Everybody working on Unix or in the database world stumbles over Oracle Berkeley DB every now and then. DB is an Open Source embedded database used by applications like OpenLDAP or Postfix. Traditionally it followed mostly a key-value access pattern. Now what caught my attention was the fact that the recently released DB 5.0 provides an SQLite-like C API with the promise of providing better concurrency and performance than regular SQLite. Time to give it a shot.

So I grabbed the source distribution, checked the documentation and saw that I shall use the …

Henrik Ingo from the Open Database Alliance (ODBA) did an interview with Oli Sennhauser of FromDual about the European MySQL database landscape and its future. If you want to know more about our opinion in this matter please read here: http://opendba.wordpress.com/2010/05/31/interview-oli-sennhauser-of-fromdual-about-european-database-landscape/.

For more technical insight see also our former presentation: MySQL, where are you going?.

If you’re near South Carolina next weekend, consider attending Southeast Linux Fest! There’s a list of illustrious speakers including several well-known in the database world: Joshua Drake and Andrew Dunstan (PostgreSQL), D. Richard Hipp (SQLite), and yes, yours truly (MySQL), plus a MySQL name that’s new to me: Brandon Checketts. There are a ton of non-database sessions too! Check out the full speaker & session list. This was a great show last year; I highly encourage everyone to attend.

Related posts:

1. Recap of Southeast Linux Fest 2009
2. How Linux iostat …

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So next time somebody complains about NDB taking a long time in CREATE TABLE, you’re welcome to point them to this :)

• A single CREATE TABLE statement
• It had ONE column
• It was an ENUM column.
• With 70,000 possible values.
• It was 605kb of SQL.
• It ran on Drizzle

This was to test if you could create an ENUM column with greater than 216 possible values (you’re not supposed to be able to) – bug 589031 has been filed.

How does it compare to MySQL? Well… there are other problems (Bug 54194 – ENUM limit of 65535 elements isn’t true filed). Since we don’t have any limitations in Drizzle due to the FRM file …

This run is very similar what I had on Intel SSD X25-M card, but now I use FusionIO 80GB SLC card. I chose this card as smallest available card (and therefore cheapest. On Dell.com you can see it for about $3K). There is also FusionIO IO-Xtreme 80GB card, which is however MLC based and it could be not best choice for FlashCache usage ( as there high write rate on FlashCache for both reading and writing to/from disks, so lifetime could be short).

Also Facebook team released WriteThrough module for FlashCache, which could be good trade-off if you want extra warranty for data consistency and your load is mostly read-bound, so I tested this mode also.

All …

Finally I was able to run PBXT 1.0.11 pre-GA in tpcc-like workload, apparently there was bug with did not allow me to get the result earlier, and I am happy to see that PBXT team managed it.

For initial runs I took tpcc 100 warehouses ( about 10GB of data) which fully fits into memory (32 GB on server),
and compared 1 and 16 users in MySQL-5.1.46/PBXT and Percona Server / XtraDB - 5.1.45-rel10.2. As workload is totally memory based it will show how PBXT scales in CPU-bond cases on 16 cores systems.

As storage system it was Intel SSD X25-M card.

While full results and config are on Wiki:
http://www.percona.com/docs/wiki/benchmark:pbxt:tpcc:start

there are graphs for 1 user:

When I have discovered MySQL User-defined variables at the first time, I didn’t pay much attention to them and didn’t realize their strength. At first, one can think that they are just one of the many unnoticed MySQL features. Well, I was wrong. Here, I will try to summarize their strength, though I think there is […]

Dear MySQL Users,

We’re happy to announce the second Release Candidate (RC) of MySQL Workbench.
Version 5.2.22 includes fixes for 76 bugs.

In case you didn’t know – MySQL Workbench is a modular product and is fully pluggable and scriptable. If you want to write a plug-in for Workbench 5.2, then stay tuned as we will be updating the documentation in the next week with all the details and examples you need on how to write your own plug-ins.

Plug-ins are great for extending or adding to workbench or for automating repetitive tasks. You can do things like adding to menus, exporting your Workbench models custom tailored for your coding environment, adding your own forms, and more. Python is our preferred scripting language but for simple scripts the Lua language can be used as well.

The first plug-in we added is called MySQL Doc Library. It can be used to read the MySQL Documentation offline and features …

The mysqlnd plugin API is a well hidden gem of mysqlnd. Mysqlnd plugins operate on a layer between PHP applications and the MySQL server. This is comparable to MySQL Proxy. MySQL Proxy operates on a layer between any MySQL client application, for example, a PHP application and, the MySQL server. Plugins can take over classical MySQL Proxy tasks such as Load Balancing, Monitoring and Performance optimizations. But due to the different architecture and location mysqlnd plugins do not share some common MySQL Proxy annoyances: no single point of failure, no dedicated proxy server to deploy, no new programming language to learn (Lua).

Slides from the IPC Spring conference

This blog posting and today’s presentation at the IPC Spring 2010, a …

The mysqlnd plugin API is a well hidden gem of mysqlnd. Mysqlnd plugins operate on a layer between PHP applications and the MySQL server. This is comparable to MySQL Proxy. MySQL Proxy operates on a layer between any MySQL client application, for example, a PHP application and, the MySQL server. Plugins can take over classical MySQL Proxy tasks such as Load Balancing, Monitoring and Performance optimizations. But due to the different architecture and location mysqlnd plugins do not share some common MySQL Proxy annoyances: no single point of failure, no dedicated proxy server to deploy, no new programming language to learn (Lua).

Slides from the IPC Spring conference

This blog posting and today’s presentation at the IPC Spring 2010, a …