We use MySQL on most of our projects. One of these projects has a an access pattern unlike any other I've worked on. Several million records a day need to be written to a table. These records are then read out once at the end of the day, summarised and then very rarely touched again. Each record is about 104 bytes long (thre's one VARCHAR column, everything else is fixed), and that's after squeezing out every byte possible. The average number of records that we write in a day is 40 million, but this could go up.

A little bit about the set up. We have fairly powerful boxes with large disks using RAID1/0 and 16GB RAM, however at the time they only had 4GB. For BCP, we have a multi-master set up in two colos with statement level replication. We used MySQL 5.1.

My initial tests with various parameters that affect writes showed that while MyISAM performed slightly better than InnoDB while the tables were small, it quickly …

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There is a little-known setting, myisam_block_size in MySQL. This affects the block size used in the indexes of MyISAM tables stored in .MYI files on disc and in the key buffer.

The default value is 1k, this is possibly too small for best performance on modern systems; in particular, many filesystems used a bigger block size, so writing a single index block requires a read followed by a write. Random reads are really slow on hard discs (writes are mostly fast as they go into your battery-backed raid controller which has lots of RAM).

I am currently in the process of experimenting with myisam_block_size, and so far have determined the following:

• myisam_block_size is settable only at server start time, either in my.cnf or on the command-line
• myisam_block_size only affects newly created tables or tables rebuilt using ALTER TABLE; existing MyISAM tables keep their old index block size and …

TOTD #97 showed how to install GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse 1.1. Basically there are two options - either install Eclipse 3.4.2 with WTP and pre-bundled/configured with GlassFish v2/v3, MySQL JDBC driver and other features. Or if you are using Eclipse 3.5, then you can install the plug-in separately and get most of the functionality.

TOTD #98 showed how to create a simple Metro/JAX-WS compliant Web service using that bundle and deploy on GlassFish.

This Tip Of The …

TOTD #97 showed how to install GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse 1.1. Basically there are two options - either install Eclipse 3.4.2 with WTP and pre-bundled/configured with GlassFish v2/v3, MySQL JDBC driver and other features. Or if you are using Eclipse 3.5, then you can install the plug-in separately and get most of the functionality.

TOTD #98 showed how to create a simple Metro/JAX-WS compliant Web service using that bundle and deploy on GlassFish.

This Tip Of The …

TOTD #97 showed how to install GlassFish Tools Bundle for Eclipse 1.1. Basically there are two options - either install Eclipse 3.4.2 with WTP and pre-bundled/configured with GlassFish v2/v3, MySQL JDBC driver and other features. Or if you are using Eclipse 3.5, then you can install the plug-in separately and get most of the functionality.

TOTD #98 showed how to create a simple Metro/JAX-WS compliant Web service using that bundle and deploy on GlassFish.

This Tip Of The …

Hi all,

The past few months, I've been developing a course on the concepts of cloud computing and virtualization. It's coming along very well, and this week I've been working on a demo for an application in the cloud that uses a database located elsewhere in the cloud (i.e. on another virtual server). I'd thought I share the steps with you. I used MySQL, but the steps should be similar for other databases.

1. Install MySQL on the server.
2. Create a new user for MySQL: create user USERNAME identified by 'PASSWORD';
3. Grant the user access to the database: grant all privileges on DATABASE.* to USERNAME identified by 'PASSWORD';
4. Then I started up the IDE and went to the Services window, where I connected to my local MySQL database.
5. After connecting, I right-clicked the MySQL driver node and chose Connect Using.
   The New Database Connection dialog box …

Hi all,

The past few months, I've been developing a course on the concepts of cloud computing and virtualization. It's coming along very well, and this week I've been working on a demo for an application in the cloud that uses a database located elsewhere in the cloud (i.e. on another virtual server). I'd thought I share the steps with you. I used MySQL, but the steps should be similar for other databases.

1. Install MySQL on the server.
2. Create a new user for MySQL: create user USERNAME identified by 'PASSWORD';
3. Grant the user access to the database: grant all privileges on DATABASE.\* to USERNAME identified by 'PASSWORD';
4. Then I started up the IDE and went to the Services window, where I connected to my local MySQL database.
5. After connecting, I right-clicked the MySQL driver node and chose Connect Using.
   The New Database Connection dialog box …