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FYI - the thoughts here have been gathered from conversations with several individuals, including an interesting conversation yesterday.  As these conversations were off the record I won’t name names here but thanks to those people.

I love open source software and I am a big supporter of many companies that produce open source offerings.  Here I am not going to debate if Oracle acquiring MySQL will be better for MySQL or not as that has been done to death.  But I do think it is relevant to discuss the dangers of blocking a commercial vendor from acquiring a potentially competitive open source vendor.

Many open source software initiatives are purely community backed and are …

InnoDB uses background threads to handle readahead (prefetch) requests. Requests are generated when it detects sequential or random access to most blocks in an extent. This is described in the 5.0 MySQL manual with new behavior in the plugin.

The Facebook MySQL patch has new my.cnf variables to disable readahead: innodb_readahead_random and innodb_readahead_sequential. I don't know whether readahead is useful for my workload. This is hard to determine because SHOW STATUS counters for InnoDB readahead display the number of times the readahead generation functions are called rather than the number of readahead requests issued (fixed in the Facebook patch, fix …

This blog post is a by-product of my preparation work for an upcoming talk titled "Why you should be using a distributed version control system (DVCS) for your project" at SAPO Codebits in Lisbon (December 3-5, 2009). Publishing these thoughts prior to the conference serves two purposes: getting some peer review on my findings and acting as a teaser for the actual talk. So please let me know — did I cover the relevant aspects or did I miss anything? What's your take on DVCS vs. the centralized approach? Why do you prefer one over the other? I'm looking forward to your comments!

Even though there are several distributed alternatives available for some years now (with Bazaar, git and …

Here is a summary of the key discussions I have had over the last month.  Keep in mind, I’m no analyst.  This is largely opinion based on various conversations I have had with the relevant companies (for analyst insight see Curt Monash).

KickFireI think Kickfire has been doing it a little tough lately.  The difficulties in a startup launching a hardware appliance (and associated logistics) combined with being too focused on the MySQL customer base has impacted the growth of this interesting start up.  But they aren’t taking it lying down and have adjusted the strategy and have added a new appliance to the range.  Kickfire now seems to have a stronger focus on the enterprise …

With many thanks to Vadim at Percona for his analysis of different capabilities of different columnar dbms. Definitely good information, and well documented.  Queries and results available at:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/

Of course InfiniDB, does offer multi-threaded processing for all offerings and distributed prRead More...

One problem made me puzzled for couple hours, but it was really interesting to figure out what's going on.

So let me introduce problem at first. The table is

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. CREATE TABLE `c` (
2.   `tracker_id` int(10) unsigned NOT NULL,
3.   `username` char(20) character set latin1 collate latin1_bin NOT NULL,
4.   `time_id` date NOT NULL,
5.   `block_id` int(10) unsigned default NULL,
6.   PRIMARY KEY  (`tracker_id`,`username`,`time_id`),
7.   KEY `block_id` (`block_id`)
8. ) ENGINE=InnoDB

Table has 11864696 rows and takes Data_length: 698,351,616 bytes on disk

The problem is that after restoring table from mysqldump, the query that scans data by primary key was slow. How slow ? Let me show.

The query in …

Notes from Enterprise2.0 Conference

What if I type this:

1. myterm> SELECT engine, count(*) AS count FROM information_schema.tables GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC | chart pie | browser

and Firefox says:What's that?I just launched an open-source project on launchpad called myterm. Myterm is a crossover between the standard mysql command line client and the concept of pipes and filters in bash. You can use it to run queries and filter the produced result set in various ways using pipe chaining. This lends itself to quite a lot of different use cases, for instance graphical charts, md5 checksums and different presentation forms to name a few. It has browser integration using shell exec, which means it can render html result sets or charts in your browser. And since most stuff is written using plugins, it will work well to serve as a hub for hooking in more and more tools for …

The New York Times posted an article called "Decision on Oracle a Test for Kroes" where they cite me with a suggestion what should be done when allowing the merger - splitting off MySQL from Sun/Oracle.

I had some tweets about the situation and briefly chatted with Florian Müller whom everybody should know from 2004's anti software patent EU campaign and who is acting as a formal advisor in the current EU observation regarding the deal. I believe in Open Source being "free as in freedom". In the last months I haven't heard anything from Oracle itself regarding its future plans for MySQL. And when I read this article ("Oracle …

With many thanks to Vadim at Percona for his analysis of different capabilities of different columnar dbms. Definitely good information, and well documented.  Queries and results available at:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/11/02/air-traffic-queries-in-infinidb-early-alpha/

Of course InfiniDB, does offer multi-threaded processing for all offerings and distributed processing (enabled with Enterprise Edition additional functionality) that was beyond the scope of hisRead More...