Venture capitalist Brad Feld just put up an intriguing post comparing Google App Engine to Amazon EC2. The meat of the entry is from an analysis by Brad's friend Scott Moody. Here are the juiciest bits, pro and con:

With EC2, you still have to set-up load balancers, configure multiple replicated database servers, implement scalability hacks if things grow too fast (such as distributed caching of data via memcached), keep distros and apps up-to-date, etc. Bottom Line: EC2-based companies still require sys admins, AppEngine companies don't. That will certainly change as more companies begin offering EC2 server management services.

Google provides a non-relational datastore and that's the only datastore available (no traditional file system, no relational databases). With EC2, people generally use MySQL or Postgresql. Amazon offers a …

The second and last tutorial of Monday was Memcached and MySQL: Everything you need to know by Brian Aker and Alan Kasindorf.

The talk was mainly about memcached and libmemcached and less on MySQL. That's OK since I have been meaning to learn more about memcached's internals.

Alan and Brian discussed the slab allocator, protocol, internal hash table, LRU (least recently used), and threading. The slab allocator is the name of memcached memory allocator. The LRU keeps track of the age of each slab. memcached uses a consistent hash algorithm for the slabs to be located quickly and supports dynamically adding new …

As per the Platinum Partners List PrimeBase Technologies has made a key achievement. I think this is a great list to make for the company. There are only 18 Platinum partners, and PrimeBase Technologies are the third Storage Engine provider and the second first open source storage engine company.

The News Release quotes “As a key milestone in our relationship with both the MySQL Community and MySQL, this partnership strengthens our commitment and involvement in working with the MySQL database server starting with PBXT and following with additional product developments.”

Update Thanks to Ken Jacobs, I need make a correct, we are not the first “open …

The day of tutorials started out with All Bases Covered: A Hands-on Introduction to High-availability MySQL and DRBD by Florian Haas and Philipp Reisner.

After a brief introduction to DRBD, they started discussing the configuration file. There were a couple settings that I had set incorrectly on my servers.

Since I have my two servers connected via a gigabit crossover cable, I had my synchronization rate set to 125MB. They recommended approximately 1/3 your network and disk I/O so that you're applications don't freeze up during synchronization. Their test system used 30MB so I'll give it a try too.

Another setting they had different was the activity log extents. All of the references I looked at said to set the al-extents …

Compiling and installing a User Defined Function for MySQL on Mac OS X seems tricky. There are installation notes, but they seem to be sparse on OS X (the comments are clues, though).

I was looking through the tutorial materials for Roland’s talk, and came up with what I think is the most full-proof way to ensure your UDFs get compiled…

gcc -Wall -dynamiclib -o udf_lightspeed.dylib -lstdc++ udf_lightspeed.c

The above will compile just fine, but MySQL will give you an interesting error saying “no suitable image found”. Its the infamous Error 1126.

Upon further poking, it seemed like the following should work:
gcc -Wall -dynamiclib -o udf_lightspeed.dylib -lstdc++ -lc -I`/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_config –cflags` udf_lightspeed.c

And it …

Thanks to Marcos Besteiro and Andrew Dashin, the MySQL Pop Quizzes are now available in Spanish and Russian!

Thanks for the hard work, guys! It’s great to see that people are finding this worthwhile. I will try to get around to linking up the individual quizzes as soon as I find some time.

If you wish to translate the quizzes into your own language, please contact me at carsten (at) bitbybit (dot) dk before you start so we can sort out the details.

Giuseppe Maxia blogs about the MySQL community dinner with some special guests in attendance.

After trying very hard to install the Yaws webserver for Erlang on windows, asking 2 friends of mine to try to install it and pleading with the original creator to make an installer, I have given up.

So my very short lived relationship with Erlang has come to an end also. I am just too busy to sit down and learn how to install a program that seems too complicated to me before I even start programming in it.

I hope one day, Yaws will use an installer like Bitrock. Until then, I will spend my time either improving the languages I know or learning new ones that seem cool and not that complicated to get into.

The pre-conference Community Dinner was organized at a conflicting time when the MySQL Community Team was participating to the traditional party at Marten's residence. That was unfortunate, but it did not stop us from participating.
Although the party at Marten's was going awesomely, the Community Team, plus some willing volunteers, went on to crash Arjen's party, with a bag of gifts and a few important guests. The intended PCC (Party Crash Commando) included Kaj, Giuseppe, Colin, and Lenz. Then, Brian Aker, Mark Atwood, and Eric Herman announced that they were attending as well, and while we were on our way, Monty Widenius joined the crashing team.

That would have been enough to make a sensation, but Kaj mentioned the covert operation to Rich Green, who proposed to …

Tolven Inc an Open Source Healthcare Solutions provider recently carried out a benchmark using PostgreSQL on Solaris 10 using ZFS on Sun Fire X4600.  The Benchmark report is now available on their website.

The size of the  single database instance using PostgreSQL 8.2.6 (32-bit) peaked at 474GB with the largest table having more than 500 million rows. More information is in the report.

Tolven's  setup guide for developers which includes information about PostgreSQL  setup is also available on their website.