Sometimes the NDBAPI is not perhaps the most straightforward. This might be useful if you are struggling with scan filters (filtering tuples in the ndbd kernel, like engine-condition-pushdown) in combination with strings. Please have a look at my previous blog about how to use strings in the NDBAPI.

If you are using string daratypes with the NdbScanFilter::COND_EQ then the following rules applies:

• VARCHAR and VARBINARY strings must have their length prepended (1 or 2 bytes)
• CHAR must be space padded
• BINARY must be null byte padded
  

However, for NdbScanFilter::COND_LIKE the following applies:

• VARCHAR and VARBINARY must NOThave the lenght prepended!
• CHAR must NOT be space padded
• BINARY must NOT be null byte padded

Many thanks to Pekka (MySQL) and Jim Dowling (MySQL) on this subject.

The test results that I have generated before (see my previous post) did not really help me in reaching my project goal, which is to make it possible to predict SQLbusRT's performance, reliability and scalability when it is used in an application.

In my new strategy I'm gonna take one step at a time to put the different components of SQLbusRT to the test.

My first upcoming test will involve sending messages back and forth between two processes, using the ORTE communication bus. This way, I can really measure ORTE's performance and reliability alone, without influence of MySQL. I will perform this test in different scenario's which will let me determine the scalability as well.

After having processed the results of these tests, I will include MySQL. Making these separate tests will let me determine the influence of ORTE and MySQL separately.

The new test results will of course be posted …

Today we announced a partnership with Microsoft. The goal of this technical collaboration is to make PHP on Windows a first class citizen. It has always been our goal to make PHP run well on any platform, and this initiative reinforces that. Both companies have also observed huge interest both from the community and our respective customers bases in good PHP support on Windows, and therefore, collaborating on making this happen is a no-brainer for both.

This is actually not the first time where PHP and Windows have crossed paths. Five years ago, Microsoft invited the PHP development team to come to Redmond and spend a week in their labs to optimize PHP on Windows. Zeev, Shane Caraveo and myself represented the PHP team. We actually made quite a few significant improvements but since that time, there hasn't been much focus on making PHP run well on Windows. Also, five years ago the team that invited us Redmond didn't have very much of …

MySQL AB Licenses Hyperic IT Management Technology, MySQL (Press Release)

Hyperic Gives ISVs Enterprise-Class IT Management Capability with New OEM Partner Program, Hyperic (Press Release)

Medsphere Expands Management Team To Support Growing Market Interest in OpenVista Electronic Health Record System, Medsphere (Press Release)

Helmi Technologies Joins Open Source Collaborative Eclipse Foundation, Helmi Technologies (Press Release)

Bostech’s New ChainBuilder ESB Enables Communication Between Applications in a …

Jason McCabe Calacanis (Weblogs) writes about this... Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) does not want to have *any* advertising, even if all of the proceeds were to go to worthy causes.

Is there anything wrong with that? Jason appears to think so, pleading with Jimmy to reconsider. There'll even be free bandwidth chucked in. But that's a catch... Jimmy does not want to be dependent on anyone else for hardware or bandwidth, Wikipedia has had fab offers from a variety of companies with great infrastructure. Other people are commenting to that blog post also, some reckon that Jimmy might change his mind "for the right price". I'm pondering... is it really so hard to understand -or at least appreciate and respect- that some people have certain guiding principles and actually stick with them - no price? Are we really so …

As I hinted at a couple of weeks ago, MySQL has incorporated the SIGAR (System Information Gathering and Reporting) technology into our MySQL Network Monitoring and Advisory Service.  SIGAR gives us a portable way to gether low-level system information so that it can be incorporated into our overall monitoring and advisory service. For example, you can have custom rules and alerts that are based on information from the MySQL Server, from the operating system through SIGAR and so on. 

We've been working with Hyperic for a long time and they have proven to be extremely responsive to any changes needed and in pointing out the best way to leverage the SIGAR API. (That is, they never tell us to …

Well, the new Quad Xeon 64-bit Intel XServes are shipping November 2006, so there are deals to be found on PowerPC XServes on eBay. We needed another XServe to add to our few G4 XServes, so we decided to get the fastest machine we could on eBay and use it as our dedicated MySQL server instead of the G4. We got a good deal on a cluster Dual 2.0 GHz G5 on eBay recently. It came with 10.3 Panther Server, but we want to use Tiger and I don't want to pay $499 for OS X Server Tiger right now (I'll wait a year when they are going to be $149 long after Leopard Server has shipped). So we are going to use Tiger 10.4 client on this headless G5 XServe. This article documents some of the details in getting this set up......

Well, the new Quad Xeon 64-bit Intel XServes are shipping November 2006, so there are deals to be found on PowerPC XServes on eBay. We needed another XServe to add to our few G4 XServes, so we decided to get the fastest machine we could on eBay and use it as our dedicated MySQL server instead of the G4. We got a good deal on a cluster Dual 2.0 GHz G5 on eBay recently. It came with 10.3 Panther Server, but we want to use Tiger and I don't want to pay $499 for OS X Server Tiger right now (I'll wait a year when they are going to be $149 long after Leopard Server has shipped). So we are going to use Tiger 10.4 client on this headless G5 XServe. This article documents some of the details in getting this set up......

Christof Wittig, CEO of db4o, and former student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, has written an excellent follow-up to his original MySQL case study.

Christof does a great job of tracing the challenges facing MySQL, as well as the way the company has successfully responded to many of them. He also identifies an interesting, parallel trend to how Linux spread:

The first enterprise-wide users of MySQL were Internet-enabled start-up companies which turned to free open source software stacks such as LAMP to get their business off the ground. These companies not only saw the lower cost advantages of open source, but also valued the ability to modify parts of the underlying software to differentiate themselves in …

We’ve been experimenting lately with database partitioning (in version 2.3.2-dev, make sure to update your kettle.jar to the latest snapshot). In our context, database partitioning means that we divide our data over a cluster of several databases.

A typical way of doing that is that you divide the customer_id by the number of hosts in the cluster and get the remainder. If the remainder is 0, you store the data on the first host in the cluster, 1 for the second, 2 for the third, etc.

This sort of thing is something that we’ve been implementing in Kettle for the last couple of weeks. The reasoning is simple: if one database is not up to the task, split the load over 2 or 5 or 10 databases on any amount of hosts.  ( Now imagine all the PCs at work all running an in-memory database )
Besides small changes to the Kettle transformation …