Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

You Mean, Memory Is Not Infinite? We're working hard getting MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.0, featuring Query Analyzer, ready for release. As part of that, we started really ramping up the number of MySQL servers reporting in query data to see how we could scale. Not surprising (to me, anyway), the first efforts did not go so well. My old friend OutOfMemoryError reared its ugly head once again.
Query Cache -- It's More Than Just Results! We're big (ab)users of hibernate query caching, and more importantly to us the natural id optimized query cache. Firing up the profiler, I was not shocked to see that the second level (let's call it L2) and query caches were hogging the majority of memory. But, something didn't smell right...

What I was seeing was tons of …

Constraints are simultaneously one of my most favorite and least favorite Oracle Database features. They're great for keeping bad data out of the database. They're a terrible imposition on object-oriented, agile, or <insert your favorite buzzword here> coding style. They save a ton of repetitive coding, writing the same logic in different languages. Hey, we already wrote all that redundant code

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It's a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It's very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we'll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it's free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it's URL. After registering you'll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We'll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …

Have you ever heard about VoiceXML? It’s a W3C standart that allows you to build web pages that are accessed by voice! It’s very used for services like travel tickets selling, hotel reservation, bank account information and so on. In this post, we’ll give you a general view of how to make a basic hotel reservation
application with VoiceXML and how to run it using Glassfish and MySQL.

First of all, for VoiceXML applications, we need a voice gateway. We used the Voxeo, it’s free and provides you with phone numbers that you can call for free using Skype. All you need to do is create a free account in Voxeo and register your application by informing it’s URL. After registering you’ll receive the unique phone number for your application.

We’ll assume you already know the basics of VoiceXML syntax for the …

I have merged the code from the mysql-5.1 launchpad repository which should put this repository up to the recent 5.1.28-rc version. You can examine the source repository here.On a related note, had a brief email exchange with Eric Herman and so I hope that there will be time for him to do some work to complete the support for Java stored routines.

Knut Anders Hatlen writes about memcached user-defined functions (UDF) for Java DB on OpenSolaris.

Knut has also mentioned the recent release of Apache Derby 10.4.2. A corresponding Java DB release should be available for download soon. (Usually this happens immediately but we're all at a developers' conference for the next couple of …

While Colin beat me in blogging about Project Kenai, I think I can still provide some additional background information about this new project hosting service from Sun.

If you are a maintainer of an Open Source project, you currently have plenty of choice when it comes to getting your project hosted for free. One criterion could be your software configuration management system (SCM) of choice.

Some of the hosting services that I am currently aware of and the choice of SCM they offer include:

• BitBucket ( …

During the process of building the new query analysis feature for MySQL Enterprise Monitor 2.0, we thought the best way to test it at a nascent stage was to use it to tune our own application (since we use MySQL as the backend repository). What we found was actually quite interesting. It also showed that even to seasoned developers, who know that frameworks while helpful, often aren't the most direct, concise way to get things done, can often do very strange things that you don't quite expect.

For those of you that haven't heard about the feature itself, "query analysis" takes all queries that are being processed by a MySQL server, normalizes them into something similar to a prepared statement form by removing literals, and then keeps track of total, min/max, average execution times, result set sizes, etc. at an aggregate …