Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site high availability and disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of applications services and data across local, regional and geographically dispersed data centers. The Solaris Cluster environment extends the Solaris Operating System into a cluster operating system.

If you are following the Solaris Cluster product and features, you would have noticed extreme innovation by Sun in the high availability and disaster recovery space since the time we released our first HA product many years ago. For well over a decade, Solaris Cluster has been a market leader for providing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions to all mission critical business applications, spanning all the major industry segments.

Continuing with our tradition of innovation, we are pleased to announce another release - "Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09" - an update to the Solaris Cluster 3.2 …

Solaris Cluster is a multi-system, multi-site high availability and disaster recovery solution that manages the availability of applications services and data across local, regional and geographically dispersed data centers. The Solaris Cluster environment extends the Solaris Operating System into a cluster operating system.

If you are following the Solaris Cluster product and features, you would have noticed extreme innovation by Sun in the high availability and disaster recovery space since the time we released our first HA product many years ago. For well over a decade, Solaris Cluster has been a market leader for providing business continuity and disaster recovery solutions to all mission critical business applications, spanning all the major industry segments.

Continuing with our tradition of innovation, we are pleased to announce another release - "Solaris Cluster 3.2 11/09" - an update to the Solaris Cluster 3.2 …

After finishing my post on the Faban 1.0 announcement, I realized that it was geared towards users who were already using Faban. So I decided to write this post for users who have never used Faban.

Faban is two things :

1. A framework for developing performance and load tests.
2. A tool to run these tests and view their results.

The former is called the “Faban Driver Framework” and the latter is called the “Faban Harness”. Although the two are related, it is entirely possible to run an arbitrary test developed outside of Faban using the Faban Harness. In fact, many benchmarks do just that. In this respect, Faban is rather unique.

The Driver Framework

The real power of Faban is unleashed only when you use the framework. The framework …

As most of MySQL users, I have often ignored what I'd like to call the minor storage engines. MYISAM, InnoDB and NDB (aka MySQL Cluster) are well covered in several articles; but what about engines like CSV or ARCHIVE? As part of some internal projects, we have been playing around with these 2 with some interesting results. On this article I'll concentrate on CSV.
ScenarioCurrently we have a few servers that are storing historical data that will eventually be migrated into Oracle. Two things need to happen until we can finally decommission them: 1) export the data to CSV so it can be imported in bulk into Oracle and 2) keep the data online so it can be queried as needed until the migration is finalized. I thought it would be interesting if we could solve both issues simultaneously and decided to try the CSV engine. Here's a description of the process.
Understanding CSV EngineThe CSV engine, as far as I can tell, was and example …

The No-SQL tag really lumps together a lot of concepts that are in fact as distinct from eachother as they are from SQL/RDBMS.

An object store is not at all similar to Cassandra and Hypertable, which is not at all like an column store. And when looking at BigTable derivatives, it’s quite important to realise that Google actually does joins in middle layers or apps, so while BigTable does not have joins, the apps essentially do use them – I’ve heard it professed that denormalising everything might be a fab idea, but I don’t quite believe in that for all cases, just like I don’t believe in ditching the structured form of RDBMS being the solution.

SQL/RDBMS has had a few decades of dominance now, and has thus become the great “general purpose” tool. With the ascent of all the other tools, it’s definitely worthwhile to look at them, but also realise that each (inluding SQL based ones) have their place. Moving all your …

In my last blog entry, I discussed a “silent” install method for deploying MySQL on Windows.  However, the best way to distribute MySQL may be to not install it.  Instead, design the application to launch mysql from the command line.  With this method, you can deploy with two files, avoid registry entries, and hide database files from end-users and their IT staff.

[Note:  these instructions may also be useful if you can't get the MySQL installer to run on a particular Windows machine.  I find it easier to copy the system tables from an existing install of MySQL that was deployed with the Windows MSI installer.  Nevertheless, you could download the "without installer" MySQL zip file and use the mysql_system_tables.sql and mysql_system_table_data.sql to create your system tables.  I had to remove the "WHERE @had_user_table=0" from the mysql_system_table_data.sql to get it to work.  The SC.exe tool …

This Thursday (December 3rd, 16:00 UTC – note the different time), Bill Karwin will talk about Practical Full-Text Search in MySQL. He'll introduce and compare five different approaches of full-text search with MySQL, using built-in functionality as well as third-party tools. It's interesting to see how vastly performance can vary, depending on which tools you use for which purposes.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice …

MySQL instance running an Infobright engine


mysql> explain SELECT COUNT(ac.UID) FROM ACTIVE ac JOIN ALL a;
+----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------+
| id | select_type | table | type | possible_keys | key | key_len | ref | rows | Extra |
+----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------+
| 1 | SIMPLE | ac | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 124426 | |
| 1 | SIMPLE | a | ALL | NULL | NULL | NULL | NULL | 7594256 | |
+----+-------------+-------+------+---------------+------+---------+------+---------+-------+
2 rows in set (0.01 sec)

mysql> SELECT COUNT(ac.UID) FROM ACTIVE ac JOIN ALL a ON ac.UID=a.UID;
+---------------+
| COUNT(ac.UID) |
+---------------+
| 17466 |
+---------------+
1 row in set (0.23 sec)

…

I suppose I should make it official: 2010 should see me being much more active in the Community.Why? Simply because I am now working for Blizzard Entertainment where I hope to help them make better, more efficient, use of MySQL/MariaDB. I expect to be working on some of MySQL's internals and storage engines in order to achieve what is wanted and helping them enhance their existing use of

GreenSQL Database Firewall 1.2 is now available.

GreenSQL 1.2 includes many new features and enhancements.
In this version, GreenSQL provides native support for PostgreSQL (http://www.postgresql.org) databases for the very first time. In fact, GreenSQL is the only database firewall (Open or Closed Source) available for the protection of the many PostgreSQL databases currently in use.

GreenSQL 1.2 merges the GreenSQL-Console package into the GreenSQL-FW. The GreenSQL-Console will no longer be released as a separated package. During the installation process, you will be able to choose whether or not to install the console.

GreenSQL 1.2 includes a new management GUI (console), The new GUI includes:

1. A configuration and security supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL
2. Easy-to-use Database and Database Proxy creation and modification
3. …