In past few quarters Zmanda has been growing at a break-neck pace. This has transformed us in many different ways. In the past 12 months, we have almost quadrupled our customer base (which is now in 40 countries!), introduced our third product line (Zmanda Internet Backup) and built new relationships with some of the leading IT infrastructure providers in the world.

These changes merit a fresh introduction. Some of you have openly wondered about who we are. Well, here is your chance to hear directly from us. Join us for a webinar on December 17th at 10AM (Pacific Time), titled: …

Rick Deckard is an Engineering Manager at MySQL. Rick is one of the most senior engineers in the company, he led the team during the long delivery of the newest GA version of the server, 5.1.

Soon after the release of 5.1, the Internet Village experienced shocking hours. A wind of disappointment spread all over the Net, blown by news of serious issues that affected 5.1. Many users were concerned, they feared for their mission critical applications based on 5.1, although they had already been in production for months without a glitch.

With great disappointment, the Net pointed the finger at Rick, asking for a clarification on these serious issues. "Is that so?" was all he would say.

After a few days, some wise users spent time reviewing the issues that affected 5.1. They discovered that some issues were not different by the ones that were affecting 5.0, and that version was currently in production. The …

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

As usual, a very interesting blog from the CTO of GigaSpaces.With the graph above we see that the IMDG [In-Memory Data Grid, which runs on top of MySQL] scales very close theoretical linear scalability. The above results were achieved with an IMDG running on 2 partitions. Better scalability can be achieved by increasing the number of partitions.

Read more about how to scale-out the data-tier in Scaling-out MySQL.

To enable this level of on-demand scalability we used our new Cloud Framework, which combines the GigaSpaces SLA-driven container as the application deployment virtualization layer, Amazon EC2 as the machine level virtualization layer, and the GigaSpaces application server as the middleware virtualization layer. This way we can provision new machines as soon as the SLA on the web-tier is breached (measuring latency, in …

As discussed previously in Options using MySQL pairs I have started evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of various open source options. This is an evaluation of Flipper, a product from Proven Scaling a MySQL consulting organization.

Overall

• Pros When correctly configured and with a working installation it just works, simple and functional, which is good design.
• Cons The functionality is incomplete especially when it comes to edge cases, additional manual scripting especially for MySQL specifics is necessary and could have be easily added.

The …

My presentation from the 2008 MySQL Conference on Top 20 Design Tips for Data Architects has been receiving a lot of traffic lately.

Most recently this presentation was featured on the front page of Slideshare, as well as last month I made the top 10 of Hacker News.

FYI, we've now added an Italian section on Planet MySQL: http://it.planetmysql.org

If you are a MySQL enthusiast from Italy and would like to start blogging about it in your native language, please consider submitting your feed for inclusion!

Giuseppe just recently started blogging in Italian as well and has already added his feed there.

In high school, I had a great programmable calculator. I’d program it to solve complicated math and science problems “automatically” for me. Most of my teachers got upset if they found out, but I’ll always remember one especially enlightened teacher who didn’t. He said something to the effect of “Hey, if you managed to write software to solve the equation, you must thoroughly understand the problem. Way to go!”.

George Reese wrote up a blog post over at O’Reilly the other day called On Why I Don’t Like Auto-Scaling in the Cloud. His main argument seems to be that auto-scaling is bad and reflects poor capacity planning. In the comments, he specifically calls SmugMug out, saying we’re “using auto-scaling as a crutch for poor or non-existent capacity planning”.

George is like one of those math teachers who …

Many users use MySQL Cluster for session management. In MySQL Cluster tables are checkpointed and redo logged to disk.

But for session data, do we really care?
If the Cluster is history then the sessions are most likely to be obsolete when the cluster recovers.

And do we want to use disk space and disk band width for the session data?

If you answer "no" on the questions above, then you can create a table that is not checkpointed nor redo logged, by setting the session variable ndb_table_no_logging:


mysql> use test;
Database changed

#enable no logging
mysql> set ndb_table_no_logging=1;
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.02 sec)

#a grossly simplified structure:
# this table will not be checkpointed or redo logged, because of set ndb_table_no_logging=1;
…

One of the many tasks ahead of me is to help improve the many sites that the Community Team manages for the MySQL Community web presence. I won't get into too much here, but we're looking at a whole host of different things to help make our MySQL community more functional, more interactive and more relevant to all users.

Now this may not seem like much but we've added a "MySQL Buzz" page to PlanetMySQL. It's a small little experiment, bringing some data that we currently don't have anywhere together onto one page. It features some data from our Forums, an addition of Google's Search tool with quick links to certain terms across Google's Blogs, News, Video and Web searches and some fun word frequency analysis.

This is by no means an end, just a quick little experiment, your thoughts are welcome and appreciated.

Hope you enjoy the little …