The latest from the MySQL community

The past 3 years, 11 months I have worked full time on NDB (MySQL Cluster). It’s been awesome. Love the product and people. In the time I’ve been on the Cluster team, we’ve gone from a small group that would easily fit in the (old old) Stockholm office to one that requires large rooms to house us all in. It’s also been all about smart people (you have to be to work on a distributed database).

With MySQL Cluster 6.4 we’re getting in a bunch of features that have been on the “wide adoption” wishlist. With each release of NDB we’ve gained a wedge of applications that can be used with it - and 6.4 is no exception.

One of the biggest things that’s been worked on is multithreaded data nodes. If you check out Jonas‘ recent posts on 500,000 …

Today Sun Software and Systems group is announcing the best open Web infrastructure and services for MySQL deployments. Sun is unveiling five new  solutions -- designed for our enterprise customers using MySQL --  that marry the market-leading, easy-to-use, open source MySQL database, with the performance and scalability of Sun servers and open storage. More at http://www.sun.com/systems/solutions/mysql/

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

    * With Sun Systems for MySQL, customers can improve the performance of MySQL in high-volume environments to grow their business with improved Web services.
    * Sun Systems for MySQL help ease MySQL deployments without significant application re-engineering efforts and by avoiding complex trial-and-error deployment testing.
    * Sun Systems for MySQL …

Recently, I read an interview that Jonathan Schwartz gave to Computerworld dated October, 13 2008.  The following question was posed: "Do you really expect customers in the near term — with the economic downturn— to, say, swap out an Oracle database and replace it with MySQL?"  Jonathan's answer: "Unquestionably.  Now that doesn't mean they are leaving Oracle ... But there is no longer one-size-fits-all in the enterprise database marketplace.".  With 80-90% of the functionality of expensive proprietary databases at 10-15% of the cost, it's no wonder that MySQL has gained such large adoption and will continue to expand as customers look to reduce discretionary spending due to software license costs.

 Adding to this, I just got this email from …

ritu

The primary advantage of deploying the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment is high availability. The Solaris Cluster environment provides fault monitoring and failover capabilities not only for the MySQL software, but also for the entire infrastructure including servers, storage, interconnects, and the operating system. If any component of the entire infrastructure fails, that failure is isolated and managed independently with no impact on availability.

MySQL Master-Slave configurations, deployed outside of a Solaris Cluster environment, provide limited availability: if the master fails, then the slave can manually be assigned master status and take over operation. However, this process is not automatic but requires manual intervention by a system administrator. Solaris Cluster removes this limitation, as it automatically fails over in the case of a master node failure. In addition, Solaris Cluster provides high …

ritu

The primary advantage of deploying the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment is high availability. The Solaris Cluster environment provides fault monitoring and failover capabilities not only for the MySQL software, but also for the entire infrastructure including servers, storage, interconnects, and the operating system. If any component of the entire infrastructure fails, that failure is isolated and managed independently with no impact on availability.

MySQL Master-Slave configurations, deployed outside of a Solaris Cluster environment, provide limited availability: if the master fails, then the slave can manually be assigned master status and take over operation. However, this process is not automatic but requires manual intervention by a system administrator. Solaris Cluster removes this limitation, as it automatically fails over in the case of a master node failure. In addition, Solaris Cluster provides high …

ritu

The primary advantage of deploying the MySQL database in a Solaris Cluster environment is high availability. The Solaris Cluster environment provides fault monitoring and failover capabilities not only for the MySQL software, but also for the entire infrastructure including servers, storage, interconnects, and the operating system. If any component of the entire infrastructure fails, that failure is isolated and managed independently with no impact on availability.

MySQL Master-Slave configurations, deployed outside of a Solaris Cluster environment, provide limited availability: if the master fails, then the slave can manually be assigned master status and take over operation. However, this process is not automatic but requires manual intervention by a system administrator. Solaris Cluster removes this limitation, as it automatically fails over in the case of a master node failure. In addition, Solaris Cluster provides high …

This Thursday (November 6, 2008), Jay Pipes will guide you on a tour of Bazaar and Launchpad for beginners. Since Jay is located in Columbus, Ohio, this session will start later than usual, that is, at 17:00 UTC / 9:00am PDT / 12:00 EST / 17:00 BST / 18:00 CET.

Getting to know Bazaar and Launchpad is certainly interesting for most developers, but it's a "must-know" for anyone thinking of contributing code to MySQL, since MySQL development has been using Bazaar and Launchpad for quite a while now.

While I'm at it: 

On the eve of the Berlin Marathon a few weeks ago, I saw Santa Claus on skates, which reminded me …

A lot of people are wondering whether SSDs make sense with MySQL.  I think that there are cases where they will make sense, and others where they will not.  Here is one test that I came across in a blog entry where the user was excited about SSD performance:

http://labs.cybozu.co.jp/blog/kazuhoatwork/2008/10/benchmarking_ssd_for_mysql.php 

Moving forward, I'm sure that we'll see much more data on this subject and be able to draw more concise lines on when to recommend SSD.

Update: Sun has expanded its Cloud Computing portfolio with the recent acquisition of Qlayer, a cloud computing company that automates the deployment and management of both public and private clouds.  The Q-layer organization, based in Belgium, is now part of Sun's Cloud Computing business unit which develops and integrates cloud computing technologies, architectures and services.

Cloud computing is about managing petascale data. Sun's server and storage systems can radically improve the data-intensive computing emerging in the cloud. Some clouds are closed platforms that lock you in. Sun's open source philosophy and Java principles form the core of a strategy that provides interoperability for large-scale computing resources. Sun's virtualization solutions for advanced …

My prayers have been answered.

We have found a worthy replacement for Jay Pipes: Dups.

• Dups joined MySQL in July 2007.
• Dups until recently was in the MySQL Web Team, and has joined us now.
• Dups comes from Canada (Newfoundland).
• Dups even lives in Canada (Montreal).
• Dups will roam the North American continent to serve the MySQL community, to learn from it, to explain Sun to the community, and to explain the community to Sun.
• Dups is sometimes mistaken for Colin Charles, because of similarities in physical appearance.
• Dups has a somewhat challenging name, Duleepa Wijayawardhana.

I’m very happy we got Dups as our Jay clone, because

• Dups is a MySQL user since last century.
• Dups knows MySQL very well.
• Dups is an excellent communicator: he structures his thoughts clearly and writes an enjoyable …