It's been a busy and exciting week since we announced RethinkDB. Of all the feedback we received, the most common request was for performance numbers. Before the launch our top priority was correctness. We spent most of our time testing RethinkDB with Wordpress and adding the missing features. As a result, performance suffered. In the past week we tuned the engine back up to high performance. We're still far from finished with the improvements we want to make, but we feel that we've reached a level of performance we can be proud to display.

We wrote our original benchmarking tool in Python, but during our latest benchmarks, we noticed that it was taking about as much time as the engine itself, hiding our real performance numbers. We now have a very small Objective-C program (<900 lines) that uses prepared statements in a tight loop, and times only across the mysql_stmt_execute() call. For inserts, the benchmark creates a …

If you're interested in ways to back up stuff, and haven't tried Dar yet, here's an article on using Dar that I've just published on my personal blog. In short, Dar works very much like Tar, but it's got a built-in feature for slicing up archive files which comes handy when you want to distribute backup files across several media, for example DVDs or hard disks.

As you might have seen Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 was released today. I am very excited to see this release which is released exactly 5 months after release of Innodb Plugin 1.0.3 (I honestly expected to see Innodb Plugin 1.0.4 to be released by MySQL Conference and Expo in April). This also is still "early adopter" version of a plugin which is a bit of disappointment as we can't wait for Innodb plugin to become stable/GA but considering number of improvements this is probably good thing.

We're also pleased to see some of Percona contributions made in this release (in modified form) while others were evaluated and given ideas for different implementations.

Among other changes I'm especially pleased with fixed …

If you're interested in ways to back up stuff, and haven't tried Dar yet, here's an article on using Dar that I've just published on my personal blog. In short, Dar works very much like Tar, but it's got a built-in feature for slicing up archive files which comes handy when you want to distribute backup files across several media, for example DVDs or hard disks.

http://blog.envylabs.com/2009/08/5-days-of-oscon-day-2/

I'm at 5:13

Today, the InnoDB team announced the latest release of the InnoDB Plugin, release 1.0.4. Some of the performance gains in this release are quite remarkable!

As noted in the announcement, this release contains contributions from Sun Microsystems, Google and Percona, Inc., for which we are very appreciative. This page briefly describes each of the contributions and the way we treated them. The purpose of this post is to describe the general approach the InnoDB team takes toward third party contributions.

In principle, we appreciate third party contributions. However, we simply don’t have the resources to seriously evaluate every change that someone proposes, but when we do undertake to evaluate a patch, …

Linux vs FreeBSD, vi vs emacs, MySQL vs PostgreSQL, your habit or favorite technology vs another’s. At the end of the day there is no winner, just a matter of preference for the task at hand. I learned C++ 13 years ago, I forgot most of my C++ knowledge 10 years ago, I discouraged the use of C++ in this period in between, and in the past year I’ve been re-learning C++ (mostly due to Drizzle). So what did I use after unlearning C++ 10 years ago? I wrote everything in C (and by everything I mean this was my performance programming language of choice). This worked quite well, but it’s an interesting evolution that I think is now coming full circle.

When I first started programming C, it was a bit clumsy, and I look back at my old code and cringe. I began to develop a certain programming style that can best be described as object-oriented C programming due to the conventions used. The structs, functions that operated on those structs, and …

I'm happy to present you my first benchmark results with XtraDB-6 on dbSTRESS. Percona team made a huge work preparing this release and there are really a lot of improvements regarding performance as well general usage (for more details about XtraDB-6 see the full announce  from Percona site).

But my main interest is around performance (sorry :-)), and I was curious how well now XtraDB-6 resists to the stress workload. New release also integrating the "timed based" concurrency model introduced within MySQL 5.4 - missing this feature was negatively impacted XtraDB in previous tests. But now we may expect it runs at least as fast as MySQL 5.4! Let's see...

Tested versions

• MySQL 5.4.0
• MySQL 5.Perf (build #45)
• XtraDB-6
• XtraDB-6-tc (configured with "timed …

Jeremy Zawodny of Craigslist wrote a great article on PBXT for Linux Magazine:

PBXT: Your Next MySQL Storage Engine?

Check it out...

Thanks Jeremy :)