ScaleArc recently hired Percona to perform various tests on its database traffic management product. This post is the outcome of the benchmarks carried out by me and ScaleArc co-founder and chief architect, Uday Sawant.

The goal of this benchmark was to identify ScaleArc’s overhead using a real-world application – the world’s most popular (according to wikipedia) content management system and blog engine: WordPress.

The tests also sought to identify the benefit of caching for this type of workload. The caching parameters represent more real-life circumstances than we applied in the sysbench performance tests – the goal here was not just to saturate the cache. For this reason, we created an artificial WordPress blog with generated data. …

Update: WordPress 4.2 has full UTF-8 support! There’s no need to upgrade manually any more. ?

For many years, MySQL had only supported a small part of UTF-8, a section commonly referred to as plane 0, the “Basic Multilingual Plane”, or the BMP. The UTF-8 spec is divided into “planes“, and plane 0 contains the most commonly used characters. For a long time, this was reasonably sufficient for MySQL’s purposes, and WordPress made do with this limitation.

It has always been possible to store all UTF-8 characters in the latin1 character set, though latin1 has shortcomings. While it recognises the connection between upper and lower case characters in Latin alphabets (such as English, French and German), it doesn’t recognise the same connection for other alphabets. For example, it doesn’t know …

Over the last few days different people asked me for comments about PHP dropping MySQL support. These questions confused me, but meanwhile I figured out where these rumors come from and what they mean.

The simple facts are: No, PHP is not dropping MySQL support and we, Oracle's MySQL team, continue working with the PHP community.

For the long story we first have to remember what "PHP's MySQL support" includes. There key part are four extensions which are part of the main PHP tree:

• ext/mysql
• ext/mysqli
• ext/pdo_mysql
• ext/mysqlnd

The first one, ext/mysql provides the mysql_* functions. This is the classic interface taught in many (old) books and used by lots of (old) software. mysqli is "mysql improved", this is a younger extension providing access to all MySQL features. pdo_mysql contains the driver …

ClouSE 1.0b.1.8 is released

OblakSoft is pleased to announce the release of ClouSE Beta version 1.0b.1.8.  This is a minor maintenance release that addresses a couple pain points, while we’re working on a release candidate that will bring the built-in point-in-time recovery and other major features.

Here is the summary of changes:

• Improved caching for Weblobs

Now ClouSE sets the cache control headers for Weblobs.  The cache control headers specify the max-age directive that allows caching content for one year.  This makes proxies and content delivery networks (CDN) more efficient.  The change resolves this support issue.

• Improved error handling on startup

Now database requests fail if …

Updating ClouSE can now be done with one command

With more than a thousand registered users worldwide, guiding customers through the upgrade process is getting hard, so we decided to automate the servicing steps.  Now the update-clouse script can be used to update ClouSE binaries to the current version.  This script ships with the ClouSE binary distribution.

Here is an example of updating ClouSE using the Webmin console.

First, download ClouSE 64-bit binaries from http://www.oblaksoft.com/downloads/.  Then upload and extract the binaries to the /home/ec2-user directory. In Webmin, navigate to Others, then to Upload and Download, then …

Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE) installation and configuration is now fully automated. Try new ClouSE installer and you’ll have cloud storage access configured in no time.

OblakSoft is pleased to announce the release of Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE) installer that can be used to deploy and configure ClouSE with your MySQL server. Now ClouSE can be deployed with just one command. The installer will guide the user through the configuration process, prompt for Cloud Storage connection parameters, and install ClouSE into MySQL.

Presented is a step-by-step guide for ClouSE installation and configuration, from downloading the binaries to running the installer. The guide was designed by request of WordPress-to-Cloud users, however it is fully applicable to any generic ClouSE installation.

The slides have notes, they are a little hard to discover with the SlideShare interface, look for a tab below the slide that looks …

ClouSE 1.0b.1.7 is released

OblakSoft is pleased to announce the release of Cloud Storage Engine (ClouSE) for MySQL Beta version 1.0b.1.7.  In this release we added support for a variety of environments to address the platform diversity of our growing customer base.

Here is the summary of changes that are included into 1.0b.1.7:

• Support for ClouSE on Microsoft Windows (limited preview)

Now ClouSE builds are available both for Linux and Microsoft Windows.  The cloud data format is the same across all platforms: Linux and Windows, 32-bit and 64-bit.  This allows for seamless transitions between machines, platforms and clouds.  ClouSE for Windows is currently available to a group of limited preview customers.  If you would like to sign up for the limited preview program please …

WordPress-on-S3 makes professional website administration as easy as pie.

OblakSoft is pleased to announce availability of the ready-to-run WordPress-on-S3 / Yapixx AMI with enhanced configuration, performance, and website administration features.  Now website owners can use Webmin and phpMyAdmin for secure website administration over the Internet, and pre-configure Cloud Storage Connection for the instance.

• System administration
• Database administration
• …

ClouSE version 1.0b.1.6 is released

OblakSoft is pleased to announce the release of ClouSE version 1.0b.1.6.  In this release we fixed some of the known ClouSE Beta limitations as well as performance and functional bugs reported by our users.

Here is the summary of changes that are included into 1.0b.1.6:

• Support for latest MySQL 5.5

Now ClouSE supports MySQL thru 5.5.29.  To keep the distribution small, we don’t build binaries for MySQL prior to 5.5.19 anymore.  If you need one, please contact us.

• DECIMAL keys support

Now ClouSE supports using DECIMAL fields in keys.  Previously neither the primary key nor indices could include DECIMAL fields.  This fixes the following Beta limitation: DECIMAL fields cannot …

Just a quick note to say that the site has been updated to a new theme which is based on the super awesome Twitter Bootstrap UI framework. To make life easier, since this site is also using WordPress at the core, I’ve made use of the WordPress Bootstrap plugin which allows for very simple integration. However, that wasn’t enough because the Bootstrap plugin comes with rather basic and boring generic styles; so I added the plugin for Google Font support and then modified the CSS accordingly.

You will also notice that the site is undergoing some reorganization of categories and content tags. This should help clean up search results as well as general information sorting. I’ve removed the sidebar widget for category listings in favor …