Looking for a summer of code project for a database?

http://drizzle.org/wiki/Soc

We are looking at projects for the server that we are actively interested in having in Drizzle. Expect that your project, if successful, will be included in the current release of Drizzle.

I don’t know if it is because of my science background, I am a physicist, I do like graphs, especially when I do performance tuning. With UNIX like operating systems, the vmstat command give you an easy way to grab many essential performance counters but, generating graphs from vmstat output with tools like OpenOffice Calc is time consuming and not very efficient. In order to solve this, I wrote a few scripts using gnuplot but they are not very easy to work with. Then, doing some benchmarks with DBT2, I found the vmplot.sh script and… I like that one. I just hacked it little bit to make it keeps the graph on screen, adding the “-persist” parameters to the gnuplot invocations. The script will produce 7 graphs that will be displayed on screen and save in png format in /tmp. The graphs it produces are the following:

• CPU: graphs idle, user, sys and wait time
• …

So we have completed a major new version of libmemcached:

Added new UDP fire-forget mode.

This is in line with the model that Facebook uses. We have added a fire and forget mode for operations which can just be "sent" to the server. Depending on your client application and the size of your data you may be greatly surprised as to how much performance you can get out of this.

Reworked performance for mget() to better make use of async protocol

We have known for a while that our mget() operation while being fast, could be made faster. Instead of now cycling through servers we poll on data coming back from the server. This allows us to skip more "wait" cycles while data is being sent.

Cleaned up execution of fetch (just one set of code now)

This moves us to a cleaner code base. Some of the same thinking we have been doing in Drizzle. Create …

This Thursday (April 2nd, 14:00 UTC), Patrick Crews will give a MySQL University session on How to Create a Test Case. This is an updated session of a talk we had in 2007, but this time it will be recorded (slides and audio). Patrick is a database engineer who works in the server QA department, so test cases are his daily bread.

For MySQL University sessions, point your browser to this page. You need a browser with a working Flash plugin. You may register for a Dimdim account, but you don't have to. (Dimdim is the conferencing system we're using for MySQL University sessions. It provides integrated voice streaming, chat, whiteboard, session recording, and more.) All MySQL …

In December 2007 Werner Vogels posted a blog article entitled Eventual Consistency, since updated with a new article entitled Eventually Consistent - Revisited. In a nutshell it described how to scale databases horizontally across nodes by systematically trading off availability, strict data consistency, and partition resilience as defined by the CAP theorem. According to CAP, you can only have two of three of these properties at any one time. The route to highly available and performant databases, according to Vogels, is eventual consistency in which distributed database contents at some point converge to a single value but at any given time may be …

SQL and Relational Theory

SQL and Relational Theory How to Write Accurate SQL Code by C. J. Date, O’Reilly 2009. Page count: 266 pages of “real” text, plus hefty appendixes. (Here’s a link to the publisher’s site: SQL and Relational Theory How to Write Accurate SQL Code).

This is a very important book for anyone involved with databases. Before I say why, I need to apologize to Mr. Date. I tech-reviewed part of the book and did not care for it. I am afraid I was quite a curmudgeon in my review comments. So, Mr. Date, if you’re reading this — I want to say I …

Well, I'm somewhere between Toronto and Detroit on a VIA train speeding along soggy and grey Ontario which is trying to wake up from the doldrums of winter. It's not a pretty sight.

Friday night I was shocked and amazed to have 20 students show up to the presentation at McMaster, after all, Friday night I thought would have been a death knell for any boring tech talk from yours truly. I suspect that the copious amounts of pizza provided by Sun might have had something to do with it.

Like London, the talk in Hamilton was a success due in no small part to the organizational abilities of the McMaster Sun Campus Ambassador, Bhavin Mehta (who I later discovered was given an award for being outstanding as a Sun CA, and had organized this to be right after his graduation ceremony - now *that* is dedication!).

Topics for the evening, again how MySQL could possibly make money by being open source, the difficulties …