On Friday, after weeks of benchmarking T5120 and T5220 and studying the Sparc T2 (Niagara 2 chip) architecture, I finally put one in production and the results have been very promising. Though Friday evening wasn't a peak period, we experienced 62% more throughput than the previously deployed V210. I expect T5120 to be able to handle our peaks without breaking a sweat.

We'll have to take a hit in certain database operations to benefit from this 62% gain. (Update: however, luckily, those operations do not occur everyday.) I will be presenting results of my benchmarks and information at the MySQL conference. If you are evaluating Sun servers for MySQL, you will find my session very interesting.
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Recall that I’ve claimed that it takes 28 years to fill a disk with random insertions, given a set of reasonable assumptions.  Recall what they are:

We are focusing on the storage engine (a la MySQL) level, and we are looking at a database on a single disk—the one we are using for illustration is the 1TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000.  It has a disk seek time 14ms and transfer rate of around 69MB/s. [See tomshardware.com] We insert random pairs, each 8 bytes.  So that’s 62.5 billion pairs to fill the disk, and at 4KB-size blocks, that 2^28 leaves (= 2^40 bytes / 2^12 bytes/leaf).

Now, my analysis requires each insertion to induce a disk seek.  Suppose we do something clever with main memory.  After all, we have this main memory hanging around.  It should be possible to buffer up some insertions, and once we fill up main memory, insert key/value pairs that belong on the same leaf.  Thus, fetching a …

I recently was interviewed by Packt Publishing for their Impackt '08 web pages:

Ever since the formal adoption of the term in 1998, Open Source has experienced growth and adoption rates that defy pressures and suggestions that it’s a viable option for enthusiasts and geeks only. Governments, corporations as well as small businesses have begun to choose Open Source over proprietary software. However, with the global economy facing an uncertain future, how will open source be impacted? Can it continue to grow despite this?

With these questions in mind and more, Packt approached some people at the heart of this movement to understand their take on the future of open source.

The …

Yesterday I chatted with Jay Pipes at his home in the Buckeye State.  Jay is the North American community manager for MySQL and very recent Sun employee.  We chatted about whats up in the world of MySQL and all about the MySQL Conference thats coming up in 10 days (April 14-16, in Santa Clara).

My interview with Jay (10:01)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

 
Photo by Sebastian Bergmann

Welcome to the 91st edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

For a change, let’s begin with some PostgreSQL stuff. On Tending the Garden, Selena Deckelmann gives her retrospective thanks to those who attended and presented the PostgreSQL Conference East.

On Esoteric Curio, Theo Schlossnagle gives his thoughts on the keynote address by Joshua Drake, touching on the perennial versus, Postgres vs. MySQL.

Hey, there was a MySQL …

A bit late in the game, but maybe somebody would be interested in working on this proposed project of mine:

PlanetMySQL currently is merely an aggregator of submitted RSS feeds, with some functionality for filtering content to keep the discussion on topic. Due to its high volume of posts, many gems get "lost in the noise" and are hard to retrieve.

We'd like to expand the functionality of PlanetMySQL significantly to provide more possibilities for community participation and interaction. For this project, we are looking for a talented PHP hacker to set up a site that provides the current functionality and more:

• Voting on articles/blog postings: it must be possible for logged in users to cast a vote on articles, similar to the …

For the past few months, like Baron, Jeremy and Keith, I have been consulting KickFire (formerly known as C2App). There is another startup currently in stealth mode with some very impressive solutions for MySQL. Unlike Kickfire, this other startup isn't SSD based. I was hoping they will be ready for announcement at the conference as well, but it seems they will need some more time. I cannot go into much detail on this startup at this point.

I have been wanting to write on KickFire but I certainly won't be able to beat Baron. He does a wonderful job in capturing what is …

Some of you have noticed Kickfire, a new sponsor at this year’s MySQL Conference and Expo. Like Keith Murphy, I have been involved with them for a while now. This article explains the basics of how their technology is different from the current state of the art in complex queries on large amounts of data.

Kickfire is developing a MySQL appliance that combines a pluggable storage engine (for MySQL 5.1) with a new kind of chip. On the surface, the storage engine is not that revolutionary: it is a column-store engine with data compression and some other techniques to reduce disk I/O, which is kind of par for the course in data warehousing today. The chip is the really exciting part of the technology.

The simplest description of their chip is that it …

Another great event happening in New York on April 14th is the monthly meeting of the New York Software Industry Association. This month's topic is "Running a Tech Business in NY: Challenges and Payoffs." There is no cost to attend but you must pre-register.

I traveled with Kaj from Paris to Milan, and we went directly to the Sun offices, where we were received with great friendship and keen interest.
Franco Roman, Director of Marketing, explained to us how Sun invests on community activities, from big customers to university, to open source events.
Then we were joined by the directors of the other departments, who engaged us in lively exchanges of ideas, where we saw that our community models are different but easily complement each other.
There is much to do, but with such is the enthusiasm that is shown towards MySQL that I have little doubt we will succeed.
In the afternoon there was the meetup itself. Unlike Paris, it was held in a conference room, with a wide screen, microphones, video cameras (it will be published online. Stay tuned). Again, the participation from Sun employees and managers was really notable.
Kaj delivered his speech in Italian. The day before …