Welcome to blog #2 in a series about the benefits of the Fractal Tree. In this post, I’ll be explaining Big Data, why it poses such a problem and how Tokutek can help. Given the fact that I am a lifelong fan of both Hip-hop and Big Data, the title was a no-brainer and, given the artist, a bit of a pun.

 I am as tired as you of hearing the term “Big Data.” It’s so overused, that it ceases to have specific meaning anymore. You see, data hardly ever starts as “big” or a “problem.” Rather, it starts small and easily manageable, but gradually grows to some unimaginable size and becomes a beast in need of slaying, like the irradiated ant from a sci-fi film, growing to the size of a cruise ship. The nature of tackling such a tough problem means that the initial understanding of the factors involved is, oftentimes, incomplete at best; Catch-22 exemplified. During the course of problem it is …

In my recent travels, I’ve been speaking with database users at various meetups and trade shows worldwide. Very often, I got questions centering around the best use cases for our products, be it TokuDB, our MySQL storage engine, or, TokuMX, our distribution of MongoDB. Over 90% of the time, I responded Cloud, Big Data or both. You see, in the software industry we’re like kindergartners, we like things to fit into neat categories. If you know any software sales people, you’ll recognize this as a fitting analogy (at least in terms of energy and attention span), but I digress. This strategy helps allocate resources where they are most likely to make an impact, and, thus, optimize our return on investment. In this blog series, I’m going to go slightly against the grain and explain why the Fractal Tree makes databases work in these environments.

Before I get into more detail, let me …

Last month I wrote a blog about the closing of MongoDB ticket SERVER-1240, which brings Collection Level Locking (CLL) to the MMAPV1 storage engine in MongoDB 2.8. In MongoDB 2.6 there is a writer lock at the database level, so each database only allows one writer at a time. In concurrent write workloads, this means that all writers essentially form a single line and do their writes one at a time. In MongoDB 2.8 this lock has been moved to the collection level. Better yet is document level locking, but even though this feature was shown at MongoDB World 2014 it's not going to ship. But it did make for one amazing demo by …

Check Out Our Latest Technical Resources for MySQL, MariaDB & MongoDB Clusters

Like every month this year, we have created new content and tools for you; here is a summary of what we’ve published this December. Please do check it out and let us know if you have any comments or feedback.

And thank you for following us in the past 12 months and for your fidelity; we look forward to “seeing” you next year as well and wish you a great start to 2015!

New Live Technical Webinars

Infrastructure automation isn’t easy, but it’s not rocket science either, says Riaan Nolan. Riaan has been in operations for the past decade, and has built over a dozen eCommerce …

If you are automating your infrastructure deployments with Chef, then read on. We are glad to announce the availability of a Chef cookbook for ClusterControl. This cookbook replaces previous cookbooks we released for ClusterControl and Galera Cluster. For those using Puppet, please have a look at our Puppet module for ClusterControl.

ClusterControl Cookbook on Chef Supermarket

The ClusterControl cookbook is available on Chef Supermarket, and getting the cookbook is as easy as:

$ knife cookbook site download clustercontrol

This cookbook supports the installation of ClusterControl on top of existing database clusters:

• Galera Cluster
  • MySQL Galera Cluster by Codership
  …

While MongoDB 2.8 introduces a formal storage engine API and brings with it the new WiredTiger storage engine, it also adds collection level locking to the existing memory mapped engine (MMAPV1) which will remain the default engine until MongoDB 3.0, so says Eliot.

The MongoDB community has been waiting a long time for collection level locking, the Jira ticket was created on June 15, 2010. When I saw the following Facebook post I got excited to give it a spin, but unfortunately the results were extremely poor using MongoDB …

MongoDB has always been about ease of use. With nothing more than the mongod binary, starting a MongoDB server is as simple as:
./mongod --dbpath=/path/to/dataAs a long time user of Oracle and MySQL I'm extremely impressed by just how simple this is. It certainly encourages new users to try it out.

In MongoDB 2.6 and earlier there has only been a single "storage engine" available in the server. That storage engine has very few tunable parameters, so the defaults are fine for most users. If you don't like the defaults you can probably change them with a little review of the documentation.

MongoDB 2.8 adds the ability to support an unlimited number of storage engines via a storage engine API. Using the alternative WiredTiger storage engine is as simple as asking for it on the command line:
./mongod --dbpath=/path/to/data --storageEngine …

I visited MongoDB Day in London on November 6. Here are a few observations:

App-Developer Centric. It is interesting to see how much MongoDB is about developers; the ops side is something which is a necessary evil developers have to deal with. The ops topics covered in principle that there are no topics about choices of operating systems or hardware for MongoDB beyond flash and more memory.

Development Stacks. Being application centric there was good coverage of the MongoDB-powered stacks – MEAN and METEOR specifically got attention. Especially the METEOR presentation by Henrik Ingo was cool – real-time view synchronization between the Web browser (or mobile app) and database as well as the same language for server-side and client-side development is a really great concept. Though …

Since this is my first blog I feel it's necessary to introduce myself. I'm Tim Callaghan, I work at Tokutek (makers of TokuDB and TokuMX), and I love benchmarking. While some of the content on this blog will certainly be about Tokutek technologies, I plan on exploring a wide variety of others as well. These are strictly my own personal views and opinions, and comments/feedback are always welcome. Lets get started...

A few weeks ago I noticed an EnterpriseDB NoSQL Benchmark that measured Data Load, Insert, Select, and Size. It wasn't just a NoSQL benchmark, it was specifically calling out …

October 17, 2014 By Severalnines

Integrating ClusterControl with a corporate LDAP directory is a common task for many IT organizations. In an earlier blog, we showed you how to integrate ClusterControl with OpenLDAP. In this post, we will show you how to integrate with FreeIPA and Windows Active Directory. 

How ClusterControl Performs LDAP Authentication

ClusterControl supports up to LDAPv3 protocol based on RFC2307. More details on this in the documentation.

When authenticating, ClusterControl will first bind to the directory tree server (LDAP …