricks” you can use to improve InnoDB performance. Tips and tricks. A general purpose relational database like MySQL shouldn’t need “tips and tricks” to perform well, and I lay the blame on design choices that were made in the early ’70s: the B-tree data structure underlying all OldSQL databases. B-trees were designed for machines that had very different performance characteristics than the machines of today. Hardware has changed, but B-trees are the same. Tips and Tricks are an attempt to make up the difference.

So B-tree implementers — InnoDB, Oracle, MS SQL Server — are fighting an uphill battle; they’re fighting the future. B-trees just aren’t meant to cope with high-bandwidth, slow-seek-time storage systems, because …

The MySQL Server from Oracle comes in a two different flavours: Community Edition and Enterprise Edition. The first one is under the GPLv2 license and the later is under the GPLv2 or Commercial license.

The Enterprise Edition was always available from https://enterprise.mysql.com (which now has an expired SSL certificate) under the GPLv2 license. This download page was restricted to paying customers. Since the Enterprise downloads were moved to https://edelivery.oracle.com the downloads are available for everyone (as long as it's not restricted by export regulations and accept the trial license agreement). The license is now 'Commercial'. The download be named V24071-01.zip or something like that, which is annoying. The latest version for the Enterprise release on edelivery is 5.5.8 while the latest Community version is 5.5.11. Previously there were two enterprise releases: …

Welcome to this week’s Last Week in Drizzle.  This again will be a relatively short edition as the 2011 O'Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo is next week and I'm currently packing for it!
Drizzle in Real Time Data Visualization
Many of you will have seen the awesome real time data map of Mozilla's downloads on their glow site.  One thing that got me really excited this week was work by Marcus Eriksson to do the same thing using Drizzle and it's RabbitMQ connector.  The live demo of this has been hosted on a Rackspace cloud server and can be found here.
Percona's Contributions
It has been very encouraging this week to see …

Welcome to this week’s Last Week in Drizzle.  This again will be a relatively short edition as the 2011 O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo is next week and I’m currently packing for it!

Drizzle in Real Time Data Visualization

Many of you will have seen the awesome real time data map of Mozilla’s downloads on their glow site.  One thing that got me really excited this week was work by Marcus Eriksson to do the same thing using Drizzle and it’s RabbitMQ connector.  The live demo of this has been hosted on a Rackspace cloud server and can be found here.

Percona’s Contributions

It has been very …

A quick reminder that MySQL is well represented at the Oracle Collaborate conference which starts in Orlando on Sunday.

For those not familiar with Collaborate, it’s the big community conference for Oracle users – this year it’s in Orlando from April 10th through 14th (I’ve just re-checked the weather forecast, 31 Celsius vs. -18 at the last conference I presented at – OOW Beijing in December – what a difference 4 months and 8,000 miles make!).

I’ll be presenting on MySQL Cluster in a session called “Building Highly Available Scalable Real-Time Services with MySQL Cluster” where I’ll focus on:

• Basics of MySQL Cluster – what it does, who uses it and why
• Accessing …