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 …

I am not sure if this is a bug or how MySQL works on validating constraints in association with ON DUPLICATE KEY (late or early checking). For example, consider the following use case (this is irrepective of storage engine and MySQL version):

      mysql> create table t1(id int not null primary key, val int not null) Engine=MyISAM;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.07 sec)
 
mysql> insert into t1 values(10,20);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.01 sec)
 
mysql> insert into t1 values(20,10);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> create table t2(id1 int not null primary key, val1 int) Engine=MyISAM;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.14 sec)
 
mysql> insert into t2 values(10,NULL);
Query OK, 1 row affected (0.00 sec)
 
mysql> insert into t1(id, val) select id1, val1 from t2 ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE val=IF (VALUES(val) IS NULL, val, VALUES(val));
Query OK, 2 rows affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
Records: 1  Duplicates: 1  Warnings: …

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.

In the world of technology, customer ownership has always been a huge issue. The company that owns the relationship is able to influence purchasing decisions that surround their product(s). For example, if the customer is tied into a specific application, that application can influence purchases down the stack (database, operating system, etc.). In these cases the specific (e.g. vertical applications) had an inherent advantage over the more generic or interchangeable (e.g. databases).

Then companies began to standardize on certain infrastructure elements. For example, a company might say “We are a Windows shop” or “We are an Oracle shop” and unless you had a REALLY compelling reason, you had to run on that infrastructure.

Cloud computing introduces a new dynamic. For example, you might be an HP equipment company, but if you use Amazon AWS, what is their equipment? They won’t tell you. What is the storage …

DynamoDB (aka LucidDB) is not just another column store database. Our goal is being the best database for actually doing Business Intelligence; while that means being fast and handling large amounts of data there’s a lot of other things BI consultant/developers need. I’ll continue to post about some of the great BI features that DynamoDB has for the modern datasmiths.

First feature to cover that’s dead easy, is the built in ability to generate a time dimension, including a Fiscal Calendar attributes. If you’re using Mondrian (or come to that, your own custom SQL on a star schema) you need to have a time dimension. Time is the most important dimension! Every OLAP model I’ve ever built uses one! It something that you, as a datasmith will need to do with every …

Following on from our earlier announcement, Paul McCullagh has responded with the answers to your questions - as well as a few I gathered from other Percona folks, and attendees of OpenSQL Camp. Thank you Paul!

What’s the "ideal" use case for the PBXT engine, and how does it compare in performance?  When would I use PBXT instead of a storage engine like MyISAM, InnoDB or XtraDB?

Unfortunately it is not possible to point to a specific category of applications and say, "PBXT will be better here, so try it".  PBXT is a general purpose transactional storage engine, designed to perform well on a broad range of tasks, much like InnoDB.  However, PBXT's log-based architecture makes performance characteristics different to both MyISAM and InnoDB/XtraDB. Tests show that PBXT's performance is similar to InnoDB but, depending on your database designed and the application, it can be faster.

PBXT is a …