Yesterday I reported that I was looking into EC2 to see how it performed as a MySQL Server. Well, I got around to running some benchmarks today. My home machine (AMD64 3000 (I think), Ubuntu 7.10, 7200RPM drive, 1G RAM) can handle almost 730 transactions/second on a basic sysbench test:

sysbench --test=oltp --mysql-table-engine=myisam --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock  prepare
sysbench --num-threads=16 --max-requests=100000 --test=oltp --oltp-table-size=1000000 --mysql-socket=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock --oltp-read-only run

What does EC2 (small instance) rate? 132.26 transactions/second.

I've got to say - I'm a little disappointed, since that's more than 5 times worse. I will test the other instance types over the coming days, and try and make my environment a little more controlled.

Databases are often disk i/o bound. Maybe they've …

The DC PHP Conference is right around the corner, and it looks like it's going to be great. (It's not too late to register.) Not only is this conference inexpensive ($450 for both days, $250 for one, and $150 for students), it boasts an impressive lineup of speakers.

Among the scheduled talks, I see Facebook, Digg, and Ning represented:

• APC@Facebook, Brian Shire (Facebook)
• …

In the spirit of the MySQL Pluggable Storage Engines the proxy has a plugin infrastructure now.

The main goal was to cleanup the code so what the admin part and the proxy itself can be loaded at runtime.

The new code-layout looks like

• mysql-proxy.c (codename: the cauldron)
• takes care of the command line options
• signal handling
• win32 service handling (not done yet)
• libmysql-proxy.so
• provides the mainloop and everything for the socket and protocol handling
• libadmin.so
• the old admin interface
• libproxy.so
• the well known proxy itself

Now you can plugin your own modules if you like and only load those modules that you really want.

The next step is making the admin module more useful. I'll keep you updated.

Hurry up!
The call for papers for the Users Conference 2008 is closing on Tuesday, October 30th.
If you haven't submitted a proposal, now it's the time to do it.
Read the unofficial but very effective guidelines offered Baron Schwartz and Colin Charles and write down your well thought abstract
NOW!

Hurry up!
The call for papers for the Users Conference 2008 is closing on Tuesday, October 30th.
If you haven’t submitted a proposal, now it’s the time to do it.
Read the unofficial but very effective guidelines offered Baron Schwartz and Colin Charles and write down your well thought abstract
NOW!

Version 0.6 of mylvmbackup, a script to perform backups of a MySQL server using Linux LVM snapshots, has now been released.

In addition to various code cleanups and documentation improvements, many new features have been added to this version. I'd like to specially thank Robin H. Johnson from the Gentoo project for contributing many of the improvements to this release!

• Added a new rsync backup type. This is very useful if you want to use mylvmbackup to create the initial state for your slave servers. Instead of creating a .tar.gz archive, the data directory is copied into a timestamped archive directory. (Robin)
• Added support for a trailing argument to tar, which can be used for excluding files. (Robin)
• Separated out the suffix of the tarball (Preperation for rsync and users that want to use bzip2 or no compression on the tarball.) (Robin)
• While the backup is performed, a temporary suffix …

Hurry up!
The call for papers for the Users Conference 2008 is closing on Tuesday, October 30th.
If you haven't submitted a proposal, now it's the time to do it.
Read the unofficial but very effective guidelines offered Baron Schwartz and Colin Charles and write down your well thought abstract
NOW!

The OpenFest 2007 is under way in Sofia, Bulgaria. The event is hosted in an elegant building in Sofia center and it's packed with enthusiastic open source lovers.
The star of the show was Georg Greve president of the EFF Europe. A passionate speaker, he gathered a huge audience just at the start of the event.
Then, during break, the organizers called for an impromptu press conference, where Georg, Jonas Öberg, Erik Josefsson, Domas Mituzas, snd yours truly enjoyed the spotlight for a hour, while asked about recipes to win the ongoing battle between good and evil in the software industry.
I had a session about getting started with MySQL Proxy, which got me a full hall and a great degree of interest. (slides) …

Morgan is looking in to EC2 on MySQL, so I thought I’d pipe up about stuff I’ve been playing with.

The ephemeral nature of the data is troubling, because at best you’re going to have some lag before you can back stuff up to S3 or some other place. (Unless that was happening continuously… but we’ll come back to that) On the other hand, if you’re doing app sharding or something similar, this essentially just makes you plan that your machines can all die at any time. If you used Google’s semi-sync replication patch, you could easily spin up little replication clusters as needed.

Hm. Clusters. Well, I’m also a fan of MySQL Cluster. What if you ran MySQL Cluster on a single ec2 node (both data and sql nodes)? What if, further, you wrote (and by you, I mean me… code coming soon, I promise) an AsyncFile implementation for Cluster that …

According to this article in ComputerWorld, MySQL to get injection of Google code. Google has signed an agreement to contribute to MySQL (oddly enough called a contributer license agreement) and will contribute source code for a variety of technical items.

In a way, this can be considered a very strong endorsement of MySQL by Google. Google even has an engineer dedicated to working with MySQL and the MySQL development team. I didn't realize that Google was such a heavy user of MySQL. Google will contribute some code related to replication and monitoring.

Also noted in the article is that MySQL, in the future of course, will support role based security and even Transparent Data Encryption (TDE). TDE is a big selling point for financial companies and other companies heavily regulated by privacy concerns. TDE puts the burden of encryption …