If you’re not using replication, the only thing you have to worry about is MyISAM and InnoDB performance. There are a lot of things you can easily do to get more (or less!) performance out of either of them. So, you get your system tuned and handling 1500 updates per second, easy as pie. You’ve got a single IDE, SATA, or SCSI disk, or maybe two using software RAID.

Then, due to natural progression, needed scalability, or catastrophic failure, you realize that you should probably be using replication, so that you can have more than one of these systems working at once.

The first step in setting up replication is normally to turn on binary logging (by enabling log-bin) on the future master. This ensures that every change to the database is logged so that it can be sent to your future slaves and executed there. Here, though, you find your first obstacle.

You enable binary logging, and all of the sudden, performance goes …

United Drugs had occasion to use the Synchronization Manager in production at this year’s convention. Mark Thomas (of United Drugs) and the MaxDB team at MySQL have been getting a use case document together to present the experiences. We had a great deal of help from the SyncMan dev team at SAP Berlin and Chris Hall of Just 4 Dental (who, by the way, also uses the Synchronization Manager in production).

I think the document has come together well and does a good job of describing what the industry can expect out of the Syncronization Manager in its current form. It should also be noted that this document has been presented to SAP Berlin and that many of the issues that have been brought to light have been addressed in the most …

Yes, for you replication lovers on MS platform, who had great time with MsSQL and MySQL's replication now Slony (replication engine for PostgreSQL) is here.
See the original blog post by Robert Treat (with installation guide). A prebuilt windows binary is available here.

The MySQL Sandbox has been enhanced, with a new express installer, capable of setting up a sandbox in just a few seconds, and an interactive wizard, for fine tuning complex installations.
A lengthty tutorial is accompanying the new release.

This tool could be the basis for a long overdue interactive installation tool for Unix systems. What do you think?

Hello all! Had a good webinar today, with some great questions. Here are the slides in PDF format:

PDF version of Performance Tuning Best Practices

I finally realised and it's so true. People don't buy open source because the opensource companies don't give free movie tickets, iPods, Moutain bikes, City Trips , the proprietary companies do.. the hardware companies do, but the people that sell open source services don't.

I remember a couple of years ago when working for one of the larger mobile operators in Belgium and we had to decide on some new platforms.. the technical people were invited to some technical sessions 5km from our office by different vendors. We actually had already decided without those sessions by marketeers that didn't even knew the answers to our questions. But.. the management got invited to a full week visit to some manufacturer in California , when they came back we were not even heard about our opinions.. the deals were already closed. And it wasn't our choice.

In other unrelated news I finally found time to upgrade a MySQL Cluster test platform to …

I didn’t really know that the Open Source Developers’ Club actually existed, but I’m impressed with the previous topics. I shall aim to be at Ben Cornwell’s MySQL Normalization & Optimisation Techniques talk if time permits on the 14th of June.

Maybe as pre-requsite reading, it might be useful for folk to read mhillyer’s excellent introductory article on Database Normalization.

I spent some time with Ingres CTO Dave Dargo today talking about Ingres and the market in general. Dave was at Oracle for many moons and is definitely one of the important database thinkers.

My initial conversation question to Dave was simple: Why does Ingres matter?

Dargo responded that he joined because Ingres had some good technology and a strong customer base. He also said that market-wise database customers were not terribly pleased with the existing products from Oracle and Microsoft.

"The success of Linux and Apache emboldened people to experiment with open source. Customers felt like they could go with free and not get features, or go with closed and be stuck. Ingres was already through the maturity process and had better technology than the other open source databases. I wanted to take Ingres beyond the database. If you look at MySQL and EnterpriseDB, …

One of the main reasons to use a MySQL Cluster is the ability to get better performance and scalability compared to using a database that is confined to a single host. This chapter discusses many of the concepts related to performance and scalability, as well as how to ensure that you get the maximum performance from your MySQL Cluster setup.