As a I wrote a couple of days ago, I went to the second day of PostgreSQL Conference East 2008 last Sunday. I had a good time and really enjoyed meeting everyone, listening, learning, and occasionally talking. I asked a number of fearless-newbie questions that paid off handsomely: people were very willing to humor me. I also left with a beautiful t-shirt, mug, and bag combo thanks to EnterpriseDB. The bag has already been put to use for a grocery shopping trip.

Note to conference/website organizers: I can’t link to anything but the front page, so I assume my link above will someday point to the 2009 conference, or the 2008 West conference. It would be good to give each event a permalink right from the start…

One thing that surprised me was the distance …

At 1:30pm EST today, I am giving my much-anticipated talk on Using Open Source Projects for Personal Profit at the first annual HabariCon, which is a celebration of uniting the user and developer communities in friendship and collaboration. I am expecting 80-120 people to show up for my talk, which focuses on how you can contribute a bit of code early on in an open source project's life and claim to be a valuable member of the committer society, thus increasing your overall karma in the open source community and landing you a higher-paying job. It's must-see learning for anyone interested in the economics of Cabal-coding. See you there!

Feel free to join the Habari Cabal and others on Freenode #habari and learn invaluable tips from some of the best open source community leaders in the world!

In my estimation, the GPL is by far the world's best open-source license for business. If Palamida's recent count of GPLv3-licensed projects is any indication, business in open source is very, very good:

Our database now contains over 2,000 projects that are using the GPL v3. At ...

I have added a couple of features to my earlier post on MySQL Cluster Features - what they are and what they do.

The features that have been added to the feature list are:

• Increased max number of nodes in a single MySQL Cluster (CGE 6.2)
• Page allocation (CGE 6.2)
• Page deallocation (CGE 6.3)
• …

I almost forgot I wrote the code a while back. Someone asked me about it yesterday, so I dusted the parallel CSV reader code off this morning and here are the results:

This test basically reads a file with 10M customer records (generated), sized 919169988 bytes in 18.3 seconds. (50MB/s) Obviously, my poor laptop disk can’t deliver at that speed, so these test results are obtained by utilizing the excellent Linux caching system

In any case, the caching system simulates faster disk subsystem.

On my computer, the system doesn’t really scale linearly (especially in this case, the OS uses up some CPU power too) , but the speedup is noticeable from 25.8 to 18.3 seconds. (about 30% faster)

The interesting thing is that if you have more CPUs at your disposal (both SMP and clustered setups work) you can probably make it scale to the full extent of your disk speed.

In the case where lazy conversion is disabled …

In a sense of ironic fate I’m officially stuck between countries. (I feel a little like Tom Hanks in one of his movies, need to find the name of it).

As part of my resignation from MySQL/SUN, I was required to leave the US within 10 days to satisfy visa requirements. I packed, stored, discarded and arrived at the airport with 2 suit-cases of belongings to leave one country - The US, and enter another - Germany.

I don’t require a visa to enter Germany, normally. However as I’m leaving the country permanently and relocating to Germany I do. So I can’t leave, but I also can’t stay (as I’m at 10 days)

This leaves me with little choices. I can’t work now in the US, I’ve violated my visa obligations for the future, even a career change won’t help me here. I may never be able to enter the US again. Seems my only option right now is to return to Australia ahead of plans.

Those hoping to see me at …

One of the goodies of MySQL Proxy is the execution of multiple queries in response of a single query from the client.
One example given in the manual is a normal query sent by the user, with a SHOW STATUS executed before and after the query to evaluate the efficiency of the query itself.
Another common possibility is to create a loop, i.e. the client sends a query with appropriate commands for the Proxy, and the query is executed N times.
Both cases are accomplished using the query queue, a data structure that the Proxy uses to process user defined queries.
The tricky part in multiple query execution is that the client has only sent one query, and thus it expects only one result. If we execute multiple queries, we will get multiple results from the server. Thus, we need to handle the results that we want to process within the Proxy and prevent them from reaching the client, while making sure that the …

Hello,
I am excited to introduce another big event in Australia!

Following its success last year, the Extended Horizons Summit is back for a thirteenth consecutive year, with a bigger and more insightful two-day conference plus pre-event workshops.

This year’s summit will include users of Sun’s SOA & Java Composite Application Suite, Identity Management, Java Enterprise System, Sun Secure Global Desktop and MySQL.

MySQL Sessions scheduled:

Sunday 25th May 2008
1:45pm - 5:00pm A Hands-On MySQL Cluster 5.1 Tutorial

Monday 26th May 2008
3:40pm - 4:30pm Tuning MySQL for Large Database Performance
5:30pm - 6:20pm MySQL in the Enterprise - Compelling Reasons to Adopt Case Studies from Web 2.0

Tuesday 27th May 2008
11:05am - 11:55am The MySQL Storage Engine …

Recently I have had a chance to check out MySQL Performance on "Memory Appliance" by Violin Memory which can be used as extremely high speed storage system.

I helped Violin Memory to optimize MySQL for customer workload and Violin memory and also had a chance to do some benchmarks on my own. 2*Quad Core Xeon running CentOS5 was tested using ext2 filesystem and SysBench tool.

Using 16K read sizes (matches Innodb page size) I could get 1.2GB/sec (80K req/sec) for reads and about 500MB/sec writes with 16 concurrent threads. Things scaled well and with 256 threads I got even a bit better performance.

Interesting enough utilization in iostat never went over few percents and load was mostly CPU bound.

Next I went on testing MySQL. My goal was to simulate as much IO as possible so I use …

In just two weeks I will be heading to the 2008 MySQL Conference.  I will be speaking this year.  My two talks are:

MySQL Hacks and Tricks to Make Phorum Fast
04/16/2008  4:25pm PDT Room: Ballroom A

From One Server to a Cluster
04/16/2008  5:15pm PDT Room: Ballroom C

I have to pull back to back talks.  *PHEW* I hope I can hold up.  To make it worse, they did not put me in the same room. If I remember right though, those are really close to each other.

Of course, the Phorum team will be in the Expo Hall in the DotOrg pavilion.  Just look for the big dog.

…