This morning at OSCON 08, Tim O’Reilly’s opening keynote Open Source on the O’Reilly Radar included a slide on Drizzle, giving this new project maximum exposure to the Open Source community.

Drizzle was only officially announced yesterday in Drizzle, Clouds, “What If?” by primary architect Brian Aker. Things move fast. There has been a number of comments from people yesterday including Mark Attwood, Monty Widenus,Monty Taylor, …

Interested in MySQL? Drizzle? How the Sun acquisition is going for MySQL? Listen to Brian, Monty, and Tim speak about this, at the OSCON panel. Watch the video, its 20+ minutes, it starts off a bit shaky (oops), but I’m mostly happy with the rest. Enjoy.

In this blog I will talk about how we (the Sun/MySQL Performance Team) eliminated the need for a lock to get better scalability with MySQL 5.1.24+.

While comparing sysbench runs using two different versions of MySQL 5.1, I noticed a big difference in the system utilization. One version had much more idle time than the other. This difference was much more apparent with high thread counts on machines with lots of CPU. A look at the system calls showed a large number of lwp_park system calls. That is, threads were being put to sleep.

bash # $ dtrace -qn 'syscall:::entry{@c[probefunc]=count()}' -n tick-5s'{trunc(@c, 10);exit(0)}'

  p_online                                                       1535
  ioctl                                                          2255
  fcntl                                                          6134
  priocntlsys                                                    6462
  write …

In this blog I will talk about how we (the Sun/MySQL Performance Team) eliminated the need for a lock to get better scalability with MySQL 5.1.24+.

While comparing sysbench runs using two different versions of MySQL 5.1, I noticed a big difference in the system utilization. One version had much more idle time than the other. This difference was much more apparent with high thread counts on machines with lots of CPU. A look at the system calls showed a large number of lwp_park system calls. That is, threads were being put to sleep.

bash # $ dtrace -qn 'syscall:::entry{@c[probefunc]=count()}' -n tick-5s'{trunc(@c, 10);exit(0)}'

  p_online                                                       1535
  ioctl                                                          2255
  fcntl                                                          6134
  priocntlsys                                                    6462
  write …

party on, garth! READ MORE

When Sun acquired MySQL and announced that it would invest the resources necessary to position the open source database for mission-critical deployments, I think everyone assumed that the database would eventually become bigger and heavier.

Few would have predicted that we would also see a project that would make the database smaller and lighter, but that is exactly what Drizzle, a new project from Sun’s MySQL director of architecture Brian Aker, is all about.

Drizzle is taking a back-to-the-drawing-board approach to refactoring MySQL by ripping out much of the additional enterprise functionality that has gone into it since version 4.1 and focusing on the demands of a core set of applications.

As Brian …

In most companies, there are prohibitions against creating competitive, derivative works of the company's intellectual property. At MySQL (now Sun), well, things may be a little different.

As announced at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Brian Aker, MySQL's director of architecture, has launched Drizzle, an optimized and trimmed-down version ...

Have you heard of Drizzle? It was announced at OSCON yesterday and is all over the blogosphere. From the Drizzle FAQ:

* So what are the differences between is and MySQL?

No modes, views, triggers, prepared statements, stored procedures, query cache, data conversion inserts, ACL. Fewer data types. Less engines, less code. Assume the primary engine is transactional.

Also from the FAQ is that, right now at least, there is no intention to make this run natively on windows and they make the point:

* "This is not a SQL compliant relational..."

Very true, and we do not aim to be that.

It is a fork of MySQL that takes it backward to pre-5.0 in features but hopefully greatly reduces the bugs and instabilities. I plan to look at it but I don't see …

There are some good high level discussions on the various database architectures for implementing software as a service.  I’m on going to duplicate that.  Instead, this article is going to highlight some of the issues and tradeoffs when multiple tenants (customers of the software service provider) are put into one database.   The core of the problem is having multiple tenants in one set of database tables can make queries that select data for only one customer much slower. 

First, I’m testing on a new system, one with 32 gig of memory.  Currently,  the innodb_buffer_pool_size set to 28 gig.   I’m using the same size tables as previously, both Sale and SaleTenant have 120 million rows and are about 27 and 28 gig respectively.  This means that the tables fit into memory, so the following tests do not have an IO component.  Not perfect, but it shouldn't make a difference in the …

(Credit: O'Reilly Media, Bernard Golden, and Sourceforge.net)

According to new research released today by Bernard Golden (Navica) and O'Reilly Research, there are at least six reasons compelling the rapid rise of open source. Agility and scale, reduced vendor lock-in, quality and security, cost, sovereignty (i.e., Local, not necessarily US-based development), and innovation. No wonder Sourceforge downloads continue to rise.

In one particular area, however, open source shines, in my opinion: The ability to reduce lock-in to a particular vendor. The report suggests:

There is little potential price competition for incumbent vendors: Because locked-in vendors have little fear of being replaced, they are in a position to extract expensive maintenance and upgrade fees, bleeding ever-shrinking IT budgets of precious dollars. For example, …