I had an interesting discussion with 2 colleagues about the possible interest of putting the swap space of a system on a SSD.

If I consider the gain in latency that an SSD brings versus a capacity disk - in the region of 100x - the solution seems obvious. Swapping - or more precisely paging - must be much faster/ with an SSD. Since RAM is expensive versus SSD, I could even be tempted to design a system with a small amount of RAM and a large amount of swap space on SSDs. In other words, I can ask myself if trying to prevent my system to page is still a good fight?

Let's try to shed some light on these questions.

Paging takes place when my system runs out of RAM because more processes are created or because existing processes requires more memory (check this article for details about how to monitor …

I had an interesting discussion with 2 colleagues about the possible interest of putting the swap space of a system on a SSD.

If I consider the gain in latency that an SSD brings versus a capacity disk - in the region of 100x - the solution seems obvious. Swapping - or more precisely paging - must be much faster/ with an SSD. Since RAM is expensive versus SSD, I could even be tempted to design a system with a small amount of RAM and a large amount of swap space on SSDs. In other words, I can ask myself if trying to prevent my system to page is still a good fight?

Let's try to shed some light on these questions.

Paging takes place when my system runs out of RAM because more processes are created or because existing processes requires more memory (check this article for details about how to …

France FORUM PHP 2009 was held last week in Paris (12th and 13th nov) at Cite des sciences et de l'industrie Thanks to LeMuG (the french MySQL User Group) MySQL has had a nice set of presentations :

Michael Widenius aka Monty ( Monty Program Ab ) presented "MariaDB, the future of MySQL". Johannes Schluter (MySQL connectors dev team + release manager of PHP 5.3) has presented "PHP and MySQL - A good match" This was the closing presentation for the 2 days but audience stayed to hear about the nice functionalities of the mysqlnd driver. A lot of interest for the new features (some experimental) : persistent connections, performance statistics, asynchronous request, client side cache, streams + filter, statistics collection, PDO + mysqlnd good match.

When Twitter decided to slowly roll out a new, official retweeting feature, people waited in anticipation. When they let their users know what it might look like, people debated whether that was the right way to deploy it. When it actually became available, people almost universally disliked it.

But my post is about why I love the new Twitter retweet feature, without ever having to think about it. The reason is that official retweeting represents the new-new arms race for authority among power users. The new-new arms race, you say? Yes, because the new arms …

What you do when you're fed up with a script? Right, you write your own.

You'll have to excuse me for the long shell script you'll find here below, but I'm not going to bother putting it on some download website.

It's a shell script which starts and stops the MySQL server. Indeed, a replacement for the init.d script found in the MySQL distributions. I'm using it personally on my Macs and it's not supported in any way.

But why? Well, I'm playing with MySQL Workbench, Server Administration. The MySQL init.d script didn't work right away (oh, various reasons for that), so I used mine. So I figured it might be useful for others and it's not complicated or shocking-new-stuff.

If you want to use it, you'll have to edit the 2 variables at the top. It's only …

MySQL Performance Blog (and percona.com too) were down today because the switch in our rack died completely. It took a while to fix it using secondary switch we had. Provider was not willing to do it as remote hands so I had to drive to the data center to fix it.

We got number of calls and messages from the customers and friends about web site going down so we probably have to invest into getting infrastructure more redundant - currently we were quite cheap and a lot of servers have single network card (so you can't use trunking to eliminate switch as single point of failure).

The customer case management systems were not affected by this outage.

Entry posted by peter | 3 comments

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Waiting for Godot
I read Waiting for Godot for HS, but I didn't expect to live it...

• E.U. Takes More Time to Review Oracle-Sun Deal

On …

On the 18th of November we've hold in Milan an event focused on Open Source Data Warehousing.

For many organizations, data warehouses are simply too costly to buy, too costly to implement and too costly to maintain. Data warehousing is still a luxury of deep-pocketed organizations, although the resulting benefits can be virtually reaped by companies of all sizes.
Open Source Software is changing the rules again, lowering the economic barriers to undertake Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing projects.

During the event we proved that MySQL can help organizations to achieve higher ROI on their projects. With the support of our partners, Infobright and Talend, we showed how to design, deploy and manage a multi-terabyte Data Warehouse with Open Source Software.

Participants have shown a …

If you haven’t seen it, Josh Berkus has a very concise way to look at the confusing mess that is database “clustering” from the point of view of three distinct types of users: transactional, analytic, and online. I think that using this kind of distinction could help keep discussions clear — I’ve seen a lot of conversations around clustering run off the rails due to disagreements about what clustering means. MySQL Cluster, for example, is a huge red herring for a lot of people, but it seems to be a difficult process to learn it well enough to decide. If we called it a clustering solution for transactional users, but not for analytic or online users, it might help a lot.

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What exactly does that mean? It means I can talk to the CEO, the Developers, the Users, and make sense out of things, and help you move your business/idea/website further along than where you are.  Quite often, a good idea, or a website gets bogged down due to lack of knowledge, or an abundance of misunderstanding and mis-expectations (I also invent words in my free time).  Usually, you know what you want the system to do, I help you figure out why it’s not doing it, and what you need to do, to get it there.

The following are the reasons why my phone rings:

• By the CEO/Founder of the Company: Their awesome developer, does not have the skills to fine tune the OS, Apache, or MySQL, so even though the application works perfectly in …