On this big trip, I made particular effort to finally visit Monty at his home near Helsinki. Somehow, in all my years at MySQL AB, this never happened – a sad omission. So, I spent the Easter days with Monty, Anna and now 5yo Maria.

I’m not a fan of most meetings, and in many cases in-person meetings are not actually necessary to get things organised or done, but I think this was both most enjoyable as well as productive for our respective businesses and joint interests. Good company, discussion, food, drink, sauna… fabulous.

It’s a great pity we live on opposite sides of the planet, as we do get along very well together. We definitely don’t agree on everything, but we’re always absolutely direct with each other, and try to provide good arguments whenever we disagree, to explore things further.

When To Use Indexes In MySQL

This comes up in discussions almost every new project I work on, because it's a very important thing to consider when designing a database. When deciding when and how to create an index in your MySQL database, it's important to consider how the data is being used.

We are pleased to announce the availability of the 1.0.4 release of InfiniDB Community Edition.  This is the second of our monthly maintenance releases that are scheduled throughout the spring.

A few highlights included in this release:  

Improved create table performance and a much smaller footprint on disk for the system catalog, newly created tables, and tables that contain less that 256K rows. 
Improved query performance when there is anRead More...

Back in January when I was between jobs I had a free weekend to do some fun hacking. I decided to start a new open source project that had been brewing in the back of my head and since then have been poking at it on the weekends and an occasional late night. I decided to call it Scale Stack because it aims to provide a scalable network service stack. This may sound a bit generic and boring, but let me show a graph of a database proxy module I slapped together in the past couple days:

I setup MySQL 5.5.2-m2 and ran the sysbench read-only tests against it with 1-8192 threads. I then started up the database proxy module built on Scale Stack so sysbench would route through that, and you can see the concurrency improved quite a bit at higher thread counts. The database module doesn’t do much, it simply does …

How to Cluster Windows Server 2003

Before you can install SQL Server 2005 clustering, you must first install Windows Server 2003 clustering services. Once it is successfully installed and tested, then you can install SQL Server 2005 clustering. In this article, we take a step-by-step approach to installing and configuring Windows 2003 clustering. In a later article, we will learn how to install SQL Server 2005 clustering.

Before Installing Windows 2003 Clustering

Before you install Windows 2003 clustering, we need to perform a series of important preparation steps. This is especially important if you didn’t build the cluster nodes, as you want to ensure everything is working correctly before you begin the actual cluster installation. Once they are complete, then you can install Windows 2003 clustering. Here are the steps you must …

Very nice and interesting post from Michael Stonebraker explaining how errors dictate CAP Theorem (Consistency, Availability and Partition-tolerance); as only one objective from the CAP can be achieved during normal error conditions as NoSQL system seems to relax the consistency model as CAP theorem anyway proves that one can’t get all 3 at the same [...]

Well… the start of it :)

I’ve taken the approach of taking tiny incremental steps (and getting review for each step) in implementing a Storage Engine based on the Embedded InnoDB library. What hit lp:drizzle (the trunk branch, for the 2010-04-07 milestone tarball) is only a handful of these small steps, so this engine is not remotely ready for end users.

There should be more of my Embedded InnoDB work hitting the tree in the upcoming days/weeks, enough to get it to a satte that one could describe as functional :)

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Yesterday’s webcast is now available for playback.

If you want a PDF of the slides, please leave a note on our web site.

Update, July 19, 2010: We have switched our webinar service provider. The webinar recordings are still available, albeit under a different URL, see this page for details.

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So there’s a bit of a swelling around the idea of NoSQL. That is, databases that don’t have an SQL interface in front of them – with the promise of better performance. With a well designed backend, this is no doubt the case.

A flexible query language is rather useful though. I think we’ll see the rise of AlsoSQL. That is systems that present a fast and simple protocol along with a SQL interface.

This hybrid system has seen use for many years. MySQL Cluster is one such example. SQL through MySQL Server, NoSQL through NDB API.

With Drizzle, I feel we’ll be in a pretty good position to offer non-sql based protocols and access methods to existing storage engines.

Are you at the MySQL conference this year? I'm giving a talk about SQLstream at 5.15pm on Wednesday 14th (a week from today), but as ever, I'll be wearing both my hats. I'm always ready & willing to chat about mondrian, Pentaho, streaming SQL, open source BI, and the future of intelligent life in the universe.

If you're going to be at the show, let's see if we can hook up. Email me directly, or reach me on twitter @julianhyde. If you want to try to randomly bump into me, first try the Pentaho booth, then try the bar...