In a previous post I wrote ARM based servers. Since then, and thanks to all the comments and responses I got, I looked more into this ARM thing and it's absolutely fascinating...

Look at this beauty (taken from the site of Calxeda, the manufacturer):

What is it? A chip? A server? No, it's a cluster of 4 servers...

And this:

is HP Redstone Server, 288 chips, 1,152 cores (Calxeda quad-core SoC) in a 4U server “Dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of cabling and …

At a time when most companies are doing all they can to maintain the status quo, SkySQL is daring to imagine a new “normal”. We’re on a mission to change the way companies interact with and manage their data, both in the enterprise and in the cloud. Along with our strategic partners, in particular MariaDB, we’re working to develop new open source database solutions that challenge proprietary enterprise solutions and business models.

To help us achieve our goal, we’re looking for a few daring open source engineers to join our team and take on the status quo:

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Hosted by Binlogic, the MySQL/NoSQL/Cloud Latin American Conference at the Hilton Buenos Aires in Argentina, June 26-28th, will bring together key members of the of open source database community for two intense days of technical talks and tutorials on popular open source databases like MySQL, MariaDB, and Drizzle; NoSQL databases such as MongoDB and CouchDB; and related technologies such as the Soir and Sphinx search engines.

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Yesterday I was asked by a customer for the reason why he had failed to achieve scale with a state-of-the-art "shared-storage" cluster. "It's a scale-out to 4 servers, but with a shared disk. And I got, after tons of work and efforts, 130% throughput, not even close to the expected 400%" he said.

Well, scale-out cannot be achieved with a shared storage and the word "shared" is the key. Scale-out is done with absolutely nothing shared or a "shared-nothing" architecture. This what makes it linear and unlimited. Any shared resource, creates a tremendous burden on each and every database server in the cluster.

In a previous post, I identified database engine activities such as buffer management, locking, thread locks/semaphores, and recovery tasks - as the main bottleneck in the OLTP …

Yesterday, it was announced that SkySQL has raised an additional 2.5 million dollars in Series A funding from California Technology Ventures.

This comes along with the news of the new CEO, Patrik Sallner, taking the CEO role at SkySQL on July 1st.

Here are some relevant snippets:

“SkySQL also announced today that CTV, a venture capital fund that makes direct investments in technology and life science companies globally, invested an additional $2.5 million as part of the company’s recent A round of funding. With this latest investment, SkySQL has collected EUR 6 million to fund further growth.”

“About California Technology Ventures, LLC
California Technology Ventures, LLC is a venture capital fund that makes direct investments in technology and life science companies. CTV has built a strong reputation for its entrepreneurial approach to investing and working with companies. They believe in guiding …

In case you may have overlooked yesterday’s post from Ulf Sandberg, I thought I’d go ahead and reiterate the main points, as it is big news, at least for those interested in SkySQL.

SkySQL has been like a rocket ship with it’s growth since we started, and now we’re making some even bigger changes to help accelerate that effort further.

As Ulf announced, we’ve named a new CEO, Patrik Sallner, to take over after the initial bootstrap period.

Patrik, a former executive at F-Secure, will officially become CEO on July 1st. “Patrik comes to SkySQL with demonstrated experience in building international software and services businesses, including delivering cloud storage solutions to the world’s largest telecommunications operators. The addition of Patrik to SkySQL’s Leadership Team is a tremendous boon to …

Today, I think we witnessed a small sign for a big revolution...

http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/256383/dell_reaches_for_the_cloud_with_new_prototype_arm_server.html
"Dell announced a prototype low-power server with ARM processors, following a growing demand by Web companies for custom-built servers that can scale performance while reducing financial overhead on data centers"In short, ARM (see Wikipedia definition here) is an architecture standard for processors. ARM processors are slower compared to good old x86 processors from Intel and AMD, but have power-efficiency, density and price attributes that intrigue customers, especially in our days of green data centers where carbon emissions is …

Growth is good, right? Yes, unless you are the one building and managing a MySQL database tier to handle all this growth!

Your company has built a great new app and launched it in the cloud. And now you are seeing what many wish for: an exponential adoption of your app. 

But is your database tier really up to the job? 

What happens if your MySQL server fails? Can you fail over to a replica

Recently I had to turn a few EC2 instances into MySQL database servers. The third time I had to do it, I grabbed the list of steps from my previous sessions and just replayed it. Later I thought maybe polishing information a little bit and publishing a step-by-step walkthrough on the blog may help a few people. So here it is.

Before you begin.

For my MySQL instances I used the following:

• Extra Large, High-Memory, and High-CPU instances. Although the instruction should work on any type of instance.
• RedHat Enterprise Linux 6.2 64-bit AMI
• For MySQL data storage, multiple identical EBS devices attached to each instance

The configuration template provided in this post assumes the new MySQL instance only needs InnoDB storage engine.

Grab the packages.

Download the appropriate packages from MySQL web page. You …

My first computer program was written almost quarter a century ago on a BK-0010 computer.  It was very simple: the program asked the user to enter their name and then greeted the user using the entered name, like “Hello, Artem!”.  I was fascinated.  A couple of lines written in Vilnius BASIC transformed a piece of metal and silicon into a considerate thing that cared about a person’s name enough to remember it :-).  Of course, the first experience doesn’t represent the day-to-day routine of software development, but the moments when I see a couple of lines making an amazing transformation still enchant me, and remind me why I’ve been writing code all this time.

I’ve just experienced this very same first-time feeling as we’ve released …