Tomorrow (Saturday, September 20 2008) is Software Freedom Day, and we’re taking Latvia by storm! We’re hosting it at the University of Latvia, and we have an awesome schedule.

Why awesome? Because we have exciting speakers like you wouldn’t believe.

• Mårten Mickos, former CEO MySQL AB, current SVP Database Group, Sun Microsystems
• Kaj Arno, VP Community, Database Group, Sun Microsystems
• Mark Callaghan, Google Inc - he’ll be talking about running a database when your business depends on it - very cool stuff
• Domas Mituzas, Wikimedia Foundation and …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxdrCDRCKuM is a case study of MySQL made available by Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

The comments that I posted there did not appear for some reason. So here are a couple of comments:

1. The one stop resource for MySQL would be http://www.mysql.com and *not* http://www.mysql.org
2. A useful reference for Storage Engines would be http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/storage-engines.html

The video lecture is a somewhat 'okayish' type introduction to MySQL.

I am going to deliver a lecture on MySQL with a …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxdrCDRCKuM is a case study of MySQL made available by Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.

The comments that I posted there did not appear for some reason. So here are a couple of comments:

1. The one stop resource for MySQL would be http://www.mysql.com and \*not\* http://www.mysql.org
2. A useful reference for Storage Engines would be http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/storage-engines.html

The video lecture is a somewhat 'okayish' type introduction to MySQL.

I am going to deliver a lecture on MySQL with a …

BIT and CPU squeezing with Facebook, Tuenti and Andrey - for the die hard experts… The MySQL Client Server Protocol supports two flavours of sending database results to the client send as text and as binary. Unlike the text protocol, the binary protocol avoids converting data into strings whenever possible. For example, the binary protocol send a TINYINT column value as one byte and not as a length coded string of a length of one to four bytes. This saves CPU cycles on the server by avoiding a cast operation and it saves at least one byte of network traffic - sometimes. Furthermore, ext/mysqli will use an (PHP) integer variable instead of a string to hold the column value. This saves memory when caching database results in …

BIT and CPU squeezing with Facebook, Tuenti and Andrey - for the die hard experts… The MySQL Client Server Protocol supports two flavours of sending database results to the client send as text and as binary. Unlike the text protocol, the binary protocol avoids converting data into strings whenever possible. For example, the binary protocol send a TINYINT column value as one byte and not as a length coded string of a length of one to four bytes. This saves CPU cycles on the server by avoiding a cast operation and it saves at least one byte of network traffic - sometimes. Furthermore, ext/mysqli will use an (PHP) integer variable instead of a string to hold the column value. This saves memory when caching database results in …

screenshot ’cause typing is for wusses

UPDATE: not actually VS bug. Nasty macro defining strtok_r to strtok on Win32. ouch.

BIT and CPU squeezing with Facebook, Tuenti and Andrey - for the die hard experts… The MySQL Client Server Protocol supports two flavours of sending database results to the client send as text and as binary. Unlike the text protocol, the binary protocol avoids converting data into strings whenever possible. For example, the binary protocol send a TINYINT column value as one byte and not as a length coded string of a length of one to four bytes. This saves CPU cycles on the server by avoiding a cast operation and it saves at least one byte of network traffic - sometimes. Furthermore, ext/mysqli will use an (PHP) integer variable instead of a string to hold the column value. This saves memory when caching database results in …

In my last article I found, and others confirmed (thanks), that timestamps were much slower than datetimes. I next wondered if datetimes were slower than storing dates as ints in the UNIX timestamp format (seconds since January 1, 1970). The conclusion is that ints are a bit faster than datetimes, but not enough for me to give up all the functionality that datetimes provide.

I ran this sql 100 times against tables of about 20 gig, with the innodb_buffer_pool_size=2G and innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT, to get physical io and make the tests reasonably realistic.

Running this datetime sql 100 times took 21.2 minutes.  The month randomly varied for each of the 100 executions to avoid caching issues. 

select sum(unit) from Sale where purchaseDate >= '2001-02-01' and purchaseDate < '2001-03-01'

Running the equavlent int sql 100 times took 20.7 minutes, a difference of about 2.4%.

select sum(unit) …

There’s a new release with a lot of goodies – speed, efficiency, user-friendliness, and new features. In particular some of Percona’s clients have sponsored features for things they need such as the ability to more frequently verify that replicas are in sync with their masters. If you need features, please ask Percona about it.

Daniel Nichter has written most of the code for this release. Having a dedicated developer is really moving the project forward. Thanks Daniel!

If you check the issues list on the project’s website you’ll see we have some ambitious plans for the project, mostly driven by real-world needs from Percona’s clients, many of whom run very large data centers and such. It makes me really happy that Maatkit is solving serious problems for which no other solution exists.

Here’s the changelog: …

The Green Party of Canada has included Open Source Software in its election platform. How long until a major North American party follows suit? READ MORE