UPDATE: if anyone knows of a non-broken syntax highlighting plugin for wordpress that supports bash or some other shell syntax, let me know :-/

Apache logs, database backups, etc., on busy web sites, can get large. If you rotate logs or perform backups regularly, they can get large and numerous, and as we all know, large * numerous = expensive, or rapidly filling disk partitions, or both.

Amazon’s S3 service, along with a simple downloadable suite of tools, and a shell script or two can ease your life considerably. Here’s one way to do it:

1. Get an Amazon Web Services account by going to the AWS website.
2. Download the ‘aws’ command line tool from here and install it.
3. Write a couple of shell scripts, and schedule them using cron.

Once you have your Amazon account, …

I created and ran some simple tests on mysql and postgresql to figure out which one is faster. It is already known that postgresql is more stable and reliable than mysql. pgsql has a rich set of features. It is a complete RDBMS and also supports fulltext search.

All benchmarks were done on my laptop - Intel core 2 duo (2.0 GHz) with 4MB L2 cache & 2 GB ram. I have 64 Bit ubuntu system loaded

LewisC's An Expert's Guide To Oracle Technology

Sun just announced MySQL Workbench, a new database design tool for MySQL developers and DBAs. I'm a data modeling tool junkie. I like to play with any I can get my hands on. I've used almost every modeling tool that's been built. My all time favorite is probably Erwin.

I decided to download MySQL Workbench and give it a try. Since I was playing with it, I figured I should write about it and while I am writing about it, I might as well write about a couple of other tools, that I have personally used, that you might like.

TOAD …

Following a link from the High Scalability blog, I found this really great article about scalability practices, as told by Randy Shoup at eBay. Randy is very good at explaining some of the more technical aspects in more or less plain English, and it even helped me find some wording I was looking for to help me explain the notion (and benefits) of functional partitioning. He also covers ideas that apply directly to your application code, your database architecture (including a little insight into their sharding strategy), and more. Even more about eBay’s architecture can be found here.

Startups are pretty fascinating. I work for a startup, and one of my good friends works for another startup. I’ve also worked for 2 other startups, one during the first “bubble”, and another one a few years later. Oh my, how the world of web startups has changed in that time!

1999: You must have funding

The first startup I was ever involved in was a web startup. It was an online retailer. They were starting from nothing. My friend (a former coworker from an earlier job) had saved for years to get this idea off the ground. He was able to get a few servers, some PCs for the developers he hired, and he got the cheapest office space in all of NYC (but it still managed to be a really cool space, in a way that only NYC can pull off), and he hosted every single service required to run the web site in-house. If I recall correctly, he had a web and database server on one machine, and I believe the primary DNS server was on an old …

I've been reading a few blog postings such as Kore Nordmann's ActiveRecord sucks and Mike Seth's ActiveRecord sucks, but Kore Nordmann is wrong.ActiveRecord is fine.  It is a tool that does just what it's designed to do.  What sucks is when developers try to make it do other things than what it's intended to do.I worked for Zend, managing the Zend Framework project through its 1.0 release.  I

Since few weeks I was working on patching the MySQL 5.1 with libevent support to have thread pooling in server end as it is needed by few properties where they do not need a persistent connection and needed to scale server with thousands of connections as each call just does a simple query execution by connecting and disconnecting and pooling seemed to be a right choice.

When I brought this idea to Monty; he pointed me to 6.0 where it is in preliminary stage. Now I took the same design and implemented in 5.1 to be compatible with how its working in 6.0; and things so far seems to be running fine, except few misc glitches that am trying to solve now.

It uses the same thread_handling=one-thread-per-connection (default) and new thread_handling=pool_of_threads and thread_pool_size controls how many will be initialized and kept at the …

Todd Hoff, who apparently learned a hell of a lot during a short stint at Yahoo followed by some startups has an extremely well-written and edutaining article about how scaling to a million or more users requires jettisoning more or less everything we know and love about relational modeling.

Even though he uses bigtable (Google’s distributed hash storage system) as his example, in reality this approach works well with relational datastores like MySQL and Oracle too, you just have to think about your data differently and use the databases differently. So I’m including this article in the MySQL and Oracle categories because I think it would be of interest.

Here’s a taste of …

We (in the Telecom team at MySQL) have been debating whether we should call this blog 'MySQL in Telco' or 'MySQL in Communications'. Naming discussions tend to take long time, and this one was no exception.

From a US perspective, it appears that Telecom is an outdated term. Wireless carriers and cable television companies do not consider themselves as Telecom companies. Maybe for this reason, large US-headquartered vendors including Sun, HP, IBM and Oracle all have a 'Communications & Media' practice.

From a European perspective, Telecom is used for equipment vendors and service providers. Companies like Logica, Cap Gemini, Atos Origin and TietoEnator refer to the vertical as 'Telecom & Media'.

Of the global SI's in India, Wipro and TCS refer to Telecom while Infosys talk about Communications.

As a working title we at one time used 'MySQL blablabla' blog, and funnily enough, there was a compromise suggestion to …

We (in the Telecom team at MySQL) have been debating whether we should call this blog 'MySQL in Telco' or 'MySQL in Communications'. Naming discussions tend to take long time, and this one was no exception.

From a US perspective, it appears that Telecom is an outdated term. Wireless carriers and cable television companies do not consider themselves as Telecom companies. Maybe for this reason, large US-headquartered vendors including Sun, HP, IBM and Oracle all have a 'Communications & Media' practice.

From a European perspective, Telecom is used for equipment vendors and service providers. Companies like Logica, Cap Gemini, Atos Origin and TietoEnator refer to the vertical as 'Telecom & Media'.

Of the global SI's in India, Wipro and TCS refer to Telecom while Infosys talk about Communications.

As a working title we at one time used 'MySQL blablabla' blog, and funnily enough, there was a compromise suggestion to …