Open source database adoption for BI and data warehousing appears to lag the open source BI and ETL tools. There are lots of reasons for this documented elsewhere, but one reason becoming less valid is performance.

An IDC survey of data warehouse size reported that ~60% of data warehouses are less than a terabyte in size. Several other surveys over the past few years reported similar findings. This tells us that the industry focus on scale-out options is overkill for the majority of people deploying data warehouses. What's needed is cost-effective performance at a scale of less than a terabyte. There are interesting vendors of both close and open source databases and appliances that work well in this size range.

Gartner recently gave some recommendations on open source databases and data warehousing that I think are inappropriate. They suggest MySQL as the only viable option. Part of their rationale is sound: commercial support …

Peter Gulutzan and Mark Leith have both written about the new PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in MySQL. I’ve read through the worklog, or most of it — there were some spots where Firefox seemed to start overlaying parts with other parts, quite weird. But anyway I’ve read as much as I can.

Obviously many people have been [...]

The slides for my Monitoring MySQL talk , which I gave earlier today in an overcrowded MySQl Developersroom at Fosdem are now online, both at my site and at Slideshare

As of now I actually expect people to use those slides for schoolwork or next year in a main Fosdem track :)
As afterall that is the goal of Open Source and spreading the word ..

MySQL Monitoring Shoot Out View more presentations from Kris Buytaert. (tags: mysql …

Today I gave an introduction talk of MySQL Cluster at FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. The room was full and I didn't see anyone dozing!
A good feedback later on was to show more usecases. This a good point and I think on working on a talk showing less how it works, but how it can be used. Doing both technical details and use-cases is hard to do in 50 mintes.
I feedback is appriciated!

BTW, slide will eventually come online somewhere..

Here’s  my sort of transcript of the most important things that were said during the Q&A with Kaj Arno at FOSDEM09. If you have any questions (or corrections if you were there and think i misinterpreted) please use the comments. It is virtually unedited, so it’s rough but I don’t have the time right now to [...]

The MySQL Developers Room at FOSDEM was a success. There was a full room (about 80 seats, and many sitting on the floor) throughout the day. We started at 9am with a talk on PBXT, and ended at 17:00. My talk had a large audience and was very well received.

The enthusiasm was quite high also because of a stunt I did during the presentation. It was a creative way of explaining the difference between physical and logical partitioning. I will repeat this stunt at the MySQL Users Conference, during my Tutorial on Partitioning.
Those who were attending today know about it. For the attendees at the …

The MySQL Developers Room at FOSDEM was a success. There was a full room (about 80 seats, and many sitting on the floor) throughout the day. We started at 9am with a talk on PBXT, and ended at 17:00. My talk had a large audience and was very well received.

The enthusiasm was quite high also because of a stunt I did during the presentation. It was a creative way of explaining the difference between physical and logical partitioning. I will repeat this stunt at the MySQL Users Conference, during my Tutorial on Partitioning.
Those who were attending today know about it. For the attendees at the …

I am now at FOSDEM, volunteering at the MySQL project stand and attending sessions in between. Today is the most important day for MySQL. At 13:15 CET there will be a talk by Kaj Arno covering recent events at Sun/MySQL. I am here with Santo Leto from HoneySoftware at the moment and he is going to attempt [...]

Here is nice gotcha which I've seen many times and which can cause just a minefield for many reasons.
Lets say you had a system storing articles and you use article_id as unsigned int. As the time goes and you see you may get over 4 billions of articles you change the type for article_id to bigint unsigned but forget linked tables.

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. mysql> CREATE TABLE article_comment(article_id int UNSIGNED NOT NULL, comment_id int UNSIGNED NOT NULL, KEY(article_id));
2. Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.11 sec)
3.  
4. mysql> INSERT INTO article_comment VALUES(4300000000,1);
5. Query OK, 1 row affected, 1 warning (0.00 sec)
6.  
7. mysql> INSERT INTO article_comment VALUES(4300000001,1); …

Peter Gulutzan and Mark Leith have both written about the new PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA in MySQL. I’ve read through the worklog, or most of it – there were some spots where Firefox seemed to start overlaying parts with other parts, quite weird. But anyway I’ve read as much as I can. Obviously many people have been putting a ton of thought into this for years, and I can’t pretend to judge their work in a single sitting.