So, a number of folks wanted more meaty content than was being offered in the CIO-targeted MySQL marketing campaign recently, "The Twelve Days of MySQL Scale-Out". I wanted to write a blog entry which addressed this carnivorous appetite of the MySQL community by going into a discussion on what precisely this term "scale-out" means.

Comparisons of Scaling Out versus Scaling Up

What is scaling anyway? Simply put, it's the ability of an application to address growth in throughput, usage, and capacity. Both scale out and scale up strategies address the ability of a system to address this growth. I think there is a …

It has gotten a bit quiet around the MySQL Proxy over the last weeks, but I can assure you it was worth it.

Here in my hands I hold MySQL Proxy 0.5.0. Not just some binaries, no everything with sources. As always it is dual licensed under the GPL and commercial MySQL license. We worked hard to get everything ready for the release: the wiki, the forums, the public SVN trees ...

The proxy can do magic. Put in your ideas and say the magic words and there ... it works. :)

The proxy is fully scripted now which opens up the proxy to your ideas. The possibilities are endless. I can think of at least of the following features:

• load balancing
• fail over handling
• query analysis
• SQL macros
• query rewriting
• .... much more

The proxy started as side project of me and is now evolved into a full MySQL project maintained by the …

For the curious, the slides for the eLiberatica 2007 presentations are now up at http://eliberatica.ro/2007/ - the slides include presentations from eZ CEO Aleksander Farstad, Brian Behlendorf, FSF Europe President Georg Greve, Ubuntist Kurt von Finck and MySQL co-founder Monty Widenius (and yours truly, but the slides are a bit weak - check out my …

So, now I am working on this project. This project is a part of google SoC. I believe in the end it should be something like mysql workbench, but web-two-zerofied. At current moment there is not much to look into (http://myweber.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/). But I will be very grateful to you for any comments, questions and suggestions.

mysql> CREATE TABLE innodb_string_test (h varchar(512) ) TYPE=INNODB;
Query OK, 0 rows affected, 2 warnings (0.55 sec)

mysql> show warnings;
+---------+------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Level   | Code | Message                                                                  |
+---------+------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Warning | 1246 | Converting column 'h' from CHAR to TEXT                                  |
| Warning | 1287 | 'TYPE=storage_engine' is deprecated; use 'ENGINE=storage_engine' instead |
+---------+------+--------------------------------------------------------------------------+
2 rows in set (0.00 sec)

Technically innodb supports defining varchar's greater then 255 characters (utf8 are double bytes so don't assume that 255 characters mean bytes-FYI). …

It's hard to believe I'm back. It's so quiet here.

Saturday morning, it took too long for the hotel clerks to check us out. They'd screwed up my credit card, krow's credit card, messed up their room reservation log, and so forth. And we needed at least the receipt for krow's corporate card before we left. (I let them handle mine off-line. If they screw it up, I just dispute the charge and wash my hands.)

The session about non-relational databases was interesting. The guy from Twitter talked about their queue db. They are using the memcached wire protocol to talk to it! Dabble talked about their neat little cheat, where they don't actually have a …

Just wanted to say thanks to the many of you that responded to my recent MySQL on Windows article that was posted two weeks ago. Without a doubt, this article has caused more feedback than any other piece I’ve written for our Dev/Community zone.

If haven’t read the article yet and you’re using MySQL on Windows now, or you’ve been thinking about it, please check it out and shoot me your thought on MySQL for WIN (what you like, hate, how you’d make it better, etc.)

Thanks!

Because I’m busy today, here’s what the announcement looks like (kudos to my colleagues Larry and Daniel for coming up with the following):

MySQL AB is very grateful for our very large Community, and it is important to us to meet and support our users! So we are happy to announce that Colin Charles, MySQL Community Relations Manager, APAC, will be visiting the following locations to meet with MySQL users.

Colin will be prepared to discuss the following with you:

• How to start your own user group
• Review of technical questions and issues
• The MySQL product roadmap and future directions
• MySQL product architecture

You can meet with Colin and speak to him one-on-one during following dates:

• Kuala Lumpur / June 27- July 12, 2007
• Singapore / July 4 - 6th, 2007
• Tokyo / September 11-12th, 2007
• Beijing / September …

Did you know that MySQL supports:

DELETE FROM t1 ORDER BY a;
?

MySQL manual says:
If the ORDER BY clause is specified, the rows are deleted in the order that is specified.

You can use stored functions and subselects there too if you like.

I should start using this feature immediately.

Samsung has announced a new line of 64G SSDs for use in consumer laptops. Nice to see innovation but I REALLY want to see more SSDs in the server space.

I JUST want to use a CHEAP 2-5G SSD for write ahead and binary logs. I just need 1k write ops per second with a SATA interface. Then I could drop them in cheap commodity servers and get a significant performance boost. My disks would still use software RAID 0 (at least until I replace this partitioning) but only store data.

Give me one of these for $50 to $100 and I’ll buy one with ever server.

The fsync’s required for writing to disks on INNODB can really hurt performance. My bet …