What a flashback this week. Staring at a text terminal trying to establish a connection with a remote server, I began to fret whether I would get my homework assignment done on time. My mind raced back to college nights years ago in the Fishbowl, hunched over an Athena workstation. Would this be another late night fueled by Jolt cola in order to get my problem set done?

Thankfully, no!

Embarking on my first software class in quite a while was relatively painless, and I have Sheeri Cabral and her detailed guidance to thank. This week I started the …

Well, it’s that time of the year again for top ten lists. There have been many versions showing up on the web the last few days, including Time Magazine’s “Top 10 Everything of 2012″ list, with 55 wide ranging lists!

Last year we started using Google Analytics to see what content for blogs was most popular on Tokutek.com and generated a 2011 top ten list, ending up with a few surprises.  This year saw spikes in some interesting areas as well, including flash performance, NASA and Big Data, and MongoDB.

Without further adieu, here is the top ten list for 2012:

10. Announcing TokuDB v6.1 – This release included better overall performance and brought …

Every time I visit my family for the holidays, as the date approaches, I find myself filled with dread. It’s nothing sinister, my family’s great, and the season is nice. The reason is simple:

I hate packing.

In fact, I hate both kinds of packing: trip packing, and bit packing. Let me tell you a story about bit packing.

Bit packing

If you’ve ever browsed around the available type attributes in GCC, you may have noticed the entry for “packed”. It seems straightforward enough, and if you’re trying to cram a lot of data in a system (like we do), it can be pretty attractive.

There are plenty …

Tired of the same old holiday tunes year after year? Join us as we Rock around the Fractal Tree here at Tokutek.

We’ve fiddled with the chorus; won’t you join us?

Rockin’ around the Fractal Tree
(sung to the tune of Rockin’ around the Christmas Tree)

Rockin’ around the Fractal Tree
As the bits begin to hop
Leaves are full on trees that are not B
Our indexes cannot be stopped

Rockin’ around the Fractal Tree
Let the MySQL spirit ring
Time to compress all into an SSD
And watch out for the Merciless Ming

You will get a sensational feeling when you hear voices singing
“No, not a fable; online changes done with alter table!”
Rockin’ around the Fractal Tree
Have a happy holiday
Everyone’s coding …

We get a lot of questions about how Fractal Tree indexes work. It’s a write-optimized index with fast queries, but which write-optimized indexing structure is it?

In this ~15 minute video (which uses these slides), I give a quick overview of how they work and what they are good for.

In this webinar we will show step by step how to install, configure, and test TokuDB for a typical performance evaluation. We’ll also be flagging potential pitfalls that can ruin the eval results. It will describe the differences between installing from scratch and replacing an existing MySQL / MariaDB installation. It will also review the most common issues that may arise when running TokuDB binaries.

Date: December 11th
Time: 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST
REGISTER TODAY

Topics will include:

• Memory allocation
• Initial data load
• Indexing, including clustering indexes
• compression algorithms

We look forward to having you join the …

One of the great things about the MassTLC unConference is the spontaneity of the ideas. In the morning I ran into an old colleague whose startup was looking at switching databases and struggling with the options. Hence, “Scalable Databases for Startups” seemed like a great topic, so I proposed it, and then was off and running full steam after lunch.

The session brought in a wide variety of firms. While there were several vendors there – Basho, Calpont, InterSystems, ParElastic, and …

There is obviously much being written these days about Big Data. While the term has many different meanings to many different folks, our MySQL and MariaDB customers tend to find their data to be uncomfortably big when the tables become too large for memory. In this case, more storage has to be acquired, performance starts to lag, and making changes to the schema becomes a challenge.

TokuDB addresses these issues for big MySQL instances by delivering high compression rates, faster insertion and query performance, and agile …

It certainly has been a tough week on the East Coast. In the Boston area, where I am located, we got grazed by Sandy – power outages, trees down, schools closed, and Halloween delayed. This though, pales in comparison to what our NY office had to endure. One of our co-founders for example is one of the first few to get his power back at his home on Long Island just yesterday. He considers himself lucky – one of the several pine trees that came down on his property was just a few degrees off from destroying his house (it ended up taking down the gutter instead). Needless to say, it’s going to be a long recovery for NY and NJ. If you are looking to help, see here.

Of course, NYC is known for its resiliency. The first post-Sandy event at Manhattan’s Javitis Conference Center,  …

At tomorrow’s NoVA MySQL October Meetup, I will give a talk: “Fractal Tree Indexes – Theoretical Overview and Customer Use Cases.” The meetup is 7 pm Tuesday, October 23, 2012, and will be held at AOL Campus HQ in Dulles VA.

Most databases employ B-trees to achieve a good tradeoff between the ability to update data quickly and to search it quickly. It turns out that B-trees are far from the optimum in this tradeoff space. This led to the development at MIT, Rutgers and Stony Brook of Fractal Tree® indexes. Fractal Tree indexes improve MySQL® scalability and query performance by allowing greater insertion rates, supporting rich indexing and offering efficient compression. They can also eliminate operational headaches such as …