This is part two in my six part series on business intelligence, with a focus on OLAP analysis.

1. Part 1 - Intro to OLAP
2. Identifying the differences between a data warehouse and a data mart. (this post)
3. Introduction to MDX and the kind of SQL which a ROLAP tool must generate to answer those queries.
4. Performance challenges with larger databases, and some ways to help performance using aggregation.
5. Using materialized views to automate that aggregation process.
6. Comparing the performance of OLAP with and without aggregation over multiple MySQL storage engines at various data scales.

What is a data warehouse?
It turns out that this question is a …

A company blog can be easily configured in under 10 minutes using Wordpress, a popular open source LAMP product that runs a reported 12+ million blogs including those found at CNN, NY Times, Wall Street Journal (WSJ), ZDNet, MTV, People Magazine, Playstation and eBay.

A company blog is a great way for the dissemination of information to your user base as well as enabling a means of user feedback via comments.

The following steps show you how to download, configure and get your Wordpress blog operational.

Software Pre-Requisites

• Installing MySQL on Oracle Enterprise Linux
• …

Back in April I wrote that MySQL 5.5.4 is Very Exciting and couldn’t wait to start running it in production. Now here we are several months later and are using 5.5.4-m3 on all the slaves in what is arguably our most visible (and one of the busiest) user-facing cluster. Along the way we deployed some new hardware (Fusion-IO) but not a complete replacement. Some boxes are Fusion-io, some local RAID, and some SAN.  We have too many eggs for any one basket.

We also converted table to the Barracuda format in InnoDB, dropped an index or two, converted some important columns to BIGINT UNSIGNED and enabled 2:1 compression for the table that has big chunks of text in it. Aside from a few false starts with the Barracuda conversion and compression, things went pretty well. Coming from 5.0 (skipping 5.1 entirely) we had some my.cnf work to do to …

Head on over to http://lca2011.linux.org.au/ and check it out!

You’ve got until August 7th to put in a paper, miniconf, poster or tutorial.

Things I’d like to see come from my kinda world:

• topics on running large numbers of machines
• latest in large scale web infrastructure
• latest going on in the IO space: (SSD, filesystems, SSD as L2 cache)
• Applications of above technologies and what it means for application performance
• Scalable and massive tcp daemons (i.e. Eric should come talk on scalestack)
• exploration of pain points in current technologies and discussion on ways to fix them (from people really in the know)
• A Hydra tutorial: starting with stock Ubuntu lucid, and exiting the tutorial with some analysis running on my project.
• Something that completely takes me off …

There are signals of continued problems and dysfunction — namely lack of support, organization and communication — in the OpenSolaris community. This follows on a deterioration of the OS leadership and support since Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, including the elimination of OpenSolaris CDs, one of the things that made the open source version of Solaris more like Linux.

We had speculated on the fate of Sun open source software under Oracle and while we acknowledged Oracle’s participation in, contribution and commitment to and opportunity from open source software, we …

OpenSolaris may be having a hard time at Oracle, but months after Oracle's acquisition of Sun Microsystems, Java and MySQL are still viewed positively by users.

If you wonder why there hasn't been an update from me for quite a while — I just returned from two months of paternal leave, in which I actually managed to stay away from the PC most of the time. In the meanwhile, I've officially become an Oracle employee and there is a lot of administrative things to take care of... But it feels good to be back!

During my absence, Giuseppe and Felix kicked off the Call for Papers for this year's European OpenSQL Camp, which will again take place in parallel to FrOSCon in St. Augustin (Germany) on August 21st/22nd. We've received a number of …

In my post on June 18th, I explained why the semantics of normal ad-hoc insertions with a primary key are expensive because they require disk seeks on large data sets. I previously explained why it would be better to use “replace into” or to use “insert ignore” over normal inserts. In this post, I explain why another alternative to normal inserts, “insert … on duplicate key update” is no better in MySQL, because the command incurs disk seeks.

The reason “insert ignore” and “replace into” can be made fast with TokuDB’s fractal trees is that the semantics of what to do in case a duplicate key is found is simple. …

The first ever MySQL Sunday is coming soon to the Bay Area. There are plenty of great speakers with new and interesting material to choose from. Come join us at Oracle's Open World conference and make sure to check out the MySQL Sunday page.

This is going to be a great event that you don't want to miss!

Have a great day and see you there.

Chris

Recently our development efforts were focused on dbForge for SQL Server product line. We’ve made five major releases of SQL Server database tools in last 18 months. Besides, we’ve made two major releases of MySQL database tools in this period. Our Oracle database tools product line, once actively developed, was frozen for almost three years. Sure we made maintenance releases, but no new features and tools. Our Oracle tools even were not re-branded to dbForge for Oracle. But now we decided to breeze the new life into Oracle tools development.

The first tool in the dbForge for Oracle product line will be Data Compare. For the first release we decided to make a free tool with basic functionality:

• comparison and synchronization of tables only (views are not supported)
• table and column mapping (by name)
• type conversion is …