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 …

Next week I’ll be visiting Moscow to talk at Highload++. The conference will take place during Monday 22nd and Tuesday 23rd at the Radisson hotel. I will be giving my personal version of an indexing talk that my colleagues have given in meetups and conferences in the US.

Highload++ conference is targeted to address the issues of complex high traffic web properties. Most of these sites depend on databases to deliver their content, record the traffic and report the application activities in real time. As I learned early in my career at MySQL, the database schema and in particular the indexing strategy, are critical to achieve the highest possible performance out of the database. I’ll be reviewing the basic strategies to define the right indexes. I will also cover TokuDB’s Fractal Tree® and Cluster …

Bradley and I (Michael) gave the tutorial on Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Databases at the 6th XLDB Conference last month.

The tutorial was organized as follows:

• Module 0: Tutorial overview and introductions. We describe an observed (but not necessary) tradeoff in ingestion, querying, and freshness in traditional database.
• Module 1: I/O model and cache-oblivious analysis.
• Module 2: Write-optimized data structures. We give the optimal trade-off between inserts and point queries. We show how to build data structures that lie on this tradeoff curve.
• Module 2 continued: Write-optimized …