Find out about Sun's new 4-chip UltraSPARC T2 Plus system direct from the source: Sun's engineers.

Sun today announced the 4-chip variant of its UltraSPARC T2 Plus system, the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440. This new system is the big brother of the 2-chip Sun SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 systems released in April 2008. Each UltraSPARC T2 Plus chip offers 8 hardware strands in each of 8 cores. With up to four UltraSPARC T2 Plus chips delivering a total of 32 cores and 256 hardware threads and up to 512Gbytes of memory in a compact 4U package, the T5440 raises the bar for server performance, price-performance, energy efficiency, and compactness. And with Logical Domains (LDoms) and Solaris Containers, the potential for server consolidation is compelling.

Standard configurations of the Sun SPARC Enterprise T5440 include 2- and 4-chip systems at 1.2 GHz, and a 4-chip system at 1.4 GHz. All of these configurations come with 8 cores per …

I presented these at an internal MySQL professional services meeting about a month ago… its mostly a hodge podge of various benchmarks… but enjoy! The big difference in these benchmarks vs the other benchmarks is I am testing on the memoright GT drive, which is supposed to be one of the fastest SLC drives out their currently. Lets get right too it:

Looking at sysbench Random read/write iops:

A lot of my clients are in a position where their database performance is deteriorating but they are not “big enough” (or not willing/able to) explore sharding all of their data structures. They’re too big for the solution to be adding another read slave, but too small to justify the resources for re-designing their [...]

So Yves knowing my affinity for all things solid state forwarded me this link, http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2008/10/so-i-got-one-of-new-intel-ssds.html , it seems Linus Torvalds picked up one of the new Intel SSD drives ( if anyone wants to send me one to test that would be cool ).  Whats interesting is he says the thing just rocks.  But how will this perfom in a database environment?  Not 100% sure, but I think it’s going to perform worse then the mtron or memoright drvies I have tested.  Why?  Well the drive is MLC not SLC.  Anandtech has a great review the Intel SSD, with an awesome explination with accompaning benchmarks on SLC -vs- MLC.  Most of these tests are performed in a windows environment, and I …

Catchy title? Its a webminar hosted by Robert Scoble, with panel members like Matt Mullenweg (WordPress - their extensive use of PHP, MySQL and more, and scalable even for wordpress.com), Paul Bucheit (FriendFeed, creator of GMail) and Nat Brown (iLike, a pretty popular Facebook application), you’d be silly not to miss it.

Its all about building a scalable server environment that grows with your traffic (virtually overnight, in some cases). I hope its all fairly generic and not Rackspace specific… we should learn to have these “fun” panel webminars.

      select
title, from_date, to_date
from titles
where emp_no in
(select emp_no
from employees
where first_name = 'Mary'
      and last_name = 'Sluis'
)

The result, in MySQL 5.1.28 is

+-------+------------+------------+
| title | from_date  | to_date    |
+-------+------------+------------+
| Staff | …

Before I leave Grazr to work at Lycos, I've been tasked with documenting several things-- MySQL setup, including replication, nagios, UDFs we use, etc. I was describing on our wiki what using InnoDB means, and some basic things about settings. Here's a tidbit of it that I think is useful information.

Some important InnoDB Characteristics

InnoDB stores data and files in the same place whereas MyISAM has separate index and data files. InnoDB stores it's data in either a single tablespace file (ibdataN -- n being number) which containins all tables, or a single auto-extending tablespace file set by innodb_file_per_table (tablename.ibd), which is what we use for grazr because file-per-table allows OPTIMIZE TABLE to reclaim space from deletions, would could gives better performance with better optimized tables. Also allows you to restore backups of single tables without interrupting the use of the remaining InnoDB tables (per …

I've mentioned Infobright before as an interesting solution to getting more performance to BI analytics solutions. Today's news are interesting: Sun invests in the company, and the baseline product is open sourced. Too busy to write more about it today, but I'm certainly watching this one closely.

This Monday, September 8th, the Boston MySQL User Group broke our 2-month summer hiatus with a presentation on MySQL Views.

The slides can be downloaded from http://www.technocation.org/files/doc/2008_09_Views.pdf -- 89 kB, .pdf format.

The 199 Mb .flv file can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/node/621/download or played directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/621/play.

The presentation covers:

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Description:
The drupal_lookup_path function unnecessarily counts all rows of the url_alias table to determine if any aliases are defined. This can be expensive on a transactional database such as MySQL with the InnoDB Storage Engine or PostgreSQL when a website has a lot of aliases. This patch modifies the query to always only return one row, possible because any existing pid will be greater than 0. If no aliases are defined, it will return 0.

Status:
This patch has not been merged into any release of Drupal.

Patch

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