Sun recently rolled out a new Business Intelligence (BI) solution that uses Open Storage at its core. There are several things that are different about this solution that make it stand out from the crowd.

1) It is based on Open Source software.

This solution uses the commercial versions of open source software from Pentaho and Infobright to provide the BI and Datawarehouse (DW) functions respectively and both use the MySQL database. Also, this solution uses Sun's Open Storage products as the core storage component which are built using Open Source software and industry standard components. Combine those with an Open Source operating system like Solaris or Linux and you have a complete BI solution built on an Open Source software stack.

2) The price is right. …

In this month’s article over at Database Journal  we discuss more areas to tune your initial MySQL database setup including InnoDB & MyISAM buffers, hit ratios, index usage and full table scans, security, and logs.  With this second article in a two part series we complete our coverage of basic tuning of a MySQL database.

MySQL: Five More Dials To Turn

Note This Article was actually written back in May after the UC at the request of Linux Magazine, through a series of events It went unpublished. Between then and now Jeremy ended up doing a great job covering most of the topics, so in the end it was unneeded. Now I had this completed article and thought, what should I do with it? In the I decided to publish them here. Also note I did update a few items.

As more companies move to MySQL and the demands for data increase, we push the bounds of the database further. The challenges large Web properties (who have pioneered many of the large MySQL deployments) faced when they stored 50GB of data and had 5,000 users were nothing like the challenges of storing 500GB of data supporting 100,000 users. Today, as we are seeing more and more 10+TB-sized datasets being …

Please note: I also reviewed a newer edition of this book.

I've been using phpMyAdmin since... Hmmm... Well... The times before I used to code in PHP. So when offered to review Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 by Marc Deslisle, I didn't expected to learn anything new, but I was bwrong.

The book is full of information for all kinds of users from beginner to professional. I only gallopped through the first chapters covering setup, basic usage etc. while luckily not covering basic SQL topics, so if you are new to phpMyAdmin and know basic SQL, this book may be the right one for you. Since phpMyAdmin has evolved in the last years and is still evolving, …

Everyone's favorite MySQL load relief system, memcached, has just hit the next major stable release: 1.4.0

This release sports a new binary protocol, major performance improvements, and many new statistics. Major kudos to the work of other people (Trond, Dustin, Toru) who put most of the effort into this new release.

Check out the release notes and give it a shot on your site. Please let us know if you've deployed it and any feedback you might have :)

Everyone's favorite MySQL load relief system, memcached, has just hit the next major stable release: 1.4.0

This release sports a new binary protocol, major performance improvements, and many new statistics. Major kudos to the work of other people (Trond, Dustin, Toru) who put most of the effort into this new release.

Check out the release notes and give it a shot on your site. Please let us know if you've deployed it and any feedback you might have :)

Prior to updating pages in place, InnoDB writes the data to a sequential log. If there is a crash when the pages are updated in place the writes are replayed using the data from the sequential log. Note that this log is space reserved in the system tablespace and is not the InnoDB transaction log. This guards against partial page writes (torn pages, fractured writes).

This feature has a cost. Is it needed? I am not an expert on Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server but I don't think they have anything equivalent to this. All of them can detect partial page writes by storing a checksum on each disk page or by storing a counter at the start and end of the page. But how do they recover from partial page writes?

The real problem that must be solved is recovery from anything that may cause page corruption on disk. There are many sources of corruption and I think that partial page writes are far from the most frequent. Oracle provides tools that can …

Since I have been a home recently, I put some time correcting bugs in WaffleGrid and adding new features. Thanks to gdb, I have been able to understand a silly bug that was affecting WaffleGrid with sysbench but, weird enough, not with dbt2. Everything is in the way connections are established. I will blog more about that soon.

Regarding the new features, it is now possible to choose which tables you want to push to memcached. For that purpose, two new parameters have been introduce:

innodb_memcached_table_filter_enable = 0 | 1   (default to 0)

to enable the filtering and

innodb_memcached_table_list = db1/table1,db2/table2   

to list the tables. This feature is filtering based on the space id so, innodb_file_per_table has to be set. Right now, the association table space_id is done only at startup so, the table has to exist. Also, since an alter table change the space_id… you need to restart MySQL …

Now that I have your attention, this is actually an update to my last post.  In about four hours I have an interview with Brian Aker for the new podcast I am putting together in conjunction with Open Source Database Magazine.  While I have enough questions for a good interview, I am always looking for more possibilities. Yesterday I said I would randomly choose a name from people who emailed me or commented on the post with a question for Brian about Drizzle and the winner would receive a free copy of MySQL Administrator’s Bible. While I have received some response, it has not been overwhelming. So here is your last chance!! Send me an email (bmurphy AT …

I was yesterday, for the second time, on a call with the US Department Of Justice regarding how the Oracle / Sun deal could affect Open Source software, in particular MySQL and Java.

I told them that I still think that my original scenarios from April are still valid. What has been worrying me lately is that Oracle has been quite vocal regarding their plans for most things related to the deal, like Sun hardware and Java, but has not said anything related to their plans regarding MySQL.

During the MySQL conference and at other conferences afterwards I have been approached by numerous MySQL users that have been very worried about the future of MySQL. From this it's clear that most MySQL users are very interested to know what Oracle is up to, but those that have tried to inquire Oracle about this, myself included, have …