ColdStore was produced to solve a particular problem - a performance problem for a particular application. The purpose of making the information available about ColdStore is to find out if there is any interest in any broader use for the solution. If there is interest, we will make it available in an appropriate form.

If you think ColdStore might be of use to you, feel free to contact us. Compare your application requirements with this. Let us know something about what you want to d with it and let's figure out how to go forward.

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

Although rails is a great development environment for web applications, for a newbie the deployment of a rails application can be challenging due to the myriad dependencies on various gems, native libraries etc.

image_science is one such ruby library that provides an easy way to generate thumbnails. It is therefore quite popular in web2.0 type applications (there isn't a site today that doesn't let you upload photographs of yourself, your pets, gadgets, whatever).  It is a very simple implementation and available as a ruby gem and so easy to install. However, the real work is done by a native library called FreeImage and installing this on OpenSolaris is a little bit of work. Although, I use OpenSolaris here, the instructions apply to Solaris 10 as well if you are using ruby from Web …

IBM to acquire Sun? TomTom countersues Microsoft. Sun unveils Open Cloud Platform. Oracle’s contributions to the Linux kernel. SpringSource updates Tool Suite. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

IBM to acquire Sun?
No prizes for guessing the big story this week as the Wall Street Journal reported that IBM was in talks to buy Sun for $6.5bn, according to “people familiar with the matter”. Raising the game, the New York Times reported that the purchase price was nearer $7bn citing “a person with knowledge of the negotiations”.

The media exploded with …

I'm doing a research survey on open source data warehouse and BI adoption that takes about 5 minutes to fill out.There's an almost complete lack of data specific to the business intelligence and data warehouse market - all the open source studies I read are generic and at best they extrapolate what's happening based on the general IT market. I want to change that.

If you have evaluated open source tools in any area of the business intelligence stack - databases, ETL tools, reporting, visualization - please consider filling out the survey whether it passed your evaluation or not, so we can begin to understand where and how people are using open source. It's as important to understand what's wrong with open source tools as what's …

This is the 140th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

Let us begin with Oracle this week. Dan Norris illustrates how to start database services automatically after instance startup. He says, “Services are an essential component for managing workload in a RAC environment. If you’re not defining any non-default services in your RAC database, you’re making a mistake.”

Vivek Sharma published his tale of, Latch: Row Cache Objects causing huge performance issue. Clever detective …

Ooops! Mark Callaghan of Google is one of world’s experts in InnoDB, and a frequent blogger on its performance characteristics. The InnoDB Plugin 1.0.3 is much more scalable on multi-core systems because of the contributions he has made (along with Ben Handy).

Mark will deliver a keynote the on Google’s use of MySQL and InnoDB on Tuesday morning at the MySQL Conference, and another talk on Wednesday. As Mark says, “Although Innodb is not in the title, it is prominent in both of the talks I will do”:

• This is not a web app – the evolution of a MySQL deployment at Google Tues, 9am
• …

We are continually measuring and tuning the performance of ColdStore. The latest results show a 1100 times improvement over the straightforward use of MyISAM and about 27 times faster than optimized MyISAM.

This is for the select

SELECT date,sum(sales) FROM  product_list JOIN bigtable USING(product) GROUP BY date

That is to say: determine the sales over time for a selection of products. The time series was two thousand dates, and the product list was one thousand items. Using ColdStore for 'bigtable' MySQL inspected
486,898 rows per second. Simple MyISAM inspected 424 rows per second. Optimized MyISAM 15,591.

We are continually measuring and tuning the performance of ColdStore. The latest results show a 1100 times improvement over the straightforward use of MyISAM and about 27 times faster than optimized MyISAM.

This is for the select

SELECT date,sum(sales) FROM  product_list JOIN bigtable USING(product) GROUP BY date

That is to say: determine the sales over time for a selection of products. The time series was two thousand dates, and the product list was one thousand items. Using ColdStore for 'bigtable' MySQL inspected
486,898 rows per second. Simple MyISAM inspected 424 rows per second. Optimized MyISAM 15,591.

We have just released the first binary version of Apache Olio for both the PHP and Rails implementation. Both implementations have been tested quite thoroughly now and we think they are robust enough for serious use - especially for performance testing the workloads.

I introduced Olio in a previous post. It is a toolkit that includes a sample web2.0 application implemented in both PHP and Rails that includes a load generator to drive load against the application.

Please visit the Olio site and download the kits. If you find it interesting, I invite you to come join the project.