MySQL AB today published a "Do's & Don'ts" summary article on the 'Top 5 Common Scale-Out Pitfalls to Avoid' -- based on the real-world experiences of the vendor's veteran professional services team. These database experts have helped countless businesses manage their 'growing pains' and be more successful with their scale-out solutions through consulting engagements. They have seen many companies fall into a few common traps when they first design their systems, only to run into performance issues once the explosive growth hits.

The full article is available here.

We live in a world full of truly lousy people.  I know this based on the amount of porn pingback and trackbacks I'm getting on this blog.  I don't yet know how to solve this so, for now, I'm turning those off.

I’ve just posted slides and (rather) rough presenter notes and image credits for my Age of Literate Machines presentation.

These are still draft slides. I’ll be working on an improved version in the coming weeks and months.

Many thanks to all who have sat through drafts of the talk (DES, Jen, Hilde, Markus, Monty, Rory, Tony).

• The Age of Literate Machines - Rough speaker?s notes and image credits (PDF)
• The Age of Literate …

Using MEMORY tables in MySQL is very useful; they are stored in memory and they are usually not so big in order to avoid a huge utilization of RAM. They are very fast.

MEMORY tables are often used to store session user data, chat messages and to store small frames of data from a bigger table in order to achieve great performance.

But, if you use them in a replication environment, you can have some problem due to their "volatility"; MEMORY table rows are lost when the server shuts down.

If you restart a slave host for some reason, you will have empty MEMORY tables on it, while the master host will have the correct ones.

How to populate automatically MEMORY tables at slave start up copying data from master host?

We could use something like LOAD TABLE table_name FROM MASTER, but it's deprecated, so we will use something else.

I have developed a stored procedure you have to create on the …

Using MEMORY tables in MySQL is very useful; they are stored in memory and they are usually not so big in order to avoid a huge utilization of RAM. They are very fast.

MEMORY tables are often used to store session user data, chat messages and to store small frames of data from a bigger table in order to achieve great performance.

But, if you use them in a replication environment, you can have some problem due to their “volatility”; MEMORY table rows are lost when the server shuts down.

If you restart a slave host for some reason, you will have empty MEMORY tables on it, while the master host will have the correct ones.

How to populate automatically MEMORY tables at slave start up copying data from master host?

We could use something like LOAD TABLE table_name FROM MASTER, but it’s deprecated, so we will use something else.

I have developed a stored procedure you have to create on …

One of the challenges we sometimes have at MySQL is that our audience is very broad.  We get hundreds of thousands of page views every day and the interests span a wide range.  That's one of the reasons we created the Developer Zone http://www.dev.mysql.com so that it would be easy for developers to find downloads, documentation and technical articles.  In effect, people who are alergic to buzzwords like ROI, TCO and CIO could bypass the home page and just stick to the technical content on the dev zone. 

Earlier this week, we launched a PR campaign called the 12 Days of Scale Out on our web site in order to highlight some examples of customers who have built very large applications or web sites using MySQL, such as Booking.com, Alcatel, Wikipedia, Zimbra, etc.  The content was targeted towards business …

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
…

it?s another month, so time for another connector/odbc release.

there?s already three bug fixes that have been committed to the repository for the next release, and the changes to support building on windows x64 should land soon.

we?re down to about 130 open bugs, about 20 less than the last release. some of those were newly fixed, and some were closed because they duplicated earlier problems that had already been fixed. this release does close another bug that is nearly three years old.

one of the things i hope to get fixed for the next release is being able to specify the default character set for the connection. you can?t do this now, so when developers try to use a different default character set …

I've had the site turned off for sometime now.  I just redirected requests for www.bytefx.com to www.bytefx.com/blog.  However, I've been interested lately in putting up some new content so I decided to reactivate the site and thought it would be a good idea to move to the latest version of DotNetNuke.

Well, the first attempt left the side disabled giving some error in the version 4.4 db script about an integer value.  I was  unable to find the error in the log so I'm not sure what the problem was.  So, from there I manually deleted all the database tables and procedures and attempted to setup the "New Install" package of DNN.  Same problem.  Frustrated and wondering if Community Server would setup easier, I tried one last time.  This time I set the objectQualifer to 'dnn4_'.  This is …

We're happy to announce that we have some new members of the Open Sources team of masked banditos. Zack Urlocker of MySQL Savio Rodrigues from IBM Dave Dargo, man of mystery and intrigue Zack started the ball rolling with a post on his recent trip to China.... READ MORE