Earlier today I was building a test-case in which I wanted to put a lot of Unicode data into a database table. The problem is of-course that I don’t have a lot of data, just a small Excel input file.

So I made a Cartesian product with a couple of empty row generators:

It was interesting to see how fast the second join step was generating rows:

Yes, you are reading that correctly: 717 million rows processed in 165 seconds = 4.3 million rows per second.

For those of you that would love to try this on their own machine. Here is an exclusive present for the readers of this blog in the form of a 3.0.0-RC2 preview of 2007/10/12 (88MB zip file). We’ve been fixing bugs like crazy so it’s pretty stable for us, but it’s still a few weeks until we release RC2. Don’t do anything crazy with this drop! This is purely a …

Dear MySQL and PHP users,

we have two good news for you. First, we are proud to announce that one year after the announcement to develop a new MySQL native driver for PHP (mysqlnd), the new driver has been committed into the 5.3 branch of the PHP project. PHP 5.3 is expected to be the next major release of PHP.

According to a poll on the PHP Internals development list the new driver is among the five most desired features for PHP 5.3. Thank you for your trust in mysqlnd! We will try to continue to listen to your whishes and are looking forward to hear back from you.

The second news is that we will strengthen our commitment into PHP …

We many times wrote about InnoDB scalability problems, this time We are faced with one for MyISAM tables. We saw that several times in synthetic benchmarks but never in production, that's why we did not escalate MyISAM scalability question. This time working on the customer system we figured out that box with 1 CPU Core is able to handle more queries per second than identical box, but with 4 CPU Cores.

The main query which showed this problem was similar to this:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. SELECT name FROM t1, t2 WHERE t2.t1_id = t1.id AND t1.stat=1  AND  t2.val = 5 LIMIT 1206,18;
2. mysql> EXPLAIN  SELECT name FROM t1, t2 WHERE t2.t1_id = t1.id AND t1.stat=1  AND  t2.val = 5 LIMIT 1206,18\G
3. *************************** 1. row ***************************
4.            id: 1
5.   select_type: SIMPLE
…

This post is half-this is how you do it, and half-is there a better way to do it?

So you want to build a system that does jobs. You want the jobs to be able to be run in parallel for speed, but also for redundancy. This system needs to be coordinated so, for example, the same jobs aren't being done twice, the status of every job is easy to see, and multiple servers can run jobs by simply querying the central source.

How can we build code around Innodb to have MySQL be our central controlling scheme?

CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS job_queue(
   id int(10) not null auto_increment,

   updated timestamp not null,
   started timestamp not null,

   state ENUM('NEW', 'WORKING', 'DONE', 'ERROR' ) default 'NEW',

   PRIMARY KEY ( id ),
   KEY( STATE )
) ENGINE=Innodb;

In this schema, our job table has a unique id, started and last updated …

Sun engineers give the inside scoop on the new UltraSPARC T2 systems

[ Update Jan 2008: Sun SPARC Enterprise T5120 and T5220 servers were awarded Product of the Year 2007. ]

Sun launched the Chip-Level MultiThreading (CMT) era back in December 2005 with the release of the highly successful UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara) chip, featured in the Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 systems. With 8 cores, each with 4 hardware strands (or threads), these systems presented 32 CPUs and delivered an unprecedented amount of processing power in compact, eco-friendly packaging. The systems were referred to as CoolThreads servers because of their low power and cooling requirements.

Today Sun introduces the …

A couple of weeks ago Hyperic announced their cooperation with JasperSoft to add advanced reporting to their open source systems management tool. Hyperic is interesting because it enables IT managers to get first-class monitoring of LAMP and other infrastructure software, whether it's open source or closed. For example, you can monitor MySQL running on Windows or BEA WebLogic running on Linux or any other combinations. Now working with JasperSoft you can get Enterprise class reporting built-in which is a great way to show your management what the heck systems management is and why it matters! It's sometimes hard to get... READ MORE

I already wrote about this issue but as I is third team I'm helping customers to resolve this "frm corruption" issue it is the time to return to it again.

During MySQL 5.0 release cycle the change was made so now MySQL does not stop if Innodb storage engine failed to initialize but starts properly... just having Innodb tables unavailable. I honestly do not know any case when this behavior change helps... of course you silently want to get good portion of your database unavailable right ? But I guess this change was made for reasons quite far from improving user experience.

It is worth to note MySQL 5.0 introduces STRICT option which will makes error control more strict, what is often expected by the Enterprise users - so instead of cutting the string lengths or converging NULLs to zeros MySQL can be tuned to abort such …

By Tim O'Reilly

We've long believed that one of the side-effects of Web 2.0 and the demands of the internet as platform is that more is required of web sites than ever before in terms of availability, performance, and scalability [Radar posts]. As a result, we've been doing a lot of publishing in that area, with titles such as Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Websites, Jeremy Zawodny and Derek Balling's High Performance MySQL, and now Steve Souders' High …

So yesterday I was at the Zend PHP conference giving a talk on EC2/S3
and deployment strategies for LAMP stacks in those environments.

It was a fun talk, and one of the types I really enjoy giving. It
wasn't about features, but on how to go out and make something. Even
after the talk was over I ended up spending the rest of the afternoon
talking to different individuals on how MySQL works in EC2 and EC2
like environments.

Other then the difficulty in building horizontal solutions compared
to vertical in EC2, I was pretty amazed at the energy at the
conference. There are a lot of startups at the moment, and there is a
need to find developers.

Which got me thinking about which languages to use. I am not a
language bigot (though I am quite fond of Objective C!). I tend to
use whatever allows me to get a job done.

…

So others know how I check out a fresh tree, here are instructions to building MySQL from mysql.bkbits.net, using the free bkf tool.

• in ~/code, do bkf clone bk://mysql.bkbits.net/mysql-5.0-community mysql-5.0-community to clone to community tree down to your disk
• wait patiently, while bitkeeper attempts to suck some of your bandwidth
• now, do BUILD/compile-dist, and wait while MySQL builds
• you might find it handy to now get the test suite on your build, via make test
• run make dist, and you’ll have nice dandy source tarballs to go with your build for easy installation/distribution/etc.
• if you encounter problems, say with ndb (and you’re not testing against it), you can run make dist –ignore ndb for instance

If for some reason you don’t want the latest development tree, and say, are …