The last article demonstrated that a denormalized data model was a bit faster than a normalized data model when all the data fit into memory, but only by 20-30 percent or so, at least for the experiments I ran.  This article deals with larger data volumes and shows a case where normalized data is faster than denormalized data and then details another case where a denormalized data model faster. 

First, this is the what the tables in question look like.  All the product tables have 10 million rows.  The denormalized ProductAll table is 5.2 gig, and as innodb_buffer_pool_size is set to 4 gig, this table won't fit into memory.  The filler column represents other product attributes without having to specify them in detail.

create table ProductAll (
    productAllId int(11) not null,
    productAllName varchar(32) not null,
    …

Ruby on Rails 2.0 was released last week, “It’s done!“, David Heinemeier Hansson notes.

Ruby on Rails has come a long way since Lenz Grimmer’s interview with DHH in February 2006.

Browsing DHH’s blog, I find snippets (bolding mine) like

Piggy-backing off the new drive for resources are a number of simplifications for controller and view methods that deal with URLs.

As you might have gathered, Action Pack in Rails 2.0 is all about getting closer with HTTP and all its glory.

We?ve also made it much easier to structure your JavaScript and stylesheet files in logical units without getting clobbered by the HTTP overhead of requesting a …

Cleversafe obtains new round of funding. Sun releases OpenSPARC T2 processor design. IT Mill open sources RIA development tools. (and more)

Former Motorola CEO Christopher Galvin Leads Cleversafe’s Series C Round, Joins Board of Directors, Cleversafe (Press Release)

Sun Accelerates Growth of UltraSPARC CMT Eco System; Releases OpenSPARC T2 Processor RTL to Open Source Community and Joins Five Major Universities in Launch of OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

IT Mill Integrates Google Web Toolkit (GWT) And Open-Sources Its RIA Development Tools, IT Mill …

The folks over at zmanda who specialize in MySQL backup are doing a webinar on December 13th, this Thursday.  They specifically mention it as relevant for Oracle DBAs or anyone moving to MySQL.  Looks to be an interesting event.

In part 2 we discussed the internals of MPP and how MPP can be used with LVS to create a failover strategy. In this part 3 we will discuss how to configure and operate MPP, and additionally use MPP with MySQL Proxy to create a failover strategy.

Today's entry is provided by Ben Ramsey.

Name

Ben Ramsey

Blog

benramsey.com

Biography

Ben Ramsey is a software architect at Schematic and the founder of the Atlanta PHP user group. He is the co-author of php|architect's Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide. He also spends way too much time in #phpc.

Location

Atlanta, Georgia

I frequently receive email messages, am asked at conferences or Atlanta PHP meetings, or am approached on IRC about how one can get involved in the PHP community. Being involved means different things to different people. Some …

I was just poking around the Open Solaris site looking for an Intel install (all of the Suns I have are Sparc based).

And what happens to be on the front page?

A note saying they will ship you a DVD with a couple of Solaris distributions.

http://www.opensolaris.org/os/

It will save me the download, and it means I can try out a couple of Solaris distributions. This has been on my list to do since I want to extend the DTrace support I added to MySQL 6.0, and being able to do this from my laptop would make the process a lot easier.

I just checked Amazon.com now and they do not have a book on DBA for Dummies. This was not surprising to me as I know that there are only a handful of DBAs out there specifically for MySQL.

And what topics would be covered in this book? Replication, backups, security, etc... But all of these topics can be found in other MySQL books. So, why would someone write a book for DBA for Dummies? Because it would contain advance topics or a in-depth details on the topics just mentioned. For example, how do you do circular replication? Or how do you manage 25 databases?

At Flickr we use a Federated Architecture, where the WHOLE of the data is spread across many servers. This means that when you load a photo page the dynamic data generated is hitting a server that holds that data, while another photo page view may hit another server for content.

Now to do complex operations to control the flow of what operates on data, the complex operation must lock the data. Let's call this a global lock, which is used to coordinate many jobs. Now to make these operations fast, lets run many processes across many servers. Essentially we needed to solve a hard problem in parallel computing: distributed locking.

This took a bunch of dedicated time to get done properly. We solved the issue by using 3 database clusters.

First I used the coolest mysql feature out there; GET_LOCK and IS_FREE_LOCK. These two mysql function are the heart of the distributed lock.

Why use them …

phpsh requires readline support built into python. It also requires python version 2.4+. You can check which version of python you have installed by typing: python -V Let us download and install readline: wget ftp://ftp.cwru.edu/pub/bash/readline-5.2.tar.gz tar zxf readline-5.2.tar.gz cd readline-5.2 ./configure make install Now let us install python with readline support:

wget http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.5.1/Python-2.5.1.tgz tar zxf Python-2.5.1.tgz cd Python-2.5.1

I had some problems on one of the [...] …