Sun just post SpecjAppserver2004 with a very excellent result of 712.87 SPECjAppserver 2004 JOPS@Standard using the latest SJSAS 9.0 Platform Edition on Sun Fire X4100 Cluster with MySQL 5.0.20 yesterday(Also check out Tom Daly's blog, Scott Oak's blog and Robert Lee's blog for more information)

SPECjAppserver is industry standard benchmark for performance testing J2EE application server. As part of important component of SPECjAppserver testing, database's performance and scalability also greatly affect the overall performance result in …

As you know MyISAM does not cache data, only indexes. MyISAM assumes OS cache is good enough and uses pread/pwrite system calls for reading/writing datafiles. However OS is not always good in this task, my benchmarks show Linux/Solaris aren't scalable on intensive pread calls (I believe the same for Windows, but I did not test it).
In 5.1 I implemented a new feature: memory mapping for the datafiles. That can be enabled by --myisam_use_mmap=1 startup option.
In this case instead of systems call MyISAM will use memcpy function. There is a memory addressing limit for 32bit platforms - 2Gb, so the datafiles over 2GB will be used the old way - pread/pwrite functions. Mmap is available on all POSIX-compatible platforms. It will work faster for SELECT/UPDATE/INSERT inside file queries, and no performance gain (maybe a bit slower) for INSERT at the end of file. In case with INSERT at the end of file we have …

SNORT developer Sourcefire closed a $20 million Series D round of venture capital led by late-stage specialist Meritech Capital Partners of Palo Alto, Calif., to boost its balance sheet and position the company for an initial public offering as early as the end of this year.

Will Sourcefire IPO before MySQL?

Link: Sourcefire gets second wind

In this article I’ll show several ways to emulate a FULL OUTER join on a RDBMS that doesn’t support it, as is the case with even the most recent versions of MySQL. This useful query is surprisingly tricky to get right. Introduction A standard SQL FULL OUTER join is like a LEFT or RIGHT join, except that it includes all rows from both tables, matching them where possible and filling in with NULLs where there is no match.

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