March 2008 will be a month of publicity for CouchDB. I will be giving a total of three presentations around the globe, the northern hemisphere, less then half of that, actually. Anyway.

March 1st, 2008 — Chemnitzer Linux Tage

As early as 9:00 a.m. on a Saturday morning, I’ll be giving the 45 minute version of my Next Generation Data Storage with CouchDB talk to a crowd of hopefully awake Linux enthusiasts. The conference is only 5€ (3€ for students), so be sure to show up! The presentation will be in German and so is the information page.

March 7th, 2008 — O’Reilly ETech — San Diego

This is a big one, and actually, they help sponsoring my flight to the US, so a big thanks upfront! In fact, this is a double session …

Probably most of MySQL users sometime had a situation when they would do changes in MySQL config file without restarting server (may be matching SET GLOBAL command to do it in run time) but either because option is misspelled or because given version does not support such option the server when would refuse to start when it restarted, either on operating system restart or recovering from MySQL Server crash. In any case it is quite nasty.

Unlike Apache MySQL service control script does not have "configtest" option so there is no straight way to check MySQL config file for errors. However you can do it by running mysqld --help option:

PLAIN TEXT CODE:

1. [root@sl1 tmp]# /usr/libexec/mysqld --help
2. 080212 12:39:30 [ERROR] /usr/libexec/mysqld: unknown variable 'myis_test=1'

This does not do complete check, ie it is possible to allocate 80GB to buffer pool …

In all versions we updated Apache to 2.2.8, PHP4 to 4.4.8 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.4. The Linux and Mac OS X versions contain also updated Perl (5.10.0) and MySQL (5.0.51a) releases.

Get the downloads and more details on the specific platforms XAMPP project page.

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I did some more benchmarking on XFS over the weekend. I ran at least 3 independent tests, which were all within 5-10% of the below results.

MySQL AB today announced that UK-based WYSdom Dental Technologies has embedded the MYSQL database into its flagship practice management product, ICONic. The ICONic system provides a one-stop-shop solution to address the complex requirements that dental practitioners face with regards to client and back-end administration systems, as well as external communication with the Dental Practice Board.

MySQL AB today announced that Comsys, a specialist in interactive telephony solutions, has selected the MySQL Embedded Server to power its VOIP solutions. Comsys provides telecommunication products and hosted services in the converging arena of IN, 3G, SIP and VoIP networks for mobile and fixed line telephony operators, MVNOs and call centres. Comsys selected the MySQL open source platform in order to meet the very demanding availability requirements of the telecom space, and to deliver a high level of reliability combined with low operational costs.

MySQL 5.1 offers an extremely useful feature called information_schema plugins. This feature allows dynamic runtime loading of a shared library into the MySQL server to implement a table in the information_schema database. The SQL standard (ISO/IEC 9075-11:2003) allows database implementations to extend the information_schema. MySQL 5.1 transfers the possibility to do this directly to privileged database users so they can extend the information_schema themselves, in any way they see fit.

Last time, I introduced the notion of strict and lenient updates.  Now it’s time to see what the performance characteristics are of each.

Just to rehash, 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 will insert and delete random pairs, each 8 bytes.  So that’s 62.5 billion pairs to fill the disk.

Strict Updates

These are the easier update types to analyze.  Please review the definition of strict updates from the last blog entry.  Now notice that each insertion or deletion requires a point query.  For example, during an insertion, in order to determine if there’s already a row with a particular key value in the database, one must look up that key.  In order …

In all versions we updated Apache to 2.2.8, PHP4 to 4.4.8 and phpMyAdmin to 2.11.4. The Linux and Mac OS X versions contain also updated Perl (5.10.0) and MySQL (5.0.51a) releases.

Get the downloads and more details on the specific platforms XAMPP project page.