I need help with this. I had a dream… Well, not so much as a dream, maybe a “It’d be cool to…”

I thought it’d be nice to discover new photos on flickr using your favorite photos and the people who also favorited those photos, and the favorite photos of those who also favorited my pictures. Still with me?

It’s actually a quite simple code (about 500 lines, check it on github: discovr), but it’s terribly slow. Some possible reasons:

• Way too much data. I’ve found people with around more than 18000 favorites, and there are photos with more than 2k fans. After limiting to 50 last …

Optimizing Oracle Performance

Optimizing Oracle Performance. By Cary Millsap, O’Reilly 2003. Page count: about 375 pages with appendices. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site.)

This is easily one of the best books I’ve ever read on performance optimization. I’ve just finished reading it for the second-and-a-half time in two weeks, and I very rarely read a book more than once. I’ve been telling a lot of people about it.

Despite the title, it is actually not about Oracle performance. It is a book on how to optimize a) any system, …

The main focus of MariaDB staff has been the MariaDB 5.1.38 release in recent weeks, but this doesn’t mean that we’ve abandoned everything else for it. There are several non-release projects going on, one of which is adding binlog filtering and markup capabilities.

In order to see how the new features fit in, let’s first look at what binlog filtering options are already present in MySQL (and so, MariaDB):

There’s a new script in kontrolbase that speeds up the login process by up to 50%. I highly recommend every user to upgrade to the latest version of the svn release. Otherwise you can grab the file here: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollbase/source/browse/trunk/bin/kontroll-query_cache_preload.pl Read more about the script and how it works here: http://kontrollsoft.com/forum/kontrollbase-issues-and-solutions/query-cache-preload-script-speeds-up-login-by-50#p22

Every time I need to install or reconfigure a new workstation, I review the set of tools I use. It's an opportunity to refresh the list, reconsider the usefulness of old tools and review new ones. During my first week at Open Market I got one of these opportunities. Here is my short list of free (as in 'beer') OSS tools and why they have a place in my tool chest.
Testing Environments
Virtual Box
Of all the Virtual Machines out there, I consider Virtual Box to be the easiest to use. Since I first looking into it while I was still working at Sun/MySQL, this package has been improved constantly. It's a must have to stage High Availability scenarios or run tools that are not available in your OS of choice.
MySQL SandboxDid you compile MySQL from source and want to test it without affecting your current …

At the end of this note I describe how InnoDB can be much faster (2.5X) for high-concurrency workloads. However, what we really did is improve the code to not get 2.5X slower.

InnoDB uses innodb_thread_concurrency to limit the number of threads that run concurrently. Enforcement of this limit is imprecise to improve performance. By imprecise, I mean that there are usually fewer than innodb_thread_concurrency threads running within InnoDB even when there are many threads ready, willing and able to run there.

In what follows assume that there is a 1:1 mapping between thread, session and connection.

Enforcement is implemented using tickets. Each time a thread enters InnoDB it gives up 1 ticket. When a thread has 0 tickets it gets more tickets if the number of threads with non-zero ticket counts is less than innodb_thread_concurrency. Otherwise the thread is put at the end of the queue of waiting threads and the thread …

I have had a few MySQL DBAs ask about how to get started learning Oracle. I will admit that it has been on my to-do list for quite a while1. It never hurts to know more than one database system and a great deal of DBA help wanted ads mention Oracle. Someone once said that you must make sure your capabilities exceed your limitations2 and recently I have been feeling limited when others have started to talk about Oracle capabilities.

So what does it take for a MySQL DBA to get their hands on their own Oracle instance? I used my Ubuntu box to go to Oracle's web site to get the free Oracle XE software.

1. 
   
2. Download and feed to package manager
   
3. Add my account to dba group
   
4. As root, /etc/init.d/oracle-xe configure to set passwords and …

This is the 168th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s give the wheel a spin and see who comes first . . . 

MySQL

Brian “Krow” Aker has something to say about Drizzle, InfiniDB, and column-oriented storage: “I have been asked a number of times ‘do you think there is a need for a column oriented database in the open source world?’ The answer has been yes!  . . .  I was very happy to see Calpont do their release of Infinidb last week.”

Vadim of the MySQL Performance Blog said, “As Calpont announced availability of InfiniDB I …

Funambol acquires Zapatec. Open source gains Closure. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

# Funambol acquired Zapatec, an AJAX web 2.0 frameworks vendor.

# The top ten issues facing open source users, according to Mark Radcliffe.

# Google …

On the eve of Microsoft’s announcement of the public release of SQL Azure Database, Amazon decides to release RDS. And that, too, after having resisted users’ demands for a relational database service for a very long time. Preemptive action, perhaps? Whatever it may be, I believe that such a healthy competition can do much good to the Cloud marketplace.

RDS brings with it the promise of MySQL on a Cloud. Having been a MySQL fan for quite some time now, I was itching to get my hands on an AWS account and check out what the hype was all about. Imagine my confusion when I signed up for Amazon RDS and all the AWS Management Console showed me was the EC2 dashboard! It was time I downloaded the Getting Started Guide and went through the rigmarole of studying it.

Setting up the Command Line Interface Tools

Apparently, there is no GUI yet for RDS. The only way to go about using it is through the CLI tools. Setting up the tools, …