Thanks to everyone who came out for the Gearman and libdrizzle talks at the MySQL Confrence & Expo and the Percona Performance Conference! Links to the slides are provided below:

• The Return of Gearman (Percona)
• libdrizzle: A New Client Library for Drizzle and MySQL (MySQL)
• Map/Reduce and Queues for MySQL Using Gearman (MySQL)

If you want to learn more about Gearman, be sure to check out gearman.org or the upcoming 3-hour tutorial or …

OK, so those who know me well can attest to the fact that I can sometimes be a little quick to speak my mind. Sometimes I say snarky things without thinking much. Last week, I blogged a short, snide blog post that Drizzle was not the MySQL Drizzle project and that it was not "shepparded by MySQL" (and, yes, I spelled shepherded incorrectly. Thanks, PeterG).

The blog post referred to Karen Padir's keynote on Tuesday morning, but I misquoted her. Karen said "shepherded by Sun Microsystems", not "shepherded by MySQL". I was actually quoting a blog post from the same day which had misquoted Karen as saying "shepherded by Sun/MySQL".

Karen, I'm sorry I misquoted you. I let my emotions dictate my words, and I should have …

As promised, here are more results running memcached on Sun's X2270 (Nehalem-based server). In my previous post, I mentioned that we got 350K ops/sec running a single instance of memcached at which point the throughput was hampered by the scalability issues of memcached. So we ran two instances of memcached on the same server, each using 15GB of memory and tested both 1.2.5 and 1.3.2 versions. Here are the results :

The maximum throughput was 470K ops/sec using 4 threads in memcached 1.3.2. Performance of 1.2.5 was just very slightly lower. At this throughput, the network capacity of the single 10gbe card was reached as the benchmark does a lot of small packet transfers. See my earlier post for a description of the server configuration and the benchmark. At the maximum …

CFO research published a white paper last month about the high cost of ERP, and the results were pretty astounding: ERP software is even more expensive than most people thought!  In their survey, over 80% of the companies had customized their ERP systems, and the annual cost of making those customizations can be nearly twice the amount of annual maintenance and support fees.  This is because most commercial ERP systems are very difficult to change.  Even minor modifications took on average 7 person-days to make.
As a result of this high cost of customizing ERP software, many CFO's are giving up completely on customizations and instead, as one finance director said, "... will modify the business process if necessary or create an offline procedure" instead of making customizations.  In other words, either they will run their …

After a turbulent week, where a few of our team were presenting workbench at this years MySQL Users Conference, we have finally uploaded the next beta packages for you to try. We’ve further improved the handling of the application. The problem with the missing table editor in the mac package is fixed in this release as well.

Please grab the package of your choice at our download page and give it a try.

Oracle didn't buy an open-source hippie commune in MySQL, but rather a tough-minded money machine.

Somewhat overshadowed in last week's headlines was news about the forthcoming MySQL 5.4 release, internally known as "Summit." While MySQL Engineering team was somewhat heads-down last year finalizing MySQL 5.1, this new version demonstrates a dramatically shorter release cycle by focusing on just two key issues: performance and scale.

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One of the common needs for a content management system (hey, that's what we make!) is some form of page ordering. Clients need to be able to manually order pages to suit their fancy, rather than relying on something arbitrary like update time or alphabetical order. For this we use a simple numeric field. On any given given page in the admin center, the user can shuffle around all that page's siblings, which are then posted and have their ordernum fields reset. Typically this is done with a query apiece, as one would expect when trying to update multiple rows with multiple different values on multiple keys. Wouldn't it be nice, though, if there were an easy way to perform this same entire action with a single query? ...

To me this is quite boring news. I already felt more distant to MySQL when it got scooped up by Sun and this sense of distance is the same now. Note this distance is still quite "travel-able" .. it just feels a bit like flying to another continent. Also I have essentially zero worries that Oracle will (try) to kill off MySQL or cripple it. MySQL is complementary to their current offerings. One thing I could see however is Oracle pushing for killing off some of the past cruft (and in the process beefing up Oracle compatibility). This last aspect brings me to something I consider much more interesting news.

EnterpriseDB (one of the companies that are active in the PostgreSQL eco-system) have teamed up with IBM to make DB2 more Oracle compatible. Given that IBM is an R&D heavy weight with plenty of developers on hand its quite impressive …

I decided to give a try to slideshare. So I uploaded the slides from my most recent talks, and will eventually catch up with the old ones. My slides repository is http://www.slideshare.net/datacharmer.

If you are looking for the slides from MySQL Conference 2009, here are the shortcuts:

• MySQL 5.1 Partitions tutorial
• MySQL 5.1 event scheduler
• Boost performance with MySQL 5.1 partitions
• …