I had an interesting conversation yesterday with Juanjo Hierro from the Morfeo Project, a Spanish community of open source communities set up to speed up the development of Service Oriented Architectures-related software standards and create business opportunities for local suppliers.

Hierro explained that the Morfeo Project is based on “The Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits”, articulated by Clayton Christensen in his book The Innovator’s Solution:

“When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value chain because a product becomes modular and commoditized, the opportunity to earn attractive profits with proprietary products will usually emerge at an adjacent stage.”

Christensen’s law has also been used by Tim O’Reilly …

Introduction to the Innodb IO subsystem

Basics When a client connects to MySQL, it creates a thread to handle it. This thread executes SQL queries and interacts with the storage engine (for simplicity, lets call them user threads). Innodb uses a four (4) additional threads to implement asynchronous io1. Although Innodb has an option innodb_file_io_threads to control the number of IO handler threads, it has no effect on how many IO handler threads are actually created. These IO handler threads wait and process events in a loop. Each IO handler thread processes different kinds of events. (Insert buffer writes, log writes, datafile writes, and read-ahead or prefetch) Let us now see how different types of IO are handled by Innodb.

Reads Using a simple sysbench read-only test, we notice that all user threads issue reads (pread(2)) to the data files. We can verify …

Jonathan puts it in slighty different words, and doesn’t gaurantee The White House to everybody.

I do wonder when we’ll get a Drizzle or NDB using president though….

...and Senator Barack Obama! May the force be with you!

If you are a MySQL 5.x/6.0 InnoDB replication user, right now you take a significant performance hit on the replication master simply by turning on the binlog. The good news is that we've taken a big step toward eliminating that performance gap. I'll describe the problem, how I was able to track down the root cause, and point to a patch that fixes the problem. Since the changes are in the InnoDB code, right now we're waiting on Oracle/Innobase to review the fix and formally commit it. Once that happens, you should see it show up in binary releases. In the meantime, if you build your own binaries you can test the prototype patch yourself.

One of the things I have been working on quite a bit over the past several months is scalability of the nodes within a MySQL scale-out replication environment.  The reason being that there has been a rapid …

The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it - and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on 500,000 …

On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.

Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.

Today Sun Software and Systems group is announcing the best open Web infrastructure and services for MySQL deployments. Sun is unveiling five new  solutions -- designed for our enterprise customers using MySQL --  that marry the market-leading, easy-to-use, open source MySQL database, with the performance and scalability of Sun servers and open storage. More at http://www.sun.com/systems/solutions/mysql/

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

    * With Sun Systems for MySQL, customers can improve the performance of MySQL in high-volume environments to grow their business with improved Web services.
    * Sun Systems for MySQL help ease MySQL deployments without significant application re-engineering efforts and by avoiding complex trial-and-error deployment testing.
    * Sun Systems for MySQL …

A quick solution to a common problem: your MySQL server has thousands of connections, some or most are not persistent. Unless you say otherwise, MySQL will check connections hostnames against the system DNS server. While this is generally not a problem with low traffic, when you are dealing with many concurrent connections you are not only wasting cycles with DNS name resolve, you may also overwhelm or alert your DNS server/provider. The solution? Set skip-name-resolve in the my.cnf file and MySQL will run the connections off of their IP address instead of the DNS name that it resolves to.  

The soft registration deadline for OpenSQL Camp 2008 has passed now; you can still attend, but you won’t be counted into meals and t-shirts. Meanwhile, we have 90 registered attendees, and a truly impressive set of sessions from heavy hitters in the database world. This conference is turning into the event I always [...]