Oh, the silly things incumbent vendors like to say about open source. One oft-repeated line from Oracle is that MySQL is "lightweight" or in some way inferior. If "inferior" means "routinely handles mission critical, backbreaking workloads that Oracle cannot muster or that no sane person would apply Oracle to," then, yes, I suppose it is lightweight.

As Zack just posted over on his blog, Pingdom did a survey of "massive" web sites (Meebo, YouSendIt, Alexaholic, TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto and Vimeo) to see what they're running. Six out of seven run LAMP, with MySQL being the "M."

So, again, if you've got a lot of money to spend, want to waste it on licenses, and don't need a best-in-class database, Oracle or DB2 might be for …

Somewhere in the last week I got a simple request, a user wanted table discovery for the memcached engine.

Both the Archive and Cluster engines support this.

Take an archive .ARZ table in 5.1, move it to another server. If you SELECT or INSERT off the table name it will be "discovered" immediately. The FRM just appears and everything just works (which means that yes in 5.1 all you have to do is save the ARZ file and you are set... no need for the FRM). Using archive_reader you can even make an online copy of the table (this was a feature request from one of the Livejournal developers last year at the user's conference).

Cluster has a similar mechanism. If you create a table on one front end MySQL server, all other MySQL servers that are talking to that cluster discover the table. The reason that this is possible is that the MySQL server just speaks to one cluster at a time.

The memcache …

Pingdom, an online web site monitoring service, surveyed 7 massive sites to determine what infrastructure software they're running.  The sites included Meebo, YouSendIt, Alexaholic, TechCrunch, FeedBurner, iStockPhoto and Vimeo, all of which are high volume Web 2.0 sites.  As it turns out the LAMP stack is being used in 6 out of 7 of these sites. According to the article, MySQL dominates the database selection among high volume web sites:

With open source ruling the game it shouldn?t come as a surprise that the database of choice for all but one of the sites is MySQL, the ultra-popular Swedish open-source database.

?The features that you get for free on MySQL, with replication, in-memory and fault-tolerant databases (if using MySQL cluster), transaction support, and the wicked performance, cost thousands of dollars with …

The price for a 160 Gbyte disk will be around USD 15'000. This is still a bit expensive. But the access time is around 0.5 ms (both for reading and writing) which is around 10 times faster than a normal 15'000 rpm SCSI disk! The disk has NO cache because it is a cache itself (according to the supplier. Maybe this will change in the future). And the lifetime of a cell is > 5 mio writes. For the same performance one needs usually an array of around 10 disks. If your database is heavily write-I/O bound you should consider this solution.

It's hardware that makes a machine fast. It's software that makes a fast machine slow --Craig Bruce

One of the most common activity in a data warehouse environment is loading data into the database. The volume of data to be loaded is large compared to a transaction processing system. Tens or hundreds of megabytes of data may be need to be loaded in a data warehouse environment from one file. Compare this to one transaction, which is probably less than a kilobyte, in the transaction processing environment. The large throughput required for data warehouse data loads is achieved by:

1. using database utilities built specifically for the purpose, as opposed to the common SQL INSERT command; and
   
2. aggressive parallelism: task, …

MySQL Table Checksum is a tool to efficiently verify the contents of any MySQL table in any storage engine. You can use it to compare tables across many servers at once. The output is friendly and easy to use, both by eyeball and in UNIX command-line scripts. The provided MySQL Checksum Filter helps you winnow output so you only see tables that have problems. MySQL Table Checksum Following up on my earlier article about how to calculate a table checksum in MySQL, I’ve integrated that methodology, with improvements suggested by the commenters and others, into a single easy-to-use tool.

Klick on the image for the story. :)

I'm a GNOME user, but on my brother's suggestion I tried Amarok a month or so ago, and never looked back. I've used most of the popular music players for linux as well as iTunes & WMP, and I'd actually call Amarok the best on any platform. It's not even close.

One really nice feature is the database integration. I think every application should have this option, and not just because I work for a database company. Amarok can keep all its information in a MySQL database, and that includes the song lyrics it pulls down from the web.

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