In the last month we've had two updates of new transactional storage engines for MySQL.  Falcon, the new storage engine developed by DBMS guru Jim Starkey is now in Alpha.  And PBXT, from Paul McCullugh at PrimeBase has a new Beta available with referential integrity.  Both use the new storage engine facilities of MySQL 5.1 and are important developments giving more choice to developers building transactional applications.  I'm sure there will be more information on these and other storage engines at the …

OK, I am in Stockholm, at a development meeting. Stockholm is a nice city. It has soul, and it is smart. Probably the best European capital I've been to.

This is my first impression - so far I've seen only a few quarters and the road from the airport. But something tells me it'll stay that way. Maybe I need not see the city and an image is ready made. I like the roads, the houses with walls that are 4-5 bricks thick. And it's the first airport with oaken parquetry floors I've been to.

Tomorrow is a day to revisit some prehistoric server problems, such as Bug#989. Need to get back to preparing my lot.

PS I can't make my P990 work with Linux. So no photographs until I get back home.

I already wrote kind of about same topic a while ago and now interesting real life case makes me to write again

Most Web applications we're working with have single tier web architecture, meaning there is just single set of apache servers server requests and nothing else - no dedicated server for static content, no squid in front nothing else. This architecture is frequently used even for medium size web sites which have millions of page views per day.

Typically single Apache server in this configuration will have rather high MaxClients settings (in hundreds) and would argue web site performance suffers if the value is decreased, only few however understand why they need MaxClients to be set to some high number. …

Q: Will future versions of mysqlnd support PHP 5?
A: Yes, future versions of mysqlnd will support PHP 5.

However, currently we focus all our development efforts on implementing core functionality like Unicode support and support for Prepared Statements. The reason is that we do not want to be distracted by differences between PHP 5 and PHP 6 at the moment. Once the missing core functionality has been implemented, we will try to port mysqlnd to PHP 5. There is no time plan for PHP 5 support, but we see the need for it.

Thanks to both Ilia and Andi for pointing out that we had forgotten to explain our PHP 5 plans in the announcement of mysqlnd!

Q: Will future versions of mysqlnd support PHP 5?
A: Yes, future versions of mysqlnd will support PHP 5.

However, currently we focus all our development efforts on implementing core functionality like Unicode support and support for Prepared Statements. The reason is that we do not want to be distracted by differences between PHP 5 and PHP 6 at the moment. Once the missing core functionality has been implemented, we will try to port mysqlnd to PHP 5. There is no time plan for PHP 5 support, but we see the need for it.

Thanks to both Ilia and Andi for pointing out that we had forgotten to explain our PHP 5 plans in the announcement of mysqlnd!

Larry Augustin was in town over the weekend, so we met up at Deer Valley for lunch and gossip. We then spent a half-hour talking through the different licensing models available to open source software vendos, and their relative merits/demerits. (No wonder Larry's wife and daughter got bored and left. ;-)

The core question up for discussion? Is 100% free source software the best model for any software vendor? I went into it wanting to say 'Yes,' but left wondering.

First off, we identified a range of strategies/services a vendor can offer that fall between a pure support model and a pure proprietary license model. Look around at many open source companies (and virtually all proprietary software companies), and you notice, as Larry said, a …

Hey all -

Just wanted to thank everyone who has been using and testing the new Falcon transaction storage engine. Our first alpha release was downloaded over 52,000 times in January alone. Be looking for a new alpha release soon that has some performance improvements and other changes.

Also, I just started a new 3-part article series on Falcon that goes through the engine in detail, so be sure to check out part 1 on our articles page when you get a chance.

Thanks again - and be sure to shoot me your feedback (both good and bad) on Falcon.

On Tuesday our CIO, Johann-Peter Hartmann, gave a Web-seminar about security issues in the Web 2.0 era. We had about 140 participants and some very good questions in the following Q&A Session. We would like to thank you for the response and also we´d like to thank Jürgen from MySQL, our webinar-host.

We uploaded our slides as promised. To download them, click here.

If you missed the Web-Seminar you get a chance to see the recording of it here.
But be aware: It´s in german!!!

For english readers/speakers: Johann held an english security talk some time ago. Find it here

We already heard that …

So it's been a very long time again between posts. So much has happened. Let me first begin by saying that I am very impressed with iSCSI performance and I believe that it is mature enough to actually run production workloads (but it really depends on the type of workload).

After all of the benchmarking and analysis, we finally decided on moving forward with a purchase of an iSCSI storage solution. For the types of queries we run (large amount of records to scan, small resultset returned) we had to tweak the schema just a bit in order to realize the performance that we desired (that plus good quality fibre-channel drives to get that extra oomph that's needed).

Bottom line is we had to make a significant investment in hardware in order to realize the benefits of having a proper storage solution in place. The benefits though outweigh the overwhelming maintenance required to keep all of the machines running. Backups using …

Registration is now open for the 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo, which will take place April 23-26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, California. The conference is poised to offer more than 110 sessions and tutorials geared to show participants how to rapidly build innovative database applications that can scale as an enterprise grows. Attendees that take advantage of early registration by March 14th can save $200 off the standard conference fee of $1195.