Last week we had a lively panel discussion moderated by Dave Nielsen, founder of CloudCamp, with leading experts in cloud computing on the panel: Chander Kant (CEO, Zmanda) & Michael Crandell (CEO, RightScale). Chander and Michael shared their insights into how their customers are using cloud computing and achieving new levels of reliability and recoverability. Here is a video archive of the panel. 

This panel discusses how you can migrate your apps and data to the cloud in a way that’s affordable and reliable and how to integrate the cloud into your IT strategy. Also hear about real-world examples of companies using the cloud for data backup and recovery and understand the hurdles to moving to the cloud, and how you can overcome them.

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In this post I’m going to talk about how TokuDB’s implementation of auto increment works, and contrast it to the behavior of MyISAM and InnoDB.  We feel that the TokuDB behavior is easier to understand, more standard-compliant and offers higher performance (especially when implemented with Fractal Tree indexes).

In TokuDB, each table can have an auto-increment column.  That column can be used as any part of a key, but it doesn’t have to be part of any key.  The value produced by auto incrementing is always greater than the previous maximum value for that column. There are some cases where auto-incremented values are skipped, such as when a transaction aborts, which “uses up” auto-incremented values.

This behavior is close to that required for SQL:2003 (see SQL:2003 at wikipedia), which specifies that each table provides one unnamed sequence which behaves essentially in the way we implemented …

One of the things about supporting multiple storage engines is that there is "no one way" to say "this is what we have".

Michael Widenius solution was to create a file called an "FRM" for MySQL that would work as a one to one ratio between table information and engine information.

All of the first engines were "stupid". Meaning that, the kernel handled lots of heavy lifting for them. As engines like Innodb were added, which were a lot more advanced, there was some friction.

Innodb keeps its own data dictionary, and so have a lot of the engines that have come after it.

This creates a very nasty problem, and a set of limitations. You can't do a lot of online work, because of the nature of ownership of "this is the real information".

And in the case of a crash? You can end up with orphaned tables or corruption on ALTER TABLE (which is very hard to make happen... but it can). …

The morning find for me was this written out entry of Kirrily Robert's OSCON keynote Standing Out in the Crowd :
http://infotrope.net/blog/2009/07/25/standing-out-in-the-crowd-my-oscon-keynote/

Some of the highlighted quotes strike home with me:

I’d never contributed to an open source project before, or even considered that I could.

but the barriers to entry seemed high.

One of my main concerns with Drizzle is that we make sure that both of the above does not happen, for women or men. I want people to feel that contributing is something that is very easy to do. We have been setting aside tasks in a …

At the May 2009 Boston MySQL User Group, Giuseppe Maxia of Sun Microsystems gave a presentation about MySQL 5.4 with use cases and benchmarks to show how it outperforms all other current MySQL releases (including the Google patches and the OurDelta/Percona releases).

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.slideshare.net/datacharmer/mysql-54-theory-and-practice

The video can be watched below, or directly on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giT4SYXuVqA&hl

MyQuery 3.0 is now available, as 3.0.0 Alpha, for download from Sourceforge. I am aware that this is probably surprising for many MySQL users, as the original plan was to release 2.4, and now we end up with 3.0 instead, which is the reverse of what MySQL is up to now (going from 6.0 to 5.4).

Now,. jokes aside, the reasons for 3.0 instead of 2.4 is that 3.0 really contains a whole bunch of new features and bug fixes. Among the cool new features are:

• Tabbed editing - This allows you to edit several files at the same time, in different tabs. The old "History" function is still there, although of less use now I guess.
• Dual connections - MyQuery can now keep two connections active at the same time, one for issuing queries, and one for controlling the whole thing. This allows the controlling connection, for example, to issue a KILL QUERY if …

At the July MySQL User Group, Eric Day and Patrick Galbraith spoke about Drizzle, a lightweight, microkernel, open source database for high-performance scale-out applications, and Gearman, an open source, distributed job queuing system.

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.oddments.org/notes/DrizzleGearmanBoston2009.pdf.

The first hour of video, where Eric and Patrick talk about Drizzle, is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi4cGzFlcuU, and below:

The second part, about 1.5 hours, where Eric and Patrick talk about Gearman, and then illustrate Gearman and Drizzle working together in a custom search application called Narada, is …

We've now published a new set of binary packages including the extended GIS functionality from the mysql-5.1-wl1326 source tree.

This release is based on the MySQL 5.1.35 code base and fixes the bugs mentioned below. It includes some improvements to the GIS functionality as well, so please use these packages for future testing of the MySQL GIS functionality.

The following GIS-related bugs were fixed in this version:

• Bug#31753: Buffer/area functions only return first row of set
• Bug#32032: Contains() does not work on MultiPolygons, may force a disconnect and/or result in extremely long query times.
• Bug#32100: contains, …

Table discovery looks a bit different from the previous time I blogged about it. Everything is now just hanging off the StorageEngine. If you want to not have dfe files on disk and just use your own data dictionary, you need to implement two things:

• A method to get table metadata
• A iterator over table names in a database in your engine

I’ve done this for the ARCHIVE storage engine (and that’s in Drizzle trunk now), and have been reading up on the Embedded InnoDB docs to see their API to the InnoDB data dictionary and am rather excited about getting it going at some point in the future (feel free to beat me to it and submit a patch though!)

As many MySQL users noticed, MySQL.com and related sites disappeared from the Internet on Wednesday 22 July 2009 for about 10 hours. I’d like to give an update on what happened and what we’ve done to fix it, as such outages are nonacceptable. For this blog entry, I’ve talked to Adam Donnison, senior MySQL.com web developer/admin. Last Wednesday certainly also highlighted the amazing power of Twitter, where we could communicate with our community in real time using our @MySQL and @MySQL_Community identities as well as our personal ones.

So what happened? For the last several years, the MySQL.com servers were being hosted in Uppsala, Sweden where MySQL AB was …