The ARCHIVE engine is a great tool to store large amounts of historical data in a compact way. While I found that it's not yet easy to combine it with another engine used to keep the current data (see the first part of this article on how to achieve something similar to a MERGE or PARTITION with an ARCHIVE table), I was positively surprised on how convenient it is to backup ARCHIVE tables.

Different tables in MySQL need different backup strategies: For some of the engines you can basically just copy the table files when LOCKed and FLUSHed (this can be done with the mysqlhotcopy script for MyISAM), for others (e.g. InnoDB) this won't work at all. The lock-and-copy method would be very convenient to backup large ARCHIVE tables.

To see if this method is safe, we need …

During one of the coldest days in early February, I invited the new MySQL AB CTO, Taneli Otala, for dinner to my home in Grankulla, Finland. Taneli was spending over a week with Michael 'Monty' Widenius, our company founder, main architect and CTO since many years.

Linden Lab is the company behind the virtual world simulation Second Life (SL) in wich users (the residents) can freely roam around and actively participate in the creation and development of the virtual world and their own appearance (their avatars). To facilitate this, Second Life provides powerful in-world 3D construction tools as well as a special scripting language, LSL. Second Life also provides its own economy and currency (Linden Dollars), that residents can use to purchase goods and objects that other residents created. Interestingly, it’s even possible to exchange Linden Dollars into US dollars and vice versa.

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

this is the fourth posting in our MaxDB series. The series started about four weeks ago and it will very likely take the rest of the year to complete. All postings of the series together will make kind of an online course for MaxDB. Over the last postings we explained what MaxDB is, we explained about the outstanding features of MaxDB and we taught you how to perform a basic MaxDB installation that serves as a basis for all of the following lessons.

In this issue

The today’s MaxDB lesson is about the two most important tools of MaxDB. The first tool is the Database Manager GUI and it’s commandline counterpart dbmcli. The Database Manager GUI is the main tool to perform administrative tasks like shutting down the database, performing backups or doing some basic monitoring of the health status …

Dear MySQL users, MaxDB users and friends,

this is the fourth posting in our MaxDB series. The series started about four weeks ago and it will very likely take the rest of the year to complete. All postings of the series together will make kind of an online course for MaxDB. Over the last postings we explained what MaxDB is, we explained about the outstanding features of MaxDB and we taught you how to perform a basic MaxDB installation that serves as a basis for all of the following lessons.

In this issue

The today’s MaxDB lesson is about the two most important tools of MaxDB. The first tool is the Database Manager GUI and it’s commandline counterpart dbmcli. The Database Manager GUI is the main tool to perform administrative tasks like shutting down the database, performing backups or doing some basic monitoring of the health status …

So, most of the “I want images in MySQL” conversations are terminated with “Don’t.” Some articles say “MySQL’s overhead isn’t worth it” and others that say “If you put the images in MySQL you don’t have to deal with the filesystem overhead.”

My company’s site has over 2 million images to store/retrieve, and our current setup is at its limit and doesn’t scale well — 2 NFS servers. We’d rather avoid adding another NFS server, because it involves changing where images are located whenever we scale. The problem is that with so many images, there are so many inodes that the filesystem cannot keep up. As well, if a server is rebooted or offline for more than an hour (ie, during maintenance) it is extremely slow until the cache catches up (about half an hour).

We believe the best retrieval method is to use MySQL. We will be doing our own speed testing, so I’m not relying on what folks say here. But I’m …

I had an exciting weekend at the FOSDEM Conference in Brussels. Initially I planned on writing a few blog entries while at the event (while memory was still fresh), but the Internet access there was very flaky and it was almost impossible to get a working wireless connection. So here is my (slighly belated) writeup.
Continue reading "FOSDEM writeup"

This is just remind you that the first Hamburg MySQL User Group meeting will take place on Monday, 6th of March, 19:00. For more details please see my initial announcement and join our mailing list!

Currently, we have about 30 people that will attend. I will give a short general presentation about MySQL (the company), later Kai will give a presentation on MySQL Cluster.

If you'd like to join us, please register via meetup.com or OpenBC. Looking forward to meeting you!