Open source the way it ought to be. Today, Percona announced a replacement for InnoDB that improves performance and fixes bugs. The new engine is called XtraDB.

According to Vadim at Percona:

It's 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in high performance environments.

The release is pure GPL (v2) and commercial support is available from Percona. If percona keeps this up, they just might become the new MySQL.

The source is available from Launchpad and from …

In a way, it's embarassing we didn't always do this, but now you can see all the schemas in your database from your connection. Your default schema is in bold. Available in the nightly builds.

This isn't quite working yet for MySQL, but should be fixed in the next few days... We'll also be fixing the dialog for creating a new connection so you don't have to specify the schema any more, we'll just use the default given by the database. If you want to switch your default, just right-click on a schema and say "Set As Default" That'll be nice...

The Perfect Server - OpenSUSE 11.1

This is a detailed description about how to set up an OpenSUSE 11.1 server that offers all services needed by ISPs and hosters: Apache web server (SSL-capable), Postfix mail server with SMTP-AUTH and TLS, BIND DNS server, Proftpd FTP server, MySQL server, Dovecot POP3/IMAP, Quota, Firewall, etc. This tutorial is written for the 32-bit version of OpenSUSE 11.1, but should apply to the 64-bit version with very little modifications as well.

Vadim announced Percona's XtraDB a couple of days ago, and then followed up with some really fun benchmarks. Of course, the first thought I had was "I need another cup of coffee," which was shortly followed by "I should merge that in to Drizzle!"

First step was merging it in to a branch of the innodb-plugin-upstream branch, making an

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb-upstream

Merged it up to drizzle trunk, and now we have:

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb

But what I really want is for our changes to InnoDB/XtraDB to get merged in. So I also make a branch of XtraDB and applied our stuff to it:

lp:~mordred/percona-xtradb/drizzle

My goal …

The MySQL 5.1 DBA exam is in alpha-test right now and some of the reviewers have had questions about upgrade exams. The new exams are no longer multiple choice. They are based on a candidates performance with a real database on a virtual server.
In the past I have stated that there was not going to be an upgrade exam. This was due to the change in exam format and the history of previous upgrades not being popular. Less than forty folks took the Core to Dev upgrade exam (about 5% with that certification) and the numbers are worse for the Pro to DBA upgrade. Why spend time on something that is not going to be cost justifiable?

But my reviewers are trying to convince me to have an upgrade. It would not be that much more work to offer a hands that could be taken over the Internet. You …

Vadim announced Percona's XtraDB a couple of days ago, and then followed up with some really fun benchmarks. Of course, the first thought I had was "I need another cup of coffee," which was shortly followed by "I should merge that in to Drizzle!"

First step was merging it in to a branch of the innodb-plugin-upstream branch, making an

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb-upstream

Merged it up to drizzle trunk, and now we have:

lp:~mordred/drizzle/xtradb

But what I really want is for our changes to InnoDB/XtraDB to get merged in. So I also make a branch of XtraDB and applied our stuff to it:

lp:~mordred/percona-xtradb/drizzle

My goal …

A number of commenters on my previous entry thought I was basically saying "Screw Windows". Lukas Smith and Bill Karwin, both of whom I respect enormously, noted that Windows is a dominant development platform for MySQL users, and that one of the reasons for MySQL's popularity was that it runs smoothly (for a while now) on Windows.

Bill and Lukas: You are 100% correct.

That said, what I wrote was this:

Forget Windows for now: Use open source, community-maintained, and standardized libraries within the kernel. Don't rewrite libc and various other quality open source libraries because of Not Invented Here syndrome or because Windows lacks these things. Focus on the standards and don't bother with platforms that don't conform to POSIX. If Microsoft wants future MySQL versions to run on its platforms, partner with Microsoft …

Cloud computing has been getting lots of buzz over the last few years, and it only seems fair that we talk a little bit about where a Waffle Grid can fit in the cloud. One of our key visions for Waffle Grid is to enable people to add capacity & resources on demand ( as needed ) as load and demand increases without rearchitecting the environment or the application. As I showed previously given the right setup ( disk bound workload, fast interconnect ) Waffle Grid can yield substantial performance benefits. This offers a compelling offering for cloud computing environments.Let’s use a simple example for those that may not fully understand the benefits of cloud computing. Being Christmas time, if you run a ecommerce site that is blessed with increased sales this time of year you probably know that your web infrastructure can sometimes become strained during this time of year. In the past many companies have built their infrastructure to handle this …

I was surprised by even the gap I saw on Vadim's post on the improvements of using the Noop IO scheduler. I've been changing my thoughts on what to set the scheduler to lately, and it's all leaning to Noop as the default.

An explanation first:
IO Schedulers (aka elevators) are a method of trying to get the best possible performance out of your disk subsystem as possible. Since your disk is essentially a mechanical device - it has a difference in performance between whether or not you are performing actions sequentially - or when you are performing actions randomly. And this difference can be huge! Last time I tested, a typical 7200RPM consumer hard drive could write 60MB/s sequentially, but performance dropped to only a few MB/s when I started trying to write small pieces of random data.

So how do …

I was surprised by even the gap I saw on Vadim's post on the improvements of using the Noop IO scheduler. I've been changing my thoughts on what to set the scheduler to lately, and it's all leaning to Noop as the default.

An explanation first:
IO Schedulers (aka elevators) are a method of trying to get the best possible performance out of your disk subsystem as possible. Since your disk is essentially a mechanical device - it has a difference in performance between whether or not you are performing actions sequentially - or when you are performing actions randomly. And this difference can be huge! Last time I tested, a typical 7200RPM consumer hard drive could write 60MB/s sequentially, but performance dropped to only a few MB/s when I started trying to write small pieces of random data.

So how do …