One thing I have been really impressed with Portland, Oregon, so far is the excellent light rail system they have serving the downtown area. There is a noticeable difference between Columbus and Portland in both the level of air pollution and the amount of traffic congestion (extremely low) in the downtown area because of free light rail service in the downtown area for all. This is something I really wish that Columbus will have implemented. Columbus spent around 29 million dollars over the last five to seven years "investigating" a light rail solution (that they later said was unrealizable). Such a shame. The Portland downtown is a shining example of what can be done when people put their minds together and work towards a set of environmentally friendly, yet economically viable, goals. Kudos to the city of Portland.

Anyway, I had a great time last night having dinner with a bunch of MySQLers at a local Portland …

I'm listening to Scott Yara talk about Greenplum's commercialization of the PostgreSQL database, and comparing it to what Paul Weinstein (EVP, Business Development, MySQL). I had always viewed the two projects - MySQL and PostgreSQL - as direct competitors, and figured both were also competing with DB2 and Oracle. This is clearly not the case, at least, not for these two companies.

Who does MySQL compete with? With no one. Marten is on the record as saying that

We continue to have most of our deployments in areas where there was no database before. Either the application didn't use a database earlier, or the application is new. We are now seeing more and more migrations from old …

I have been trying to compile super-smack, a benchmarking tool for MySQL, on a Solaris 10 box but compiling super-smack fails with the following message(s):

###################
[root@db:/home/me/benchmarking/super-smack-1.3] ./configure --with-mysql=/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql
checking for a BSD-compatible install... ./install-sh -c
checking whether build environment is sane... yes
checking whether make sets $(MAKE)... no
checking for working aclocal... missing
checking for working autoconf... missing
checking for working automake... missing
checking for working autoheader... missing
checking for working makeinfo... missing
checking for sh... /bin/bash
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... cc
checking for C compiler default output file name... configure: error: C compiler cannot create executables
See `config.log' for more details.
…

Fabrizio has one of the best posts I've yet seen on open source licensing. It's one of the most candid posts I've ever seen on open source licensing (and candor is something all software companies need - open and closed).

Fabrizio traces the contours of open source licensing, honing in on dual licensing strategies. He astutely observes that a dual-license strategy works well for MySQL (or a product that is embeddable), because there the "trigger" is clear: you either pay your way out of the GPL (or similarly restrictive license) or you contribute code back. Simple.

Open source applications, as Fabrizio notes, are different. There is no obvious trigger (You'll need to read Fabrizio's post to discover the non-obvious trigger that he comes up with) for either contributing back or buying. So what do you do?

In Alfresco's case, …

"Pageviews per kilowatt-hour (kWh)"Noted by Jim Buckmaster (Craigslist), they keep getting kicked out of colocation sites. I've heard this a lot lately, the biggest headache at highly scaled sites is the power consumption of all the server hardware. Perhaps it's simply a side-effect of the horizontal scaling (scale-out): lots of cheaper machines, rather than some big iron (but the latter is not affordable, and might not be suitable for this kind of job anyway).

So the challenge lies with chip manufactureres (CPU, RAM) and hardware companies: provide high performance with lower power consumption. One can probably simply look at 64-bit CPUs there, with the memory addressing capabilities and relative low cost (AMD Opterons being ahead right now, but Intel is coming out with new stuff), 32-bit for this type of server won't make much sense any more. Of course this is when talking …

This morning's elevator talk snippet (at OSCON)"So, which database do you use?"
"Yes."Turns out this company uses pretty much (each where appropriate) all - except Sybase, for whatever reason...
It was someone from whitepages.com.

Right now I'm in Tim O'Reilly's executive briefing which is a new separate event at OSCON. The first panel is on the impact of open source on web 2.0. Guests are Jim Buckmaster (CEO of Craigslist), Chris DiBona (Google), Jeremy Zawodny (Yahoo!). During their intro, they were actually arguing over who used MySQL the most ;-)
Jeremy reckoned it was Yahoo!, but you never know with Google. Craigslist is interesting in another way also. When looking at big succesful companies, most have thousands …

Thank you for the replies to my previous post.

However, let me rephrase the question:

I have a table of type MyISAM that is reporting 47 million rows when I do a SELECT COUNT(*). When I convert this table to InnoDB, running a SELECT COUNT(*) returns only 19 million rows. The conversion confirms 19 million rows were inserted and reports no warnings or duplicates.

I have done the conversion to InnoDB using the following ways
1. by dumping all the data in a text file and loading it.
2. by using ALTER TABLE

Why is the record count so low after conversion to InnoDB?
Who should I believe: InnoDB or MyISAM?
Any ideas as to what can be done to avoid loss of this many rows?

I will be posting output from my latest conversion attempt in some time.

----------------------------
PS: Thank you for all the replies. It turned out that the …

My Tutorial went well on the first day of OSCON. I ended up spending about 45 minutes on partitioning, and another 20 minutes on Events.

The surprise? I spent nearly 20 minutes on mysqlslap, our load generation and benchmarking tool in 5.1. I've run across a few system integrators who have been using it to "break in" new machines by generating SQL loads with many concurrent users, but this was the first time I have gotten a lot of user oriented questions about the tool.

For those of you in Portland this week MySQL will be throwing a reception/party on Tuesday (aka Tonight) at the Double Tree. Free drinks and t-shirt give away.

Free as in libre, since I don't believe we have in sales people here this week either :)

UPDATE I should also mention that the party is at 5:30->7:30 PM.

I watched the Falcon presentation from the MySQL Meetup in Boston. There was one optimization Jim spoke of that I was particularly fond of;

Falcon has a kind of two stage index retrieval. It first builds a list of what records it has to get, then buffers that and flips them into the correct order to scan through on disk. Potentially this means much faster retrievals; based on the assumption people are using one disk, or one of the RAID levels that doesn't support striping. Disk seek time is a real killer on performance in any database application, but I'm trying to think to myself now at what point the cost of software-sorting becomes more expensive, and this is actually a hindrance (since the raid controller will send the requests to different volumes anyway).

I'm guessing since disks are always a bottleneck, anytime you …