There was some incredulity expressed yesterday when I suggested that SAP is a great case study on the way in which proprietary companies have engaged with open source.

To be clear, I was not suggesting that SAP is, or should be considered, an open source company, but based on our understanding of SAP’s changing strategy with regards to open source software it represents a good case study on how proprietary companies have learned that it is in their best interests to contribute to open source software projects.

Jay and I had the opportunity yesterday to speak to Claus von Riegen, SAP director of technology standards and open source, and Erwin Tenhumberg, SAP open source program manager. Our formal …

Installing Lighttpd With PHP5 And MySQL Support On Mandriva 2010.0

Lighttpd is a secure, fast, standards-compliant web server designed for speed-critical environments. This tutorial shows how you can install Lighttpd on a Mandriva 2010.0 server with PHP5 support (through FastCGI) and MySQL support.

Anant Jhingran (IBM’s CTO, Information Management, Analytics and Optimization) challenged our assertion that the cloud benefits the shared-disk database architecture. For me to enter into a battle of technical vision with Anant is equivalent to bringing a knife to a gun battle, but I enjoy a good challenge.

1. Cloud storage: Anant argues that (a) SANs won’t beat local disk in costs; (b) many shared-nothing databases use SANs anyway. To quote Inigo Montoya from Princess Bride: “Let me ‘splain. No there is too much. Let me sum up

Response: (a) While some clouds use traditional SAN or NAS storage, the trend among clouds is to assemble large collections of low-cost disks using a cluster file system to handle disk striping and data redundancy thereby providing SAN-like …

Recently I attempted to use this parameter in one of our InnoDB table and had an experience to make a note of.

So this is what actually happened.

As we know InnoDB writes all the table information into one tablespace file ibdata1.
Obviously this lead to a disk space issue, since the ibdata1 file grew to 90G+ and it was not possible to defragment tablespace using the Alter method (Infact is is hardly possible to do in a production environment, since it leads to a huge downtime.)

So I decided to go for innodb_file_per_table on our other production database server which was being configured from scratch.

Now this database had around 15 tables and it had very high inserts/deletes/updates. For few days, things went ok. But in few days, I started getting complains from development team regarding performance on the tables and queue being backed up. Apparently whenever a delete / …

Well, I did it again. Two days ago I improved my server's QPS from 20k to 109k.
Today, after upgrading the MySQL version which allowed me to allocate more memory to the key buffer size (12 Gb), I managed to get it to 328k QPS.

The server is similar to the one from the previous post. Its a 4 year old, but quite meaty server.

The server ran triggers and stored functions that I wrote to help connect different data sets together. Basically reference another table using fairly complicated search logic, get an ID back and store it. The code was then tweaked to be as fast and light as …

Whew! The Sun MySQL exams (310-810 through 310-815) are back to $200. I just checked the Prometric Site and was able to confirm.

A preliminary schedule is now available for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 (in Santa Clara, California, USA). I have two talks and a tutorial, currently scheduled as follows:

• MySQL Cluster Tutorial, Mon 08:30 on 12 Apr 2010, together with Andrew Hutchings and Andrew Morgan
• MySQL Cluster: An Introduction, Tue 11:55 on 13 Apr 2010
• Connecting MySQL and Python, Tue 15:05 on 13 Apr 2010

Schedule might change a bit, so I …

A preliminary schedule is now available for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010 (in Santa Clara, California, USA). I have two talks and a tutorial, currently scheduled as follows:

• MySQL Cluster Tutorial, Mon 08:30 on 12 Apr 2010, together with Andrew Hutchings and Andrew Morgan
• MySQL Cluster: An Introduction, Tue 11:55 on 13 Apr 2010
• Connecting MySQL and Python, Tue 15:05 on 13 Apr 2010

Schedule might change a bit, so I …

Taking TOTD #121 forward, this blog explains how to create a JPA Persistence Unit for a MySQL sample database and package it as a library. This JAR file can then be easily included in other web applications.

Lets get started!

1. Configure GlassFish for using the MySQL sample database (sakila) as described in TOTD #121.
2. Add the GlassFish instance in NetBeans IDE using "Services" panel.
3. Create JPA entities using NetBeans IDE.
   1. Create a Java class library:
      
      
      
      Our ultimate goal is …

I'm running in this misconception second time in a week or so, so it is time to blog about it.
How blobs are stored in Innodb ? This depends on 3 factors. Blob size; Full row size and Innodb row format.

But before we look into how BLOBs are really stored lets see what misconception is about. A lot of people seems to think for standard ("Antelope") format first 768 bytes are stored in the row itself while rest is stored in external pages, which would make such blobs really bad. I even seen a solution to store several smaller blobs or varchar fields which are when concatenated to get the real data. This is not exactly what happens

With COMPACT and REDUNDANT row formats (used in before Innodb plugin and named "Antelope" in Innodb Plugin and XtraDB) Innodb would try to fit the whole row onto Innodb page. At least 2 rows have to fit to each page plus some page data, which makes the limit about …