For those who have been asking me about downloading Falcon (or any development tree), Bitmover has posted a new free client on their website:

http://www.bitkeeper.com/Hosted.Downloading.html

To download the falcon tree grab the client and then do the following to grab the falcon source:

bkf clone bk://mysql.bkbits.net:8080/mysql-5.2-falcon mysql-5.2-falcon

The BUILD directory has a number of our build scripts in it that we use to build binaries, so you may want to consider looking in the directory and executing the appropriate script ( I use compile-amd64- debug-falcon).

After I published my article on how to build MySQL with the new Falcon storage engine from source, the free BitKeeper client was updated to version 2.0. I have now updated the instructions accordingly, our manual has been updated to reflect these changes, too.

However, it is currently still not possible to clone the Falcon tree with this client, some kind of obscure locking error message appears, even though the admin console on bkbits.net does not reveal any active locks in the repository:

$ bkf clone bk:// …

After I published my article on how to build MySQL with the new Falcon storage engine from source, the free BitKeeper client was updated to version 2.0. I have now updated the instructions accordingly, our manual has been updated to reflect these changes, too.

However, it is currently still not possible to clone the Falcon tree with this client, some kind of obscure locking error message appears, even though the admin console on bkbits.net does not reveal any active locks in the repository:

$ bkf clone bk:// …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Now that the source tree for the new Falcon Storage Engine is finally public, here's a quick HOWTO on how to compile the server from source. This procedure is described in more detail in the MySQL Manual. I assume you use Linux and have the required development toolchain installed.

You first should get the free BK client from http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar, unpack and install it:

$ wget http://www.bitmover.com/bk-client2.0.shar
--17:34:34--   …

Hi All -

Just a note to let you know that I’ve written a couple of new white papers that will help you get up to speed on our new transactional storage engine, code-named Falcon. The first is a technical overview of the engine, with a comparison between it and some of the other MySQL storage engines. The second is a getting started guide, which will help walk folks through installing, configuring, and using (creating tables, working with the locking modes, backup/recovery, etc.) Falcon.

You can find both papers on the White Papers section of our web site. Falcon is available via source right now, with binaries coming soon to our download page.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

We're happy to announce Andrew Aksyonoff, developer of popular OpenSource full text search software Sphinx joins our team.

Andrew will now have more time to dedicate to Sphinx development so cool new features will come sooner.

Having Andrew on board we'll be able to solve all kinds of problems related to full text search, tagging and general information retrieval.

It does not mean we'll push sphinx ether it suits your needs well or it does not. Sphinx is great for high performance high quality or complex full text search applications - but If you're looking at smaller search applications we can help you getting most of MySQL build in full text search. If there are some features which are missing in Sphinx or it is not best solution for your application for other reasons we can help you with using Lucene or other external search system.

Finally having …

Several days ago MySQL AB made new storage engine Falcon available for wide auditory. We cannot miss this event and executed several benchmarks to see how Falcon performs in comparison to InnoDB and MyISAM.
The second goal of benchmark was a popular myth that MyISAM is faster than InnoDB in reads, as InnoDB is transactional, supports Foreign Key and has an operational overhead. As you will see it is not always true.

For benchmarks I used our PHPTestSuite which allows to test wide range tables and queries.
The script and instruction are available here:
http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/files/benchmarks/phptestsuite.stable.tar.gz

We used table "normal" table structure which corresponds to typical structure you would see in OLTP or Web applications - medium size rows, auto increment primary key …

Today I set up a mysqld connected to my not-quite-HA cluster at home here to replicate from my MythTV database into cluster. The idea behind this is to eat an increasing amount of my own dogfood around the house.

To do this, I also set up the MySQL Instance Manager to manage the now multiple instances of MySQL Servers on a box here. I found it a pain to do, it should be a lot simpler, but isn’t. At least now things are going okay…. but the feature wish list I have is rather long (perhaps I should hack some stuff up in this “spare time” i’ve been hearing so much about).

I’m also about 10 minutes (or however long the build takes) off moving one of the data nodes off the machine so it will be a real 2 node system (but I still have to move the management server to a third machine to have any real HA… and I have a PowerPC machine marked for that, I just have to await some patches to make it work :)

Currently …

I've made the 1.0 release I promised yesterday. I am very happy to declare innotop production-ready and stable. In this article I talk a little bit about my plans for the future, and look back to the project's humble beginnings as a script I ran inside watch. Check out the screenshot! OMG!