Tokutek, the leading innovator in high-performance and agile schema storage engines, announced today that its team members will be speaking at both the IOUG Collaborate 11 in Orlando, FL, on April 11, 2011 and the O’Reilly MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA, on April 12. Tokutek will also be exhibiting at booth # 612 at the O’Reilly MySQL Expo.

IOUG Collaborate 11 (FL) April 11, 2011

Date: Monday, April 11
Time: 10:30 am – 11:30 am
Speaker: Zardosht Kasheff, Software Developer, Tokutek
Topic: Understanding Indexing
Location: Room 306A, Orange County Convention …

From 31 minutes to 2 seconds Hot Indexing Overview

TokuDB v5.0 introduces several features that are new to the MySQL world. Recently, we posted on HCAD: Hot Column addition and Deletion. In this post, we talk about Hot Indexing.

What happens when you try to add a new index, as follows?

mysql> create index example_idx on example_tbl (example_field);

In standard MySQL 5.1 InnoDB, the table example_tbl gets locked while all indexes, including the primary key, get rebuilt. In the InnoDB plugin for 5.1, as well as in previous releases of TokuDB, things are improved in that the table is only locked while the one index is built. This still however can easily cause hours of downtime.

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Keeping from Getting Buried in Big Data

Boy, what a way to go into spring. We are expecting up to 1/2″ of rain (or perhaps sleet) today. This follows the 3″ of snow we had on Friday (Shaq — watch out we long ago got Nate – you are next).

Here is the picture from outside our offices on Friday:

Anyway, as I mentioned in my post last Monday, our Chief Scientist and co-founder Martín Farach-Colton had the privilege of sitting down with Sheeri Cabral and Sarah Novotny for their weekly …

From 18 hours to 3 seconds! Hot Column Addition and Deletion (HCAD) Overview

TokuDB v5.0 introduces several features that are new to the MySQL world. In this series of posts, we’re going to present some information on these features: what’s the feature, how does it work under the hood, and how do you get the most out of this feature in your MySQL setup.

Today we start with HCAD: Hot Column Addition and Deletion. Many users have had the experience of loading a bunch of data into a table and associated indexes, only to find that adding some columns or removing them would be useful. An

alter table X add column Y int default 0;

or the like takes a long time — hours or more — during which time the table is write locked, meaning no insertions/deletions/updates and no queries on the new column until the alter table is done. …

Running with Big Data

It’s spring here in Boston, though one could hardly tell (still barely hitting 40°F). So, for those stuck indoors working out on the treadmill, or those lucky enough to do a workout outdoors, we’ve got a great podcast. Our Chief Scientist and co-founder Martín Farach-Colton had the privilege of sitting down with Sheeri Cabral and Sarah Novotny for their weekly MySQL Database Community Podcast (OurSQL Episode 39). In it, he speaks about Tokutek and TokuDB v5.0, which was just released last week (see …

Big Data + Big Ideas = Big Advantage

“Big Data” is the new buzzword in IT. Doing a Google search will yield over 1M hits. In Boston, there were two back-to-back Big Data events last month. On Wednesday in New York, there was another Big Data event.

Of course, everyone has an opinion on Big Data. And while size of data is always top of mind, there were some interesting discussions around the time component of Big Data – specifically, how fast data comes in and how fast one can respond to it.

Here’s a sampling of some of the interesting discussions (which was in our Twitter stream during the show):

The Need for Speed: Sample of Real World Data Rates

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The Big Data Opportunity

“What if you could analyze every transaction, capture insights from every customer interaction, and didn’t have to wait for months to get data from the field?”- McKinsey Column, Financial Times

Despite this tremendous opportunity, MySQL implementations are usually kept relatively small, often on the order of 500 GB or less.  Anything lager than this threshold tends to lead to big operational problems, i.e. poor insertion rates, slow queries, hours to days for index rebuilding, offline schema changes, long loading times, dump/reload cycles during down time, extended recovery, etc. The promise of Big Data has remained largely unfulfilled for MySQL. Until now.

Live from NY, at the …

Yesterday, at the Boston MySQL Meetup, I gave a talk on indexing. It is posted here (also goo.gl/S2LBe).

In short, indexes are used to improve query performance. As a result, good indexes are designed around queries that users find important in their application. The presentation covers three simple and effective rules on how to construct indexes around queries that result in good performance.

The rules are explained using a simple model that does NOT rely on understanding B-trees, Fractal Tree™ indexing, or any other data structure used to store the data on disk. They are derived from these simple properties:

• Point queries are slow
• Range …

In Part 1, and Part 2 of this series, I presented some thoughts on partitioning. I heard some great feedback on why people use partitioning. Here, I present a flow chart that summarizes what I’ve learned. In summary: with TokuDB in the picture there’s almost no reason to use partitioning. Or I should say, there are almost always better (higher performing, more robust, lower maintenance) alternatives to partitioning.

Here goes:

1. Spindle contention? In other words, are you partitioning in order to spread your query work load across many disks? I’ve yet to see a compelling technical case that RAIDing your disks doesn’t do this as well, with much less setup and maintenance.
2. …

As Huey Lewis once noted, sometimes it’s “Hip To Be Square.” Apparently, occasionally, someone even pays attention to you when you are. Xconomy just featured “10 Boring Boston-Area Tech Companies That Are Actually Interesting” and we made the cut. As they note it is a “short list of the Boston area’s most boring-sounding tech companies that readers should actually care about.”

So how did we get on their radar screen? They noted TokuDB for using “’Fractal Tree indexes’ to ‘enhance MySQL’s scalability and performance.’  In other words, it makes existing databases faster and more efficient to query and …