Before creating a unique index in TokuMX or TokuDB, ask yourself, “does my application really depend on the database enforcing uniqueness of this key?” If the answer is ANYTHING other than yes, do not declare the index to be unique. Why? Because unique indexes may kill your write performance. In this post, I’ll explain why.

Unique indexes are a strange beast: they have no impact on standard databases that use B-Trees, such as MongoDB and MySQL, but may be horribly painful for databases that use write optimized data structures, like TokuMX’s Fractal Tree(R) indexes. How? …

In my last post, I showed what a Fractal Tree® index is at a high level. Once again, the Fractal Tree index is the data structure inside TokuMX and TokuDB, our MongoDB and MySQL products. One of its strengths is the ability to get high levels of compression on the stored data. In this post, I’ll explain why that is.

At a high level, one can argue that there isn’t anything special about our compression algorithms. We basically do this: we take large chunks of data, use known compression methods (e.g. zlib, lzma, …

Tokutek is known for its full-featured fast-indexing technology. MongoDB is known for its great document-based data model and ease of use. TokuMX, version 1.0, combines the best of both worlds.

• So what, exactly, is TokuMX? The simplest (but incomplete) answer is that TokuMX is MongoDB with all its storage code replaced by Tokutek’s Fractal Tree indexes.
• How do Fractal Tree indexes improve MongoDB? The direct benefits include high-performance indexing, strong compression, and performance stability – in other words, the performance stays high, even when data is larger than RAM.
• Are there any features in TokuMX that MongoDB doesn’t have? Yes. We have added support for transactions to TokuMX, so that TokuMX is ACID compliant and has MVCC. We have also added support for clustering indexes, which dramatically accelerate many types of queries.
• …

Over several blog posts, Tim has presented performance results on large data sets of TokuMX, our MongoDB product with fractal tree indexes integrated, side by side with MongoDB. Results look good. We’ve shown improved throughput numbers on a sysbench benchmark, faster load times, and high compression.

So what is TokuMX, and how does it achieve this performance?

TokuMX has replaced ALL of the storage code in MongoDB with fractal trees. Every collection, every secondary index, every metadata collection is stored with fractal trees, the same technology that implements the TokuDB storage engine for MySQL. That is, all data is stored and managed with our transactional, ACID and MVCC-compliant, write-optimized storage library.

TokuMX achieves …

Two months ago I posted a performance comparison running Sysbench on MongoDB versus MongoDB with Fractal Tree Indexes v0.0.2. The benchmark showed a 133% improvement in throughput. Nice, but our engineering team had an effort on our road-map for lock refinement that we believed would really boost our performance, which is now available in v0.1.0. The benchmark application itself is unchanged and available on GitHub.

For anyone curious about Sysbench itself, the details are available from the prior blog. The only change for this run was hardware. Our Sun x4150 server recently began rebooting itself at random times, so it has been replaced with a newer HP server. Another change is …

With this version, the source code is now freely available under the GPL License v2. For more details, see our blog here. Open source pioneer Mozilla has been using TokuDB to manage its MySQL-driven Datazilla Data cluster, an open-source system for managing and visualizing performance data.

Date: May 2nd
Time: 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST
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In the past TokuDB has been free for evaluation; the new TokuDB Community Edition extends free use to deployed environments. With this release Tokutek is also planning on making available a TokuDB Enterprise Edition, which includes technical support, initial customer onboarding services, and advanced tools for backup and recovery.

We …

Since we had the pleasure to announce that TokuDB is open source on Monday, it’s been a thrilling ride. With several members of the team out west all week, back on the east coast we’ve been seeing quite a lot of questions, suggestions, and exciting results.

Here are some of the highlights of our first week of open source:

We started hearing back from the community almost immediately after the announcement with discussions in multiple forums. We even reached #2 on Hacker News for a bit.

On Tuesday, a friend of mine in China wrote up …

Yesterday we posted the photos and lyrics. Now we’ve got the YouTube video (click here)!

And for those who want some behind the scenes photos, see here and here. (courtesy of @seattlegaucho).

We wanted to thank everyone for naming Tokutek the Corporate Contributor of the Year 2013 for ongoing contribution to the MySQL community.

The MySQL Community Awards are given annually to the people and companies that support the MySQL ecosystem. The MySQL Community Award for Corporate Contributor of the Year recognizes a company or other organization or entity that has made valuable contributions to the MySQL ecosystem either in terms of open source code, knowledge, funding or other resources or sponsorship. The winners are selected by an independent community panel.

“Open Source is about collaborating and contributing to build …

Since we announced that TokuDB is now open source, there has been a lot of positive feedback (thanks!) and also some questions about the details. I want to take this opportunity to give a quick high level guide to describe what our repositories on Github are.

Here are the repositories:

• ft-index. This repository is the “magic”. It contains the Fractal Tree data structures we have been talking about for years. This is also the main piece that was previously closed source. Here are some interesting directories:
  • src: This directory is a layer that implements an API that is similar to the BDB API.
  • locktree: an in-memory data structure that maintains transactions’ row-level locks. …