Recently, our CEO, John Partridge had a chance to talk about novel database technologies for “Big Data” with Peter Cohan of Forbes.

According to the article, “Fractal Tree indexing is helping organizations analyze big data more efficiently due to its ability to improve database efficiency thanks to faster ‘database insertion speed, quicker input/output performance, operational agility, and data compression.’” As a start-up based on “the  first algorithm-based breakthrough in the database world in 40 years,” Toktuetek is following in the footsteps of firms such as Google and RSA, which also relied on novel algortithm advances as core to their technology.

To read the full article, and to see how Tokutek is helping companies tackle big data, see …

With Oracle OpenWorld just around the corner & MySQL Connect already underway I can’t believe yet another year has passed.  This is my third OOW and I must have a following as folks are already reaching out to me on twitter @pythiansimmons (log buffer lady seems to be a handle I can’t seem to shake). [...]

We are excited to announce TokuDB® v6.5, the latest version of Tokutek’s flagship storage engine for MySQL and MariaDB.

This version offers optimization for Flash as well as more hot schema change operations for improved agility.

We’ll be posting more details about the new features and performance, so here’s an overview of what’s in store.

Flash

TokuDB v6.5 continues the great Toku-tradition of fast insertions. On flash drives, we show an order-of-magnitude (9x) faster insertion rate than InnoDB. TokuDB’s standard compression works just as well on flash and helps you get the most out of your storage system. And TokuDB reduces wear …

The fall conference season is starting.  I will be doing a number of talks including a keynote on "future proofing" MySQL through the use of data fabrics.  Data fabrics allow you to build durable, long-lasting systems that take advantage of MySQL's strengths today but also evolve to solve future problems using fast-changing cloud and big data technologies.  The talk brings together ideas that Ed Archibald (our CTO) and I have been working on for over two decades.  I'm looking forward to rolling them out to a larger crowd.

Here are the talks in calendar order.  The first two are at MySQL Connect 2012 in San Francisco on September 30th:

• …

Every time I have had the pleasure of attending Oracle Open World, I have discovered a plethora of technical heavy-weights from all over the world in attendance. I enjoy meeting and shmoozing with these people almost as much as absorbing the technical content of the show itself. Many of my Pythian colleagues are presenting at [...]

Oracle is the most powerful database system in the world. However, Oracle's expensive and complex replication makes it difficult to build highly available applications or move data in real-time to data warehouses and popular databases like MySQL.

In this video (recording of our 9/13/12 webinar) you will learn how Continuent Tungsten solves problems with Oracle replication at a fraction of the

Next week Michael and I (Bradley) will be travelling to Silicon Valley to present a tutorial on Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Databases at the 6th XLDB Conference.

The tutorial, which is 4 hours on Monday afternoon, aims to cover the following topics (but it’s looking like we’ll have to drop several items for lack of time.)

This tutorial will explore data structures and algorithms for big databases. The topics include:

• Data structures including B-trees, Log Structured Merge Trees, and Streaming B-trees.
• Approximate Query Membership data structures including Bloom filters and cascade filters.
• Algorithms for join including hash joins and Graefe’s generalized join.
• Index design, including covering indexes. …

Oh I love these things: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/22/how-big-is-facebooks-data-2-5-billion-pieces-of-content-and-500-terabytes-ingested-every-day/

Every day there are 2.5B content items shares, and 2.7B "Like"s. I care less about GiGo content itself, but metadata, connections, relations are kept transactionally in a relational database. The above 2 use-cases generate 5.2B transactions on the database, and since there are only 86400 seconds a day, we get over 60000 write transactions per second on the database, from these 2 use-cases alone, not to mention all other use-cases, such as new profiles, emails, queries...

And what's the size of new data, on top of all the existing …

On the 8/16 I conducted a webinar titled: "Scale Up vs. Scale Out" (http://www.slideshare.net/ScaleBase/scalebase-webinar-816-scaleup-vs-scaleout):


ScaleBase Webinar 8.16: ScaleUp vs. ScaleOut from ScaleBase
The webinar was successful, we had many attendees and great participation in questions and answers throughout the session and in the end. Only after the webinar it only occurred to me that one specific graphic was missing from the webinar deck. It was occurred to me after answering several audience questions about "the difference between …

NSFW (audio) “…pipe your data to /dev/null – it will be very fast.” “Does /dev/null support sharding?” NSFW (audio) “…the only thing constructive we could have used their source files for was as random keys for SSL certs.” NSFW (audio) “PHP reeks … Continue reading →