Raja Srinivasan from Zeus will presenting how to load balance MySQL reads and writes on the Joyent Public Cloud tomorrow in a free webinar taking place at 10 AM Pacific (America). Register here.

This past week I have been working with 2 Web2.0 startups - members of Sun Startup Essentials, they get the support for free - that are looking at improving the response time of their web site.

We've been working at understanding how they servers behave today and what could prevent their application to scale, which led me to show how to run a quick diagnostic on an existing system and to restate some key fundamentals in terms of scalability.

Let's start by the fundamentals.

Any piece of software is nothing else than a set of instructions that need 2 things: computing units to execute on, and a fast access to data.

Computing units are available in the form of a hardware threads located on a processor. The number of threads that a server makes available to the application depends on the number of processors on the server, the number of …

I'll be speaking Tuesday night at the San Francisco MySQL Meetup. Here's the blurb from the announcement:

Jeremy Zawodny will talk about Craigslist's current use of MySQL, where it's painful, and how things are being re-architected to make the pains go away. This includes hardware changes, sphinx, redis, memcached, and some custom Perl work.

Despite not living too far away from the SF MySQL Meetup venue, I'm a little annoyed at myself for never having attended. So this will be my first time and I'm really looking forward to meeting local like-minded folks.

Thanks to Mike and Erin for recruiting me.

If you're coming and have specific things …

This past week I have been working with 2 Web2.0 startups - members of Sun Startup Essentials, they get the support for free - that are looking at improving the response time of their web site.

We've been working at understanding how they servers behave today and what could prevent their application to scale, which led me to show how to run a quick diagnostic on an existing system and to restate some key fundamentals in terms of scalability.

Let's start by the fundamentals.

Any piece of software is nothing else than a set of instructions that need 2 things: computing units to execute on, and a fast access to data.

Computing units are available in the form of a hardware threads located on a processor. The number of threads that a server makes available to the application depends on the number of processors on the server, the number of …

This past week I have been working with 2 Web2.0 startups - members of Sun Startup Essentials, they get the support for free - that are looking at improving the response time of their web site.

We've been working at understanding how they servers behave today and what could prevent their application to scale, which led me to show how to run a quick diagnostic on an existing system and to restate some key fundamentals in terms of scalability.

Let's start by the fundamentals.

Any piece of software is nothing else than a set of instructions that need 2 things: computing units to execute on, and a fast access to data.

Computing units are available in the form of a hardware threads located on a processor. The number of threads that a server makes available to the application depends on the number of processors on the server, the number of …

So you’ve finally caught on with the hype, and you’re seriously considering using Amazon RDS for your database needs. Here are ten things you ought to know before you take the leap:

10. Amazon RDS uses a patched version of MySQL 5.1.38. While several discussions within MySQL forums allude to a growing concern that Amazon may not have the required expertise for upgrading and maintaining patched versions of MySQL, the fact still remains that Amazon has enough resources to just buy them from other vendors who do. The patch enables MySQL to scale dynamically in the cloud, besides adding other features.

9. EC2, EBS, and RDS: Connecting the dots. Amazon RDS DB instances are basically instances of MySQL running on an EC2 platform. Persistent storage (for back-ups, etc.) is allocated in EBS volumes. However, neither can you access the underlying EC2 instance nor can you use S3 to access your stored …

Fig 1. Typical management configuration

MySQL Cluster is designed to be a High Availability, Fault Tolerant database where no single failure results in any loss of service.

This is however dependent on how the user chooses to architect the configuration – in terms of which nodes are placed on which physical hosts, and which physical resources each physical host is dependent on (for example if the two blades containing the data nodes making up a particular node group are cooled by the same fan then the failure of that fan could result in the loss of the whole database).

Of course, there’s always the possibility of an entire data center being lost due to earthquake, sabotage etc. and so for a fully available system, you should consider using asynchronous replication to a geographically remote Cluster.

Fig 1. …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.1.3, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released. This is our latest GA release and is suitable for use in all scenarios against servers ranging from version 4.1 to 5.4!

It is now available in source and binary form from [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.1.html] and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time – if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

This release builds on the cool new features introduced with 6.1.2 and adds the following changes/bugfixes.

• fixed session state provider table definition to allow more than 64K per-session data (bug#47339)
• fixed compilation problem in NativeDriver inside ExecuteDirect  (bug #47354)
…

MySQL Connector/Net 6.2.1, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver
for MySQL has been released. This is a beta release and is intended to
introduce you to the new features and enhancements we are planning. This
release should not be used in a production environment.

It is now available in source and binary form from
[http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/connector/net/6.2.html] and mirror sites
(note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time
- if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later
or choose another download site.)

The new features or changes in this release are:

• fixed SessionProvider to be compatible with 4.x MySQL, replaced TIMESTAMPDIFF with TIME_TO_SEC (bug#47219)
• implemented support for client SSL certificates …

Welcome to Profiling InfiniDB Multi-Join, part of a series designed to highlight different aspects of the InfiniDB join capabilities. InfiniDB is engineered and optimized to execute join operations for millions or billions of rows using a number of key features:

Hash Joins.
Parallel processing (multi-threaded and optionally distributed).
Join sequencing to minimize data shipping costs. (Right-deep join tree instead of left-deep).
InfiniDB multi-join (stream 1 large table past up to 60 hRead More...