Recently I was working on a project which used Infobright as the database. The version tested was 3.1.1 both on OpenSolaris as well as Solaris 10. Infobright is like a column-oriented database engine for MySQL primarily targeted towards data warehouse, data mining type of project deployments.

While everything was working as expected, one thing we did notice that as number of concurrent connections tried to query against the database we noticed that queries deteriorated fast in the sense that not much parallel benefits were being squeezed from the machine. Now this sucks! (apparently sucks is now a technical term). It sucks because the server has definitely many  cores and typically each Infobright query still can at the max peg a core. So the expectation will be typically to atleast handle concurrent queries which is close to the number of cores  (figuratively speaking though …

Been a while since we did a post for open positions but this is an important one so wanted to get it out there.

Position Overview:
Manage Zimbra’s rapidly growing technical community and launch our developer outreach program.  A key part of Zimbra’s rapid growth and ongoing success is the ability for us to engage and interact with our open source community.  This position will take the solid base we’ve grown over the past 5 yrs and define and implement a Zimbra developer program to lower the bar for external developers, partners and customers to build solutions around the Zimbra platform.  This will include expanding and leveraging the relationships between Zimbra, our customers, our developers and our sysadmin community members.  A few of the existing public tools and touch points are listed below. This position will build upon and improve the current tools and evaluate and add to these as needed.  The …

If you ever wondered how big is that or another index in InnoDB ... you had to calculate it yourself by multiplying size of row (which I should add is harder in the case of a VARCHAR - since you need to estimate average length) on count of records. And it still would be quite inaccurate as secondary indexes tend to take more space. So we added more detailed index statistics into our xtrabackup utility. The thanks for this feature goes to a well known Social Network who sponsored the development.

We chose to put this into xtrabackup for a couple of reasons - the first is that running statistics on your backup database does not need to hurt production servers, and the second reason is that running statistic on a stopped database is more accurate than with online (although online is also supported, but you may have inexact results).

Let's see how it works. I have one table with size 13Gb what was filled during about 2.5 years.
…

On the 23rd of June 2008, I wrote a note saying that I had just joined Pythian. Today I am posting a similar, but different, note saying that as of the last of September, I will no longer be employed by Pythian, the time has come to look for new challenges. Although I am sad to leave, I do look forward to the future and what it may hold for me.

I wanted to take this moment to thank Pythian for having me, for having such great co-workers whom I count myself lucky to have worked with. I also want to give a special thanks to Augusto for taking care of me when I first joined, and showing me around how the company works. I must thank Paul as well—he is an exceptional person to work with, and I’ve come to value his …

Just a short heads up on what is going on with the Open Database Alliance.

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MySQL is proud to announce the MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release!

The MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release includes the MySQL Enterprise Monitor with the improved MySQL Query Analyzer - now with new correlation graphs for faster performance optimization. Join our webinar series and see a live demonstration of the new MySQL Enterprise Monitor and the improved Query Analyzer, hear about the new Advisor rules and support services and get live answers to your questions from our MySQL experts.

The "What's New in the MySQL Enterprise Fall 2009 Release - EMEA" web presentation will be delivered on Wednesday, September 16.

For those of you who speak Italian I'll deliver a local version of it on the Thursday, September 24 at 10am CET. Register and listen to it from the comfort of your home or office via this …

I haven’t blogged in over a month now.  This is for a number of reasons.  Firstly I have been flat out with various activities.  This included a trip to VLDB in Lyon mid month.  Secondly, a lot of the companies I have spoken with this month aren’t ready to speak publically so hence no blog posts resulting from these sorts of discussions.

However there has been a wiff of a change in the air in terms of focus that is interesting and worth highlighting.  After years of lots of innovation around data analytics, OLTP is starting to make a comeback in terms of reclaiming some of the limelight.  Much more on this between now and the end of the year, but a couple things to watch:

• On the Radar: VoltDB
• …

Here is a copy/paste example of the content from the new analytics tab that is in revision-177 of Kontrollbase (downloadable now) – it features as many or more options and analysis than pay-to-use monitoring solutions can offer at the moment and you don’t have to pay a dime. Along with the Analytics tab you also [...]

The CodePlex Foundation was announced this week by Microsoft. Most reactions have been quite positive, but there has, of course, also been skepticism and concerns from Open Source advocates. The two main worries can be summarized as "the CodePlex Foundation is a ploy" (e.g. TechNews World) and "what's in it for them?" (e.g. Open Bytes).

I will try to explain why I think that the CodePlex Foundation is a good idea, and why I agreed to be an advisor for the Foundation.

N.B. All of the following is my own interpretation based on conversations with the people behind the Foundation. Any misinterpretations of issues and all speculations are my own.

It's important …

In line with my prediction from few days ago, Larry Ellison is announcing the new Database Machine — the new version is targeting OLTP workloads and is based on Sun hardware.

Looks like I just got the date wrong. Oh well, now is the announcement, hype and demo is at the Oracle Open World and shipments are to start upon Oracle-Sun acquisition completion.

So what’s new in Exadata that I …