I've completed an initial round of testing InnoDB with data compression and the results are extremely promising. The testing was performed by setting up two shadows of a production database. The shadows execute the exact same queries as the production database to collect performance statistics but the query results are ignored.

The production server uses Fusion-io PCI-Express flash storage and had 290GB of data. Both shadows were running on traditional spinning disks, so I wasn't sure they would be able to keep up with the load. The first shadow was configured with MySQL 5.0.84 with the uncompressed "compact" InnoDB storage format. The second shadow was configured with MySQL 5.1.38 and the InnoDB 1.0.4 plugin with 2x compression. With compression enabled on all tables except 3 containing pre-compressed data, the InnoDB data size shrunk to 170GB, a 41% reduction.

When the shadows were first started up with empty caches, the …

Dear EC, I have an opinion on Sun/Oracle merger.

I don’t like objections, therefore I object to them. Of course, I understand, that some people want to play major parts in dramas and soap operas, others are spectating and enjoying it, but most people I know and respect simply want to be efficient and get their work done.

These people, many of whom were my colleagues back at Sun/MySQL, sometimes can be labeled as ones who don’t care about greater picture, or the common good. Unfortunately, the topic of common interest depends from religion to religion, from society to society, from person to person.

My approach to common good is doing what I want to do for the community, and not what community wants me to do. If that relation is not compatible for any of the sides, there is no relation at all. Now, what happens now, is that there is some user community (and I include all the people who are protecting their …

This Thursday (November 12th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia of the MySQL Community Team will present Gearman for MySQL. Gearman is a client/server infrastructure for generic tasks, usable on distributed servers, with little worry about the details. No matter what language you speak, Gearman can meet your needs in C, PHP, Perl, Ruby, shell scripting, and several more. Gearman can also work in conjunction with MySQL, either using UDFs, or simply through its basic architecture. Giuseppe's talk will show examples of how to use Gearman for remote installation and how to call a complicate data warehousing function written in Perl from any other language, with no knowledge of Perl at all.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser …

This Thursday (November 12th, 14:00 UTC), Giuseppe Maxia of the MySQL Community Team will present Gearman for MySQL. Gearman is a client/server infrastructure for generic tasks, usable on distributed servers, with little worry about the details. No matter what language you speak, Gearman can meet your needs in C, PHP, Perl, Ruby, shell scripting, and several more. Gearman can also work in conjunction with MySQL, either using UDFs, or simply through its basic architecture. Giuseppe's talk will show examples of how to use Gearman for remote installation and how to call a complicate data warehousing function written in Perl from any other language, with no knowledge of Perl at all.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser …

We just updated our web site and blogs. We hope the update didn’t cause any trouble for people trying to read the blogs or download TokuDB, our MySQL storage engine. In addition to a new look, we now provide pricing as well as easier downloads.

For the past two months, I have been running tests on TokuDB in my free time. TokuDB is a storage engine put out by Tokutek. TokuDB uses fractal tree indexes instead of B-tree indexes to improve performance, which is dramatically noticeable when dealing with large tables (over 100 million rows).

For those that like the information “above the fold”, here is a table with results from a test comparing InnoDB and TokuDB. All the steps are explained in the post below, if you want more details, but here’s the table:

I've been coding up a storm in the last couple days and have just about completed coding on three new INFORMATION_SCHEMA views which allow anyone to query the new Drizzle transaction log for information about its contents. I've also finished a new UDF for Drizzle called PRINT_TRANSACTION_MESSAGE() that prints out the Transaction message's contents in a easy-to-read format.

I don't have time for a full walk-through blog entry about it, so I'll just paste some output below and let y'all take a looksie. A later blog entry will feature lots of source code explaining how you, too, can easily add INFORMATION_SCHEMA views to your Drizzle plugins.

Below is the results of the following sequence of actions:

• Start up a Drizzle server with the transaction log enabled, checksumming enabled, and …

Debian Linux (the underlying foundation of Ubuntu) manages the startup/shutdown of MySQL quite differently from the ways I am used to. I am a long-time user of both the MySQL binary provided by Red Hat/SuSE (along with Fedora and clones like CentOS and Oracle Enterprise Linux) and the official binary from mysql.com. After the successful restore of a cold backup, I started mysqld using the Debian provided init script. The script said that mysqld failed to start up, but in reality it did start up. Similarly, stopping mysqld fails.

The output below demonstrates the outputs and the behavior seen on a Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Server:

root:~# ps -ef | grep mysqld
root     20165 19926  0 15:12 pts/4    00:00:00 grep mysqld
root:~# /etc/init.d/mysql start
 * Starting MySQL database server mysqld                                            [fail]
root:~# ps -ef | grep …

 Hi – I’m Walt Weeks, Engineering  Manager at Calpont. We are pleased to announce the availability of the 0.9.5.0-0 release of InfiniDB Community Edition.  This is our latest alpha release and is not recommended for production work. 

New functionality we’ve added with 0.9.5.0 includes:  

The ability to add new columns to existing tables in an online fashion – something we know Read More...

 Hi – I’m Walt Weeks, Engineering  Manager at Calpont. We are pleased to announce the availability of the 0.9.5.0-0 release of InfiniDB Community Edition.  This is our latest alpha release and is not recommended for production work. 

New functionality we’ve added with 0.9.5.0 includes:  

The ability to add new columns to existing tables in an online fashion – something we know Read More...