My mind is playing "Suffering Succotash..."

I have been working on MySQL performance for a while now, and the team I am in have discovered that SysBench could do with a couple of tweaks for Solaris.

Sidebar - sysbench is a simple "OLTP" benchmark which can test multiple databases, including MySQL. Find out all about it here , but go to the download page to get the latest version.

To simulate multiple users sending requests to a database, sysbench uses multiple threads. This leads to two issues we have identified with SysBench on Solaris, namely:

• The implementation of random() is explicitly identified as unsafe in multi-threaded applications on Solaris. My team has found this is a real issue, with occasional core-dumps happening to our …

My mind is playing "Suffering Succotash..."

I have been working on MySQL performance for a while now, and the team I am in have discovered that SysBench could do with a couple of tweaks for Solaris.

Sidebar - sysbench is a simple "OLTP" benchmark which can test multiple databases, including MySQL. Find out all about it here , but go to the download page to get the latest version.

To simulate multiple users sending requests to a database, sysbench uses multiple threads. This leads to two issues we have identified with SysBench on Solaris, namely:

• The implementation of random() is explicitly identified as unsafe in multi-threaded applications on Solaris. My team has found this is a real issue, with occasional core-dumps happening to our …

FOSDEM 2009, one of the biggest European Open Source conferences, will take place on February 7-8 in Brussels, Belgium. Today I received a confirmation from the organizers: MySQL will have a developer room on Sunday, the 8th! This is very cool.

My idea was to organize some kind of MySQL mini-conference, with a focus on developers and DBAs. I am going to send out a more formal CfP soon, but if you have any ideas or suggestions for a talks/sessions already, please get in touch with me!

In addition to the devroom, I have also been invited to give a talk about MySQL High Availability solutions in the conference main track. In this talk I plan to cover some commonly used HA setups for MySQL, including the OSS components/tools (for Linux and …

FOSDEM 2009, one of the biggest European Open Source conferences, will take place on February 7-8 in Brussels, Belgium. Today I received a confirmation from the organizers: MySQL will have a developer room on Sunday, the 8th! This is very cool.

My idea was to organize some kind of MySQL mini-conference, with a focus on developers and DBAs. I am going to send out a more formal CfP soon, but if you have any ideas or suggestions for a talks/sessions already, please get in touch with me!

In addition to the devroom, I have also been invited to give a talk about MySQL High Availability solutions in the conference main track. In this talk I plan to cover some commonly used HA setups for MySQL, including the OSS components/tools (for Linux and …

…is the title of this post written by Tim Bray a few days ago in which he outlined the directions he would like to see his employer take to improve its fortunes.

He also invited others to continue the thought process. Many have already done so (I’ll include the best in tomorrow’s CAOS Links post) and given my recent constructive criticism of Sun’s open source strategy I feel compelled to provide some answers as well as questions.

I’m sure there are lots of things Sun should be doing with relation to storage and servers and processors and client devices, but I’m going to stick to what I know. What would I do?

Light a fire under MySQL
When Sun announced its acquisition …

Currently I'm working hard to find and remove scalability
bottlenecks in the MySQL Server. MySQL was acquired by Sun
10 months ago by now. Many people have in blogs wondered what
the impact has been from this acquisition. My personal
experience is that I now have a chance to work with Sun
experts in DBMS performance. As usual it takes time when
working on new challenges before the flow of inspiration
starts flowing. However I've seen this flow of inspiration
starting to come now, so the fruit of our joint work is
starting to bear fruit. I now have a much better understanding
of MySQL Server performance than I used to have. I know fairly
well where the bottlenecks are and I've started looking
into how they can be resolved.

Another interesting thing with Sun is the innovations they have
done in a number of areas. One such area is DTrace. This is a …

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

Recently I burned a copy of OpenSolaris 2008.11 RC1 and used it with Songbird (using pkg install SUNWsongbird)  and Fluendo MP3 Decoder (which is free for OpenSolaris),  Flash and soon I had a setup in my bedroom which I love to call OpenSolaris Home Theatre Edition that I used to listen to my songs collection and watch online shows that I controlled via Remote Desktop  which to me was a serious contender to those Media Centers out there. 

However I realized that while I wanted to …

There are a couple of easy ways to test your Solaris application with MySQL ("the world's most popular opensource database").   Of course, you can always setup a Solaris or OpenSolaris environment and download it (70-80MB) and then install/configure locally.   However, if you don't want to go through the hassle of setting up the System, OS, & database yourself, Sun has made it easy to get your hands on pre-configured bits in a couple of other efficient ways.

Use the EZQual Virtual Lab.  Sun Partner's can get access to secure, no-cost, test environments (within Solaris containers/zones).  Here's the information directly from the program:

We've set up a …