Phew, here we go, this blog post has been long time coming! A few months ago I started toying around with the idea of analyzing the PlanetMySQL public blog feed. It doesn’t take long to extract the data and prepare it for analysis but between lots of work and procrastination this blog post was left unfinished.

It was partly out of pure curiosity and partly the fact that it seemed to me there were less posts than previous years that I decided to trend out the number of posts over the past years and here we go.

The blue line shows the blog posts per month over the past six years and the black line is a polynomial trend line. There are a few points of interest which are visible and I’ll be listing here (to all their understanding):
1. The first thing which struck me negatively is …

GoogleCL is an apparently simple application. If you install it on Mac using macports you realize how many dependencies it has and how much complexity it gives under the …

1. ZeroMQ -- bold claim of "Fastest. Messaging. Ever." LGPL, C++ with bindings for many languages, past version 2 already. (via edd on Twitter)
2. Prediction Market News (David Pennock) -- HSX is going to be a real marketplace with real $. The real HSX will of course say goodbye to the virtual specialist and the opening weekend adjust, two facets of the game that make it fun to play, but that create significant amounts of (virtual) wealth out of thin air. The Cantor Gaming group is engaged in other interesting initiatives. They are taking over a sportsbook in Las Vegas and turning it into more of a derivatives exchange with live in-game betting, a step toward my dream of a geek-friendly casino. …

Tokutek is pleased to announce the general availability of TokuDB for MySQL, version 2.2.0.  This version offers several improvements:

• 
  
• Better multi-core load balancing for concurrent workloads.
  
• Faster bulk loading performance.
  
• Enhanced diagnostics for easier tuning and troubleshooting.
  
• Fixed all known bugs.

About TokuDB

TokuDB for MySQL is a storage engine built with Tokutek’s Fractal Tree technology. TokuDB provides near seamless compatibility for MySQL applications. Tables can be individually defined to use TokuDB, MyISAM, InnoDB or other MySQL-compliant storage engines. Data is loaded, inserted, and queried using standard MySQL commands, with no restrictions or special requirements. Our Fractal Tree technology indexes up to 50 times faster than …

At Tokutek, Rich Prohaska used
Gearman to automate our nightly build and
test process for TokuDB for MySQL.  Rich is busy working on TokuDB, so I’m
writing up an overview of the build and test architecture on his behalf.

Build and Test Process

Rich created a script, nightly.bash, that gets kicked off every night as a cron
job.  Nightly.bash creates a separate Gearman job for each build target.
We have a separate build target (unique binary) for each combination of
operating system (e.g. Linux, Windows, etc.) and HW architecture (e.g.
i686, x86_64) supported by TokuDB.  As we support more operating
systems over time, the number of build targets grows quickly so we needed
a build and test architecture that scales, and Gearman makes …

For those who wonder why my blogging is so low these days (apart from today) .. I`m actually writing more Lines of Code than Blog Entries the last couple of weeks:)

And when I`m not writing code I`m reading :) Either proofreading an upcoming book on Zabbix or reading some of the other books Packt sent me.

Next to that I`m busy preparing my T-Dose presentation

Oh and did I mention a 40 something questions questionnaire about some merger ?

Technorati Tags: …

Tokutek® announces the release the release of the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL®, version 2.1.0.  This release offers the following improvements over our previous release:

• Faster indexing of sequential keys.
• Faster bulk loads on tables with auto-increment fields.
• Faster range queries in some circumstances.
• Added support for InnoDB.
• Upgraded from MySQL 5.1.30 to 5.1.36.
• Fixed all known bugs.

About TokuDB

TokuDB for MySQL is a storage engine built with Tokutek’s Fractal Tree™ technology. TokuDB provides near seamless compatibility for MySQL applications. Tables can be individually defined to use TokuDB, MyISAM, InnoDB® or other MySQL-compliant storage engines. Data is loaded, inserted, and queried using standard MySQL commands, with no restrictions or special …

On April 9-10 the National Science Foundation hosted the Workshop on the Science of Power Management (SciPM 2009), where I gave an invited talk. Here I give a brief summary of my talk along with a pointer to the slides.

The talk describes how MySQL with TokuDB can provide a path to more energy-efficient database implementations. It’s a theoretical talk. That is, rather than presenting results from an existing implementation, it provides food for thought about future possibilities.

Here’s an executive summary of the talk.

Disks use a substantial fraction of the computing power in a typical database application. Although different workloads and configurations can give very different values, somewhere around 1/3 to 2/3 of the total energy consumed by the computing unit seems like a good …

A couple of weeks ago, Baron Schwartz wrote an interesting post describing a rule of thumb he sometimes uses to choose the order of columns in an index. In a nutshell, he recommends putting highly selective columns first. This is a very good rule of thumb.

I would like to add another rule of thumb: columns that are used for equality comparisons are better than columns that are used for range queries.

If one has a query “select count(*) from foo where a BETWEEN 10 and 20 and b=5”, an index of (b,a) will always be as good, and likely better, than an index of (a,b), regardless of the selectivity of “a” or “b”.

This is because of how MySQL performs range queries. For an index of (a,b), a range query will be done from (10,5) to (20,5). This will require many rows to be processed where …

A particular blog entry usually feels relevant and topical when fresh, at least to the author. So let’s say a blog entry even carries some non-zero long-term value. How do you find it after a while? And more importantly, how will your readers find your blog entry?

Descriptive subjects go a long way. But your readers may be searching for “development model” when your header says “release plan”. And even if you anticipate the search words used by your readers, you can only pick one wording for your header.

Full-text search also helps. There’s now a brand new Search field in the top left corner of Planet MySQL. Chances are you’ll find what you look for, no matter if search for “Chinese”, “DRBD”, “development” or “PHP”. You may even search for several words, such as “Chinese, UTF”.

Easy searchability calls for yet a bit more, namely tagging. …