Save the date - October 14th, 3pm Paris & Berlin, 2pm London, 4pm Jerusalem  -  for this free live webinar where you'll have a chance to ask questions to our experts.

This webinar focuses on how ZFS, SSDs and the Open Storage line of products from Sun are changing the rules in the database storage industry. You will learn how to increase data security, scalability, and reduce the price/performance ratio with these technologies. This webinar includes ZFS best practises for databases backup and performance.

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Just in case you missed the live event, we have a recording of the ZFS + SSD for databases webcast

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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 …

I've been doing a little more playing with Cassandra, an open source distributed database. It has several features which make it very compelling for storing large data which has a lot of writes:

• Write-scaling - adding more nodes increases write capacity
• No single point of failure
• configurable redundancy

And the most important:

• Key range scans

Key range scans are really important because they allow applications to do what users normally want to do:

• What emails did I receive this week
• Give me all the transactions for customer X in time range Y

Answering these questions without range scans is extremely difficult; with efficient range scans they become fairly easy (provided you pick your keys right).

…