Thanks to Google we have a few tech talks about MySQL. One talk about NDB and another about MySQL performance tuning.

I know this stuff and even I learned a few things.

I’m finally taking the time to continue this series =)

• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three <

Lyrics Grep

For testing purposes, I went ahead and scraped about 60,000 song lyrics off of a number of sites and developed a simple search engine for them. The script that did the scraping is pretty nasty (to handle equally nasty HTML that I had to parse through), so I’m going to refrain from posting that script and save myself some embarrassment. Make a pot of coffee, sit down, and write one yourself (or something else that’s similar enough).

Database Schema

I created a new database called lyricsgrep with the following simple …

I spent some time talking with Steven Grandchamp, CEO of OpenLogic, today, and am very glad I did. I've been operating under a two-years old understanding of OpenLogic's business, and it's time for an upgrade.

OpenLogic is not a "stack provider." Rather, it provides a gateway to a high-quality library of open source projects, certified to work together, with the ability to apply and enforce policies around adoption and deployment of those projects.

Interestingly, OpenLogic's technology isn't solely applicable to open source. It actually allows enterprises to extend the OpenLogic library with open source or proprietary modules (applications/databases/whatever) that they prefer. Enterprises, for example, may be an Oracle shop, and …

Let me preface this by saying this is my personal opinion and does not express any official MySQL standpoint.

While certainly not the first to issue the statement, "MySQL Is Not a Real Database", yesterday Dave Dargo, advisor to Ingres, blogged about his thoughts on why indeed MySQL is not a real database. Let me present my thoughts about this now-long-tired strain of thought.

Dave, while acknowledging that MySQL is "one of the most successful database systems out there", states the he holds self-evident that "MySQL is not a real database". I think Dave, and thousands of other professionals in our industry, are missing the point: MySQL isn't trying to conform to some decades-old definition of what is a "real" database. Why? Because we aren't stuck in the past; we're forging ahead with technology, concepts, and application …

MySQL and JasperSoft today announced a new OEM relationship. In fact, I think it's the first OEM deal that MySQL has done (InnoDB excepted). Is this a new trend for MySQL? For JasperSoft?

Here's the deal:

[The two companies announced the] availability of Jasper for MySQL: OEM Edition, a suite of operational reporting products that includes a high-performance interactive report server, a graphical report creation tool, and a pixel-perfect reporting system with dashboards, tables, crosstabs and charts.

The two companies have signed a joint reseller agreement that allows MySQL to offer the new product to its commercial ISV and OEM customers. JasperSoft will also have the right to resell MySQL's database solutions as part of the JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite.

With Jasper …

The UK government yesterday re-affirmed its position on software patents: it doesn't like them, and won't enforce them.

The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software. Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK....

The Government will...continue to exclude patents from areas where they may hinder innovation: including patents which are too broad, speculative, or obvious, or where the advance they make lies in an excluded area such as software.

Stiff upper lift wins out in the end. Silliness continues to reign supreme here in the US regarding software patents.

A few days ago, MySQL launched the Quality Contribution Program. The main purpose of that program is to improve the quality of submissions from active users. We published the rules, and soon we saw more reports coming our way, with better contents than usual.
The commotion happened yesterday evening, when I noticed a bug report that looked interesting. At a quick glance, it was. A clear description of the problem. Cool. An attached test case. Great! And a result file! Even better. And the closing remark, "See patch", was just too much to believe. So, there was a bug report telling us about a problem, including a clean way of reproducing it, and even saying where the problem is in the code and how to fix it!
It was already late in the day, but I told myself that it wouldn't take me too long to …

Performance optimization is never ending story, you can virtually always find something else to optimize but while on generic system, not tuned by expert you often can get significant performance increase in the matter of hours further performance improvements become more and more time consuming and expensive and gains smaller.

This observation does not only apply to MySQL but to systems running other databases or no database at all as well.

So how does System size come in play here ? Well it is system size and scale what may define how much performance you need to squeeze out, and also how your scaling is set up.

For smaller systems lets say running couple of MySQL servers running another couple can be cheaper than serious application changes and this can be good way to go if you're not expecting major growth.

This however implies two things - first you can scale system by adding more servers, because scaling up …

Solid contributes additional open source code…Medsphere releases Community Editions of OpenVista…Zenoss celebrates its one-year anniversary…and more…

Solid Contributes New Database Benchmark Suite to Open Source Community, Solid Information Technology (Press Release)

Medsphere Releases Community Editions of OpenVista EHR Platform, Medsphere Systems (Press Release)

Zenoss Marks One Year Anniversary on SourceForge.Net with 130K Downloads and Top Ranking Among Open Source IT Monitoring Projects, Zenoss (Press Release)

…

The two big changes in 0.5 are that I fixed a memory leak and it now has its own information schema table on statistics.

For example:
mysql> select * from information_schema.memcache_servers;
+----------------+-------+---------------+-------------+-------+---------------------+-------------------+-----------------------+------+------+------+--------+------------+---------------+----------------+
| NAME | COUNT | CURRENT_ITEMS | TOTAL_ITEMS | BYTES | CURRENT_CONNECTIONS | TOTAL_CONNECTIONS | CONNECTION_STRUCTURES | GETS | SETS | HITS | MISSES | BYTES_READ | BYTES_WRITTEN | LIMIT_MAXBYTES |
+----------------+-------+---------------+-------------+-------+---------------------+-------------------+-----------------------+------+------+------+--------+------------+---------------+----------------+
| localhost:6688 | 2 | 5 | 39 | 399 | 2 | 65 | 3 | 236 | 39 | 197 | 39 | 4669 | 9546 | 67108864 |
| …