It's been a while since I said anything about the progress on the book. That doesn't mean we are not still working on it, though.

As Peter wrote a while ago, he is basically wearing the hat of a very advanced technical reviewer at this point. We've finished writing all the chapters from his detailed outlines. He has worked through about half the chapters, and I'm continuing to spend my evenings and weekends and holidays (yes, nearly all my free time -- just ask my wife!) writing some new material (an appendix on EXPLAIN, for example), finishing unfinished things marked with TODO in the text, and revising chapters after Peter reviews them. Vadim is working on benchmarks. For example, he just finished some benchmarks for something I profiled with SHOW STATUS. I thought that would be good …

Every few years, a wave of people claim that the relational model falls short of modeling data structures of modern applications. This includes some really smart people recently such as:- Jim Starkey- Brian Aker- MIT researchersThis trend of criticizing the relational model started almost immediately after E. F. Codd published his seminal paper, "A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data

Our company, Percona is even more Virtual than MySQL AB - we have no offices and 100% of staff members work out of their homes (or traveling, onsite with customers etc). We also probably have just couple of cities where more than one Employee lives.

Working as a virtual company has a lot of benefits both for company and employee - office expenses savings, saving time spent commuting, flexible work time, access to more talents but it also has challenges as we typically able to communicate more efficiently with people we personally met and there are also many things which are better made or discussed in the groups. While working for MySQL I learned the great solution to this problem is periodic meetings - company wide or group wide organized both for sake of working together as well as team building as having fun together.

So we're having first company wide meeting at Egypt next …

A while back, I built some PPC64 (powerpc 64-bit) packages for MySQL. They were built on a POWER5 box, running Fedora Core 6, with glibc 2.5, using a Bitkeeper snapshot (public bkbits, 5.0.45 tag). All tests pass on ppc64, for what its worth. I’ll do periodic builds for Linux/PPC64 as and when its required (i.e. someone pings me or I need them for some reason).

Grab them from: ftp://ftp.linux.org.uk/pub/people/byte/mysql/

Hat tip to dwmw2 (for power5, bombadil) and Bryce (for ftp.linux.org.uk).

Technorati Tags: power, power5, mysql, linuxppc, …

After I wrote the post: How do I dump all tables in a database into separate files? I got emails from couple people asking how to import the individual table files back in to MySQL. First way to import each sql file created by the post is to import each file individually by [...] …

Bug ID: 6493264 Solaris libc should provide posix_memalign

At least it’s acknowledged as a problem :)

Although I now have to go and implement it in the NDB portlib.

I wish we could drop support for everything other than linux 2.6… would make this stuff a lot nicer.

It’s been a while since I said anything about the progress on the book. That doesn’t mean we are not still working on it, though. As Peter wrote a while ago, he is basically wearing the hat of a very advanced technical reviewer at this point. We’ve finished writing all the chapters from his detailed outlines. He has worked through about half the chapters, and I’m continuing to spend my evenings and weekends and holidays (yes, nearly all my free time – just ask my wife!

A little over a year since the project to write this book began, the MySQL 5.1 Cluster Certification Study Guide is now at long last available. It covers everything you’ll need to know to pass the Certified MySQL Cluster 5.1 Database Administrator exam, including MySQL Cluster Concepts, Architecture, Configuration, Deployment, NDB Internals basics, High Availability techniques, Security Issues, and more.

(It does not cover MySQL Cluster 5.1 Carrier Grade Edition, for the simple reason that MCCGE features are not part of the official mainline MySQL 5.1 release. However, those features will be part of MySQL 6.0 [yes, MySQL 6.0 is already starting to happen, and there are already some cool new Cluster, Replication, …

CouchDB got its own TCP port assignment from the IANA. Yeah! The latest release (0.7.2) already configures your default installation to use this port and the accompanying documentation and the wiki should be up to date as well. A big thanks to Noah Slater for taking care of the procedure.

Oh, and it is 5984.

I've been working with various databases for a number of years. In that time I've found there is plenty of documentation on various features but not much on how database modeling impacts performance. Some people say one should use a fully normalized data model with a few denormalizations that are required for performance reasons, but those denormalizations are never discussed. And Ralph Kimball has many articles and a book concentrating on the physical data modeling, but they are more of the "here is how you solve the problem" and they don't detail why his method works better.

I've always found this odd as the physical data model has a major impact on database performance. I want this to be more of the whys behind various physical data modeling options with some examples showing the magnitude of the performance differences.

The first goal of this blog (over a few articles) will be to show cases where a denormalized dimensional data …