How many in your household again?

One of President John Kennedy’s most memorable phrases is “ask not what your country can do for you –  ask what can you do for your country”.  I got to thinking about this over lunch with a fellow colleague in the big data space. After comparing named customers for a while, we realized we had forgotten one of the biggest “big data” customers whom we both have in common – the government.

Whether you believe in small or big government, one thing is for certain – it has some very big data on its hands. Some of this is freely available, such as the …

Archimedes, the first DBA

According to a recent MIT Sloan Management Review study, top performing organizations use analytics 5 times more than lower performers. That’s pretty astounding. And while we all know about the ocean/lake/waves/(your favorite water analogy) of Big Data we struggle with everyday, information is not knowledge. So how can we get insight from data? Recent articles from O’Reilly and HBR offered some …

Hot Column Addition and Deletion (HCAD)

In the previous HCAD post, I described HCAD and showed that it can reduce the downtime of column addition (or deletion) from 18 hours to 3 seconds. In fact, the downtime of InnoDB is proportional to the size of the database, whereas the downtime for TokuDB 5.0 depends on the time it takes for MySQL to close and reopen a table — a time that’s independent of database size. Go ahead and build bigger tables. The HCAD downtime for TokuDB won’t increase.

You may be wondering how we do HCAD. Here goes:

Under the hood

TokuDB is based on Fractal Tree indexing, one of the cools features of which is that they replace random I/O with sequential I/O. The way this happens has an impact on how HCAD happens, …