By Tim O'Reilly

Working to make clear that it is a database for the big boys, MySQL is running a series of posts on their web site called The Twelve Days of Scale Out. Each day features a different customer who has taken MySQL to the moon. Today's feature (Day 5) covers Wikipedia.

The page quotes Redmonk analyst Steven O'Grady:

"The notion persists within many traditional enterprises that once you reach a certain level of application importance, it is necessary to transition to big, expensive boxes running big, expensive databases. However, free-thinking members of their IT staffs are beginning to ask the question: 'What can we learn from Google, Yahoo, and Wikipedia …

I will be giving a 3 hour tutorial on July 23rd at this year's OSCON entitled "Target Practice: A Workshop in Tuning MySQL Queries". If you attended my tutorial last year, this one is quite different. It's much more of a workshop-type tutorial than last year's lecture-style tutorial, so there's loads of demos, code examples, and I'll have lots of goodies to pass out (books, shirts, etc) for folks who answer questions correctly or shout out interesting questions...

Here's a quick overview of the tutorial:

This tutorial is for all those database developer gun-slingers who want to rid their applications of poorly performing queries and their outlaw cousin, the inefficient schema.

Take aim at poor application performance by learning how to read and understand MySQL …

In the previous post I mentioned not all architectures and solutions work for Commodity People, and people seems to agree with me.
Number of vendors would claim they are in Commodity Software or Hardware business but few would probably mention they are doing it for Commodity People, because few people would like to be called commodity - each of us would like to rightfully think he is special and unique.

Thinking more about the topic I think being "Commodity People Friendly" is one of important properties for commodity products. Look for example at Dell HP or Whitebox x86 servers, they are not only cheaper but they are also easier to use than Mini Computer systems from IBM. Directly attached storage is more simple to use than SAN, MySQL is more simple to use than Oracle or DB2, PHP is more simple than Java.

Even for the same Vendors you can find commodity products are designed to use by commodity people - they tend to be …

I rarely see the point of posting the slides of a presentation for people who didn't see the original presentation. Yet, this is often requested. I don't have a problem with posting my latest slides (PDF, 2.9M), but they are of little value without context and I do have a problem with posting things of little value, so here's the context.

Slide 1

Welcome to my presentation about CouchDb. This is a ca. 80 minute ride through the world of non-relational data storage.

Slide 2

I'm Jan, from Münster, Germany. I'm a developer focussing mostly on the web. If time permits I'm studying computational linguistics. I mostly do freelancing consultance work on the web and gained experience with scaling high traffic LAMP sites doing that. I'm also the co-founder of freisatz, a company bringing typographic bliss to everyone.

I had little time and no internet while preparing the slides. …

Build notes and Tuning tips for Solaris

lighttpd seems to be increasingly popular, so much so that netcraft has started tracking it's use on production websites. I've spent some time building, tuning and running simple performance stress tests on lighttpd 1.4.15 on Solaris and thought I'd share what I learnt.

Building lighttpd

My build of lighttpd uses the openldap library from Cool Stack. I also built and installed pcre-7.1 in /opt/coolstack using the following script :

#!/bin/sh
INSTALLDIR=/opt/coolstack
CFLAGS="-fast -xipo -xtarget=generic"

make distclean
./configure --prefix=$INSTALLDIR CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
make
make install
…

Build notes and Tuning tips for Solaris

lighttpd seems to be increasingly popular, so much so that netcraft has started tracking it's use on production websites. I've spent some time building, tuning and running simple performance stress tests on lighttpd 1.4.15 on Solaris and thought I'd share what I learnt.

Building lighttpd

My build of lighttpd uses the openldap library from Cool Stack. I also built and installed pcre-7.1 in /opt/coolstack using the following script :

#!/bin/sh
INSTALLDIR=/opt/coolstack
CFLAGS="-fast -xipo -xtarget=generic"

make distclean
./configure --prefix=$INSTALLDIR CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
make
make install
…

So, I hear you ask (ask dagnammit!), what does a MySQL Cluster hacker do when not hacking MySQL Cluster?

Well,

Today, a box arrived:

I eagerly opened the box… eager for what was inside:

Hrrm… this does look promising! Quickly I turned it all up the right way:

It’s here! It’s here! Only about a month after Michael got his copies! Gah international shipping (and moving addresses) can be casually annoying sometimes. But anyway, it’s here, it looks sweet and now I can go set up a …

In the first two articles in this series, I discussed archiving basics, relationships and dependencies, and specific archiving techniques for online transaction processing (OLTP) database servers. This article covers how to move the data from the OLTP source to the archive destination, what the archive destination might look like, and how to un-archive data. If you can un-archive easily and reliably, a whole new world of possibilities opens up.

In MyISAM, we do have LOAD INDEX INTO CACHE. In InnoDB this does not work. For benchmarking I often require a way to preload the innodb_buffer_pool with the primary key and data after a server restart to shorten warmup phases.

According to Blackhole Specialist Kai, the following should work: CODE:mysql> create table t like innodbtable;
mysql> alter table t engine = blackhole;
mysql> insert into t select * from innodbtable; Another win for the unbreakable BLACKHOLE storage engine.

MySQL’s latest advertising campaign (called “The 12 Days of Scaleout“) is getting a bit of a kicking in the MySQL blog space.

I am sure that this is slightly uncomfortable for the MySQL team, but at the same time the team is lucky that people who care about MySQL still take the time to explain what they don’t like.

Perhaps it would be a good time for them to go back and add some meat to the case studies?

…