I've been working on cleanups to the Drizzle autoconf and automake system. Actually, to be fair, I've been doing this work on Drizzle, Gearmand, libdrizzle and libmemcached.

In all of those projects, we have the same set of build ideas:

1. Warnings == Errors
2. As many warnings as we can enable
3. Lots of people will be building directly from bzr

As it turns out, I'm pretty lazy, and I got tired of remember to port the latest m4 macro fix that we made in one project across to the other three. O, hai - code reuse!

So I did some refactoring and split the several macros and large portions of the configure.ac files out into a set of m4 macro files. These now live in their own project, which you can grab from bzr via:

 bzr branch lp:pandora-build

Although each of the macros is useful by itself, the fun part is that you can just put:

…

Today we increased price for the Amanda Enterprise Backup Server. The new price for our Standard subscription level is $500 per year. Our online store is a place to quickly checkout prices for all our products on a single page. This price increase was done in conjunction with release of Amanda Enterprise 3.0, which represents several man years of R&D on the backup server, including advanced media management such as D2D2T. Our subscription provides access to software and enterprise-class support.

Amanda Enterprise is used by businesses of all shapes and sizes. But a typical scenario is the following:

• Backup Server on Linux
• One tape library with one or two tape drives. Or VTL on a NAS device.
• A mix of Linux & Windows servers and desktops …

Eric McDermid just checked in a nice new feature into Mondrian which optimizes the SQL generated by MySQL. It takes advantage of the fact that in MySQL, if some of your GROUP BY columns are unique, you can leave the other columns out of the GROUP BY clause, and MySQL does less work.

In some cases, a lot less work. MySQL implements GROUP BY by sorting, and since this reduces the volume of data being sorted, Eric reports significant performance improvements. Unfortunately it only works on MySQL, since MySQL is the database I know which has this feature.

See the latest schema documentation for more details.

I'll note that we reserve the right to change the syntax a little in future versions. In mondrian-4.0 we're adding physical schemas, which will include much more information …

I've been working on cleanups to the Drizzle autoconf and automake system. Actually, to be fair, I've been doing this work on Drizzle, Gearmand, libdrizzle and libmemcached.

In all of those projects, we have the same set of build ideas:

1. Warnings == Errors
2. As many warnings as we can enable
3. Lots of people will be building directly from bzr

As it turns out, I'm pretty lazy, and I got tired of remember to port the latest m4 macro fix that we made in one project across to the other three. O, hai - code reuse!

So I did some refactoring and split the several macros and large portions of the configure.ac files out into a set of m4 macro files. These now live in their own project, which you can grab from bzr via:

 bzr branch lp:pandora-build

Although each of the macros is useful by itself, the fun part is that you can just put:

…

I've been working on cleanups to the Drizzle autoconf and automake system. Actually, to be fair, I've been doing this work on Drizzle, Gearmand, libdrizzle and libmemcached.

In all of those projects, we have the same set of build ideas:

1. Warnings == Errors
2. As many warnings as we can enable
3. Lots of people will be building directly from bzr

As it turns out, I'm pretty lazy, and I got tired of remember to port the latest m4 macro fix that we made in one project across to the other three. O, hai - code reuse!

So I did some refactoring and split the several macros and large portions of the configure.ac files out into a set of m4 macro files. These now live in their own project, which you can grab from bzr via:

 bzr branch lp:pandora-build

Although each of the macros is useful by itself, the fun part is that you can just put:

…

(yeah, this company is going to have to get used to the Austin Powers references.)

Groovy Corp put out a press release last night that starts the official launch of their SQL Switch relational database platform.

I have been speaking with Groovy for a few months, and while the press release is a bit noisy there is actually some interesting stuff in it.

First, an overview

• They are an in memory RDBMS
• They have worked with Intel to architect from the ground up for large multi processor concurrency
• Initially they are launching as a multi-core appliance
• They claim 200,000 sql operations per second from a single box
• They are proprietary (not built on MySQL or any other open source …

This blog post was inspired by a recent report of a Database Analyst at American Express stealing Credit Card data.

It’s amazing how many companies still follow a mainly “perimeter security” approach when it comes to controlling access to sensitive information—their focus is on network security using firewalls, advanced authentication options, and so on. Even with such measures, it’s very common to setup strong barriers to the outside world but very little by way of internal limits; most internal people have some level of access to servers that store and process sensitive data.

Well, there’s nothing wrong with pre-screening your stuff, or having access to the sensitive information, or setting up advanced …

This post builds upon the earlier article (Creating a simple Cluster on a single LINUX host) which explained how to install and run a Cluster where all of the nodes run on the same physical host.

The single host solution is not great for a real deployment – MySQL Cluster is designed to provide a High Availability (HA) solution by synchronously replicating data between data nodes – if all of the data nodes run on a single host that that machine is a single point of failure.

MySQL Cluster running accross 2 hosts

This article demonstrates how to split the nodes between hosts; the configuration will still be fairly simple, using just 2 machines but it should be obvious how to extend it to …

How do you determine the cause of a query pileup? By this I mean how do you explain a server that suddenly has 200+ concurrent queries when it normally has less than 10. Has the query arrival rate changed? Or have recent queries been more expensive? First, you need to monitor SHOW STATUS variables using a tool that archives the variables and computes rates of the sampled counters. Then you need to know which variables to monitor.

The query arrival rate can be determined by computing the rate of change in the SHOW STATUS variable Questions. This counter is incremented each time a new SQL command arrives at the server.

The SHOW STATUS variable Threads_running displays the number of queries running …

This is the 153rd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

Let’s start by revisiting a perennial issue with Craig Mullins addresses with the question, Are DBAs Obsolete? “Before we go any further, let me briefly answer the question posed in the title of this blog entry: ‘No Way!’,” writes Craig. “Every time I hear this it makes me shake my head sadly as I regard just how gullible IT publications can be.” He argues that an Internet-paced attitude regarding the work of the DBA may be the first culprit in the devaluation of the DBA’s work.

Oracle

Dion Cho, the Oracle Performance Storyteller, …