On many web sites you would see a counter how many time given object - blog post, forum thread, image, movie etc was viewed. This is sometimes handy feature but it can be rather expensive from performance point of view.

The nasty thing with counters as they are implemented the most trivial way - they convert read load to write load. When you would simply fetch given object information now you do not only fetch the data but also update the view counter.

For smaller single system web site with no caching the overhead may well be insignificant - as you run update for the same row which just was fetched it does not cause any synchronous IO and background IO can be batched rather effectively.

As the system growths however and you implement some form of caching, ie memcache you end up reducing number of reads from database dramatically but writes still have to happen at full speed. It also really hurts if you choose replication …

Version 0.5.0 of MySQL Proxy was released a week ago, and in the meantime there have been 25 revisions.
If you want to try the latest version in your box, you can get the sources from the svn repository and build it yourself.

svn co http://svn.mysql.com/svnpublic/mysql-proxy/ mysql-proxy

Then, you can build and install this way.

./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && make install

That works beautifully on my Linux desktop.

So far, the good news. The bad ones is that on my Mac OS X laptop, things are not so smooth.
First, aclocal complained about missing macros. Jan was online, and he helped me fix the problem with an environment variable.
Then …

While checking out the new features due for MySQL 6.0 (Falcon) the other day, I happened to browse my way past the Certification pages to see if anything had changed - am I glad I did!

It was during my browsing that I noticed the Important Information that detailed a typsetting error with the voucher expiry date found in the MySQL 5.0 Certification Study Guide……..the same guide that had been sat on my lounge floor for the last few months…..

Quickly flipping through the pages I found the voucher that offered 25% off your exam and then went …

We choose our joys and sorrows long before we experience them --Kahlil Gibran

MPP is hardware growth (scalability) by adding small 2 to 4 CPU servers, preferably cheap, to the existing infrastructure. SMP is replacing the current hardware by getting a bigger, badder, meaner box.

ETL

While Ab Initio does provide hash partition based parallelism capabilities that can be used in MPP environments, the effective use of this approach is a non-trivial undertaking. MPP is rarely used for ETL processing. Contemporary update: Hadoop and Hive are coming up fast to provide a viable solution in this space.

Reporting

It is easy to split reporting load into smaller chunks …

Few month ago I heard about some initial work on MySQL Proxy software by Jan Kneschke and I thought about implementing some type of MySQL Replication Aggregator based on this software. The idea was to create some piece of software which could get many replication streams, merge them and feed to some mysql slave. This software could be used for backup purposes and many other interesting things. But back then mysqlproxy distribution has been suspended (afaik, by MySQL AB because of some legal issues).

And at last, today MySQL Proxy project has been released to public and it became much more flexible so I think we need to take a look at it and try to implement such replication aggregator patches for it.

I just want to point you readers to Planet X-Tend, where a bunch of collegues are posting their muses and rants on different Open Source and related thingies, such as Xen, MySQL, OpenStreetMap, KVM, Fon and off course Linux in general.

Please note this late-breaking news related to this story. Then still please sign our letter! 15 years ago, with the release of Oracle 7.0.12, Oracle gave the world?or at least its customers?something really great: the Oracle Wait Interface (OWI). The OWI is one of the reasons that Oracle?s database product and its customer base are what they [...]

Building on the momentum created by OSS Camp-Mumbai, and having received very positive response from the OSS community -- a second Indian OSS Camp has been scheduled for September 8-9, 2007 in Delhi.

The Free Software Foundation today announced the finalized version of the long awaited GPL3 open software license.  This was pretty long in the making, more than 16 years since the prior release, but the process, led in large part by Eben Moglen, was deliberate with input from a broad range of users, vendors, developers and lawyers.  Pretty much anyone who wanted to comment on the GPL was able to.  MySQL participated in the process, both through David Axmark's early discussions and feedback as well as Kaj Arno's chairing of a subcommittee.  I'm also glad that the FSF took the extra time to address issues …

The other day I was looking for a open source, feature-rich, high performance ETL tool to use in an enterprise environment. I was disappointed nothing really seemed to match my requirements. Have I overlooked something or is this really a niche where there aren’t any viable projects? After looking in the usual places like sourceforge.net and doing a bunch of Google searches. I could not find any products that fit the bill. Here are (some of) my criteria:

• Fast. The candidate tool has to be able to move huge amounts of information between the source and target databases quickly.
• Flexible error handling. Data errors occur all the time, and when errors are encountered, we should be able to stop processing or log the error to a file or push the record into a violations table for subsequent processing. There are probably other popular strategies for handling errors, such as changing the offending data and trying to insert it …