A year ago, I criticized the under-development Falcon storage engine in MySQL 6.0 of failing to meet the demand of large-scale deployments. Falcon has now reached a beta phase and is included in the MySQL 6.0 alpha versions, most recent release of which is 6.0.4 this February. We're thinking of making an early test of Falcon in place of MyISAM/InnoDB for Habbo to see what to expect later on, so I reviewed the documentation again, and thought to look at my concerns from a year ago.

Falcon now supports multiple tablespaces per database, although the corresponding manual page still begins with the unfortunately misleading sentence of "all data ... is stored within a single file", and goes on to correct itself in the second …

This week’s Open Source Business Conference was a strange meeting of Enterprise IT users, venture capitalists, and free software entrepreneurs. The opening keynote was delivered by Red Hat’s freshly minted CEO Jim Whitehurst who gave a very modest speech noting that while Red Hat has been a leading open source company they have not necessarily been an open source leader. Whitehurst’s presentation lacked anything especially insightful or noteworthy and he has the advantage of being the new guy so he’s off the hook for anything that might have happened before he took the job.

What is apparent Red Hat’s no longer exciting. They’ve crossed over to …

As posted here I started to think about possible ways to implement database sharding/partitioning.

I finally found the time to start prototyping a MySQL Proxy based solution that would allow you to analyze and rewrite queries to direct them to different databases. So this would going to be a nearly 100% transparent solution (some queries are impossible to support due to the nature of having multiple tables in different locations).

How does it work?
The main goal is to split up mysql tables and optionally put each of the resulting partitions on different mysql servers.

For now I concentrate on splitting up big tables into smaller ones within the same database. Distribution of these tables (i.e. partitions) over multiple databases would be the final goal and a lot more challenging task (think of …

Yesterday, I set out a little quiz about the TABLE_CONSTRAINTS table in the MySQL information_schema. The task was:

• Specify a minimal set of columns of the information_schema.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS table that is sufficient to reliably identify a single row in the information_schema.TABLE_CONSTRAINTS table.
• Argue why these columns are necessary and sufficient to identify a row, and why a smaller set of columns does not exist

Short Answer
For MySQL there are two such column sets:

• 
  
• CONSTRAINT_SCHEMA, …

Earlier this week at OSBC in San Francisco a new advisory board was announced for Continuent, the leading provider of commercial open source middleware solutions for database high-availability and scalability. I feel priviledged to be able to be part of this group:

Tim Golden, Senior Vice-President, Bank of America. Tim has 20 years IT management experience designing and implementing major infrastructure projects, both as a consultant working for IBM® and currently as a senior vice president at Bank of America working exclusively with Linux® and open source software technologies. He was also named as one of the 15 most influential open source business people recently by eweek story here

Douglas S. Tracy, the EVP for IT (North America) and Chief Technology Officer, Global IT, Rolls-Royce. Doug has over 25 years of management experience in the private …

DBAs are always try to determine the best way to manage their storage for InnoDB. The three main options include:Having one shared InnoDB tablespace data file.Setting up individual files per InnoDB table.Setting up a shared tablespace across multiple files.Option 1: Having one shared InnoDB tablespace data file.This is fine if you have a simple and small MySQL database. Great for new DBAs to

Here are some view tables that are going to be in the new release of Monolith. They work with the current release though, so maybe they will be useful for DBAs that have utilized the CLI to get data out of Monolith. The new release will feature an updated Status page that shows the data from these view tables instead of the “last 25 backups”. Edit the DEFINER user as needed.


mysql> show tables;
+-------------------------+
| Tables_in_monolith |
+-------------------------+
| dbs |
| process_exec |
| process_status |
| pruning |
| system |
| users |
| view_daily_result_all |
| view_daily_result_code1 |
| view_daily_result_code2 |
| view_daily_result_code3 |
+-------------------------+
10 rows in set (0.00 sec)


mysql> show create table view_daily_result_all\G
…

Welcome to the 90th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First, SSQA.net’s SQL Master offers his walk-through of best practices for installing SQL Server 2005, with clustering as the destination.

If you read SQL Server blogs, you already know Adam Machanic. I’m very pleased to mention his first post for the Pythian Group blog, covering the basics of minimal logging and its enhancements in SQL Server 2008.

…

I've long preferred OpenOffice for my presentations. It has functionality (like the ability to enter a group of objects I've grouped and edit just one of them) that I simply can't get in Microsoft Office, and the performance is quite good. I'm therefore happy to see version 2.4 hit public release. The good just got better, as The Register reports:

The OpenOffice.org 2.4 database, Base, now supports MS-Access 2007, while capabilities for MySQL, Oracle JDBC and native HSQL databases have been improved.

PDF handling has been improved with five export options, and Writer has been rounded out with improved "find and replace", new keyboard short cuts, and the ability to set options for printing hidden or place-holder text and for following hyperlinks.

...