My list of reasons for never using or recommending Amazon’s MySQL RDS service grows every time I experience problems with customers. This was an interesting and still unresolved issue.

ERROR 126 (HY000): Incorrect key file for table '/rdsdbdata/tmp/#sql_5b7_1.MYI'; try to repair it

You may see this is a MyISAM table. The MySQL database is version 5.5, all InnoDB tables and is very small 100MB in total size.
What is happening is that MySQL is generating a temporary table, and this table is being written to disk. I am unable to change the code to improve the query causing this disk I/O.

What I can not understand and have no ability to diagnose is why this error occurs sometimes and generally when the database is under additional system load. With RDS you have no visibility of the server running the production database. While you have SQL access, an API for managing MySQL configuration options (I also add not all …

The attached storage used by Amazon’s managed Relational Database Service has a known issue where the bytes per inode ratio is very high (default on RHEL5 systems is 4096, to be found in /etc/mke2fs.conf). Amazon does not allow any administrative access to these instances so there is no way to reformat the filesystem to allocate more inodes, or attach storage the user can format with a different ratio.

This becomes problematic for databases that have many small tables (generally MyISAM tables, or InnoDB with the innodb_file_per_table setting) which quickly consume the available inodes. When the inode allocation is exhausted MySQL responds with

"ERROR 1030 (HY000): Got error 28 from storage engine"

The only current solution is to increase the size of attached storage, which increases the number of inodes (at the same …

Patents! Patents! Patents! Canonical’s perfect 10. And more.

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# Google responded to Oracle’s claims that its Android OS infringes copyrights and patents related to Java.

# Matt Asay evaluated the various patent claims against Android and its related devices.

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# Glyn Moody …

Government adoption. Financial results. New funding. And more.

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For the latest on Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL via Sun, see Everything you always wanted to know about MySQL but were afraid to ask

Government approval
The US Department of Defense issued guidance on the adoption of open source software, while ComputerWorld reported that the U.S Department of Defense has open-sourced an …

Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.

Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:

"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …

Amazon’s SimpleDB isn’t a relational database, but it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability. Amazon’s recently announced Relational Database Services (RDS) is a relational database, but it doesn’t provide elastic scalability or high-availability. If you are deploying enterprise applications on the cloud (including Amazon Web Services), you might want to look at ScaleDB because it is a relational database and it does provide elastic scalability and high-availability.

Amazon describes SimpleDB by comparing it to a clustered database:

"A traditional, clustered relational database requires a sizable upfront capital outlay, is complex to design, and often requires extensive and repetitive database administration. Amazon SimpleDB is dramatically simpler, requiring no schema, automatically indexing your data and providing a simple API for storage and access. This approach eliminates the administrative burden of …