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Recently there has been a lot of discussion on fundamental scalability of traditional relational database systems. Many of the blog posts on this topic give a great overview of some of the immediate issues faced by engineers while scaling relational databases, but don’t dissect the problem in a systematic way and with sufficient depth to get to the core issues. I’d like to dedicate a series of blog posts …

This time it took us a little longer, but now the waiting has come to an end: Yesterday, we released the a new (so called) final version of XAMPP for Mac OS X.

Updated in this version of XAMPP: MySQL (5.1.44), PHP (5.3.1), phpMyAdmin (3.2.4), Apache (2.2.14), Perl (5.10.1), and ProFTPD (1.3.3).

You find the download at XAMPP's Mac OS X page.

Interested in working at RethinkDB? We’re hiring – please see our jobs page for more details.

Recently there has been a lot of discussion on fundamental scalability of traditional relational database systems. Many of the blog posts on this topic give a great overview of some of the immediate issues faced by engineers while scaling relational databases, but don’t dissect the problem in a systematic way and with sufficient depth to get to the core issues. I’d like to dedicate a series of blog …

On today's show, Apple wants to wipe all HTC phones from the face of the earth, apparently because Steve Jobs is just grouchy about this whole business. Donald and Molly engage in a nice long talk about the validity of software patents.

We planned for a company meeting to be in Iceland, with just about a month’s notice. You can do that, when you’re a fairly small company. Having been back from London during the winter, where it was snowing in the New Year, I was not exactly jumping high to visit Iceland. Ice? Gasp.

It was not exactly easy to get to Iceland: KUL – SIN – FRA – CPH – KEF. Five countries, in a little over a day (would have been about it, had it not been due to a delayed flight from Copenhagen — seemed that the plane was snowed in from Iceland). Upon getting my boarding pass for the last leg, I was asked by the SAS ticketing agent if I’d like a window seat – I naturally replied aisle, and he confirmed my choice with me, as if shocked. Then I realised, there might be some interesting …

MySQL by default is a NON transactional database. For the hobbyist (See The Hobbyist and the Professional), startup entrepreneur and website developer this may not appear foreign, however to the seasoned Oracle DBA who has only used Oracle the concept is very foreign.

In MySQL you have to be concerned with two situations that will catch the unprepared out. The first is the default autocommit mode. This is TRUE, i.e. all statements are automatically committed on completion.

mysql> SELECT @@autocommit,TRUE;
+--------------+------+
| @@autocommit | TRUE |
+--------------+------+
|            1 |    1 |
+--------------+------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

The second is the storage engine used. Again a foreign term for Oracle DBA’s, a storage engine is a technology that stores and retrieves the underlying data from the …

I recently was asked how many fsync / sec ( and therefore durable transactions / sec) we can get on FusionIO card.

It should be easy to test, let's take sysbench fileio benchmark and run, the next command should make it:


./sysbench --test=fileio --file-num=1 --file-total-size=50G --file-fsync-all=on --file-test-mode=seqrewr --max-time=100 --file-block-size=4096 --max-requests=0 run


PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. Operations performed:  0 Read, 922938 Write, 922938 Other = 1845876 Total
2. Read 0b  Written 3.5207Gb  Total transferred 3.5207Gb  (36.052Mb/sec)
3.  9229.35 Requests/sec executed

So that's 9229.35 req/sec, which is pretty impressive.

For comparison the same run on PERC 6i RAID10 with BBU:

…

So far PHProjekt 6 (P6, see http://phprojekt.com) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience. Nevertheless, we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.

Everybody knows GoogleMail with its easy to use frontend. Maybe you use it for your daily work. In GoogleMail, there is no need to refresh the page to receive a new mail, Google informs you automatically whenever a new mail is available. But how is this possible? The answer to this question is really simple: The server triggers a signal informing that a new mail is available. This technology is called Comet and describes a way how the server communicates with the client [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) ].

Is there a way to use Comet …

So far PHProjekt 6 (P6, see http://phprojekt.com) is already enhanced with nice AJAX workflows and snappy user-experience. Nevertheless, we discussed a way to provide synchronous communication and direct information within the application.

Everybody knows GoogleMail with its easy to use frontend. Maybe you use it for your daily work. In GoogleMail, there is no need to refresh the page to receive a new mail, Google informs you automatically whenever a new mail is available. But how is this possible? The answer to this question is really simple: The server triggers a signal informing that a new mail is available. This technology is called Comet and describes a way how the server communicates with the client [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_(programming) ].

Is there a way to use Comet …

I’ve been noticing an undeniable trend in my consulting engagements in the last year or so, and when I vocalized this today, heads nodded all around me. Everyone sees a growth in the number of cases where otherwise well-optimized systems are artificially limited by InnoDB contention problems.

A year ago, I simply wasn’t seeing the need for analysis of GDB backtraces en masse. These days, I’m writing custom tools to gather and analyze backtraces. A year ago, I simply looked at the SEMAPHORE section of SHOW INNODB STATUS. These days I’m writing custom tools to aggregate and reformat that data so I can interpret it more easily. And I’m actually seeing cases of this type of problem multiple times every week. I remember the first time I ran into a server that was literally optimized to the limit, but struggling under the load. It was something new for me, not that long ago. Oh, I’d seen it before, plenty, but was always able to point …