There is a raft of new Tungsten open source builds available for your replication and clustering pleasure. Over the last couple of days we uploaded new binary builds for Tungsten Replicator, Tungsten Connector, Tungsten Monitor, and Tungsten SQL Router. These contain the features described in my previous blog article, including even more bug fixes ( …

This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards‘ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.

Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Giuseppe Maxia explains some details of MySQL’s New Release Model. Andrew Morgan announces a New MySQL Cluster Maintenance Release. Aleksandr Kuzminsky of the MySQL Performance …

Articles on this blog have been pretty scanty of late for a simple reason--we have been 100% heads-down in Tungsten code since the recent MySQL Conference. The result has been a number of excellent improvements that are already in Subversion and will appear as open source builds over the next couple of weeks.

Tungsten has a simple goal: create highly available, performant database clusters using unaltered commodity databases that are simple to manage and look as close to a single database as possible for applications. Over the last two months we completed the integration of individual Tungsten components necessary to make this happen.

Full integration is a big step forward and finally gets us to the ease-of-use we were seeking. Imagine you want to add a slave database to the cluster. …

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.

Personally, I think “tell me about storing images in a database” is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized “what’s right” versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate — if they just say “NEVER do it, it’s as bad as crossing the streams!” then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).

Consider the following cases:

What about storing …

This is the 149th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

MySQL

Let’s begin with the big-picture stuff. Jeremy Zawodny laid out his view of the state of MySQL in Linux Magazine’s blog, noting the rough transition between versions 5.0 and 5.1, the status of storage engines, and outside contributions.

Like Baron Schwartz’s Maatkit, for example. Baron announced this week that he is writing a book about Maatkit, and also …

Ever since Sun Microsystems agreed to acquire MySQL back in 2008, there has been a fair bit of uncertainty and chaos surrounding the world’s most popular Open Source database. With many big names in the MySQL community pulling in different directions and the recent Oracle / Sun acquisition, the choice of which Open Source database to use is now easier than ever – PostgreSQL. …

Cloudera lands funding. SourceForge acquires Ohloh. Novell reports Linux growth. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory

Cloudera shows signs of progress
GigaOM reported that Cloudera raised $6m Series B funding from Accel and Greylock and is now looking beyond web applications to wider enterprise adoption of Hadoop. Cloudera also announced its first certification program for Hadoop.

Open source goes mainstream in the UK
There have been signs of change recently with regards to open source adoption in the UK, which has traditionally lagged behind the rest of Europe and the US. CBR Magazine provided an analysis of …

This is the 148th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Welcome.

PostgreSQL

Since PGCon ‘09 has concluded not long ago (and not far away), let’s start with Postgres stuff, much of which has to do with the convention.

Here are Robert Treat’s reflections on PGCon 2009, on his zillablog: “ . . . PGCon always presents the strongest line up of Postgres information available, and this year was certainly no exception.”

Josh Berkus was there, of course, and he sends two detailed reports: …

During my PGCon 2009 presentation there was a question on the saw tooth nature of the workload results on the high end side of benchmark runs. To which Matthew Wilcox (from Intel) commented it could be scheduler related. I did not give it much thought at that time till today when I was trying to do some iGen runs for the JDBC Binary Transfer patch (more on that in another blog post) and also Simon's read only scalability runs . Then I realized that I was not following one of my one tuning advice for running Postgres on OpenSolaris. The advice is to  use FX Class of scheduler instead of the default TS Class on OpenSolaris . More details on various scheduler classes can be found on docs.sun.com.

Now how many times I have forgotten to do that …

During my PGCon 2009 presentation there was a question on the saw tooth nature of the workload results on the high end side of benchmark runs. To which Matthew Wilcox (from Intel) commented it could be scheduler related. I did not give it much thought at that time till today when I was trying to do some iGen runs for the JDBC Binary Transfer patch (more on that in another blog post) and also Simon's read only scalability runs . Then I realized that I was not following one of my one tuning advice for running Postgres on OpenSolaris. The advice is to  use FX Class of scheduler instead of the default TS Class on OpenSolaris . More details on various scheduler classes can be found on docs.sun.com.

Now how many times I have forgotten to do …