At the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, Britt Crawford and Justin McCarthy, both from Cafepress.com, gave us a very interesting talk on scaling with HiveDB. I took a few notes (pasted below), their slides are online (warning: 6.1MB PDF), and if you’re after their abstract its available as well.

I also took a video of them (refer to Slide 12, for the IRC conversation):

The quick notes:

• OLTP optimised (as it serves cafepress.com)
• Cannot lock tables, or take it offline
• Constant response time is more important than low latency (little slower query is ok, just not exponentially …

Just ran into the weirdest case... a client was outsourcing some of its sysadmin stuff, and in this instance their task was to set up a couple of new servers which were going to run MySQL, hence my involvement. So I was present at a meeting where this company was represented by two very capable people - they were clearly technically very clued in.

All good so far. But the actual work done by the company was... bad. 32-bit OS install on 64-bit hardware, not providing documentation on some specific setup aspects, that kind of "fun". Cause? The people I met were actually sales, and not the same as those involved in the execution of the plans. The result is a rather curious and sad story, where sales is for once more competent than technicals in the same company. Oh dear!

Almost 2 years ago, in How Open Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source? I wrote:

Google and Yahoo! are not rich because they have secrets. They are rich because they started with secrets, but I believe they could safely let their secrets out with very little loss of revenue.

Matt Asay’s recent post Google’s slow transformation into an open, transparent company made me dig up that post, which by many standards is old in terms of time, but it’s only now that some of this change is actually happening.

Matt ponders,

It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of …

Seems to be down, only reports "500 Internal Server Error".
First time I checked it today. Honest, guv!

I've been using MySQL fulltext indexes on a table where I keep a few varchar and one text column that is used for searches. I've had it defined as:

CREATE TABLE `items_text` (
  `item_id` bigint(20) NOT NULL,
  `fts` varchar(4) NOT NULL default 'grzr',
  `author` varchar(80) NOT NULL default '',
  `title` varchar(255) NOT NULL default '',
  `content` text NOT NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`item_id`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `title` (`title`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `author` (`author`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `fts` (`fts`),
  FULLTEXT KEY `content` (`content`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8

One of my colleagues pointed out he was experiencing slow performance with this query:

select count(*) from items_text where (MATCH (title, author, content) AGAINST ('+iron +man' IN BOOLEAN MODE))

I ran EXPLAIN just to make sure that the index was being used:

mysql> explain …

I wrote this a few weeks ago and held it back until now. I decided to publish this somewhat in response to Roberto's post. While Roberto is trying to find a band-aid to the problem, I think we need to rethink the root cause of the problem. I've been blogging about OSS for nearly 2 years now. My in-the-trenches experience with OSS goes back to early 2004. The constant drumbeat of "proprietary software is dead, open source is the only path forward" has been deafening at times. I'll admit that I too used to espouse similar words. But, I am... READ MORE

Hey,

As I had mentioned in my previous blog entry about MySQL Admin and NetBeans. There, I had ended the post, with a note that I have filed an issue related to MySQL Server Node in Database Explorer.

After exchanging several mails and updating the bug report at Issuezilla. I told David, that I would be looking for a workaround, as he had set the TBD to 6.5 release. I can’t wait that long!

So, I had two options, either hack the code and fix it by myself, and use it. Else, I should look for a workaround.

I am glad that I could find a workaround for this issue. What I did, when I …

A couple more articles I saw posted out on the web on Sun’s new SSD offerings.  In the The official press release…  their are very scant details on the sun offerings right now.  But the official release says:

“Sun is already shipping Solaris ZFS software optimized for SSD technologies through the OpenSolaris(TM) community and is the first major systems vendor to add an end-to-end Flash-based disk product line to its portfolio, leapfrogging competitors and giving customers 3x better performance at one-fifth the energy consumption of traditional spinning disk offerings.”

Hopefully I am misreading this… 3X performance seems slower then the other SSD I have looked at.

In …

Former VP and GM of North American sales at Red Hat, Ed Boyajian, has been named CEO of EnterpriseDB. Current CEO, Andy Astor, will be shifting roles to lead EnterpriseDB's business development as EVP. Very interesting that EnterpriseDB was able to attract Ed. I'd guess this move speaks more to the potential at EnterpriseDB than anything amiss at Red Hat. A quote from Dave Power, a member of EnterpriseDB's board, and from Ed both point to taking EnterpriseDB to the next level. For instance, Ed states: "The Postgres open source community is active and robust, and the company has a... READ MORE

My earlier post mysql versus postgresql brought me lots of negative comments - that i did not compare the transactional database of pgsql with the transactional engine (innodb) of mysql. The main reason why i did not do that was because i had found InnoDB to be very slow as compared to MyISAM.

But after all those comments i ran the benchmarks again using the same scripts and the same technology