I wrote a guest column for GigaOm on how open source software, cloud and software as a service are helping to bring about the consumerization of IT: namely bringing simplicity where complexity reigned.  I cited some examples including New Relic, Box.net and Apple.

Open source has gone a long way toward putting power back in the hands of developers, who can download, install and deploy software without having to go through any kind of convoluted sales or budget approval process.  You want MySQL?  You can download and install in 15 minutes, and you don’t have to …

Single-threaded apply is one of the big downsides of MySQL's built-in replication, as Baron Schwartz pointed out a couple of days ago.  While a master can process dozens of updates at once, slaves must apply them one after the other on a single thread.  Add in disk I/O, and the result is very slow performance indeed.  The obvious answer is parallel apply, namely writing multiple non-conflicting updates to the slave at once.

I have spent the last few months implementing parallel apply for Tungsten 2.0, which we are now testing at customer sites.  In this article I would like to describe how Tungsten's parallel apply works as well as some of the lessons that have become apparent through the implementation.

There are a couple of big challenges in parallel apply.  …

Disaster recovery (DR) is not the first thing most DBAs think of when putting up a new database application.   However, it's one of the top issues for people using the data--what happens if the site goes down and everything disappears?   So even if DR is not the first issue in every deployment, it is a very high priority as soon as your application is the least bit successful.

At the database level DR has a fairly simple solution:  keep copies of data on a backup site that is up-to-date at all times.  This article explains the architecture for MySQL DR with Tungsten and a couple of key features that make it work, namely floating IP addresses and global transation IDs.  We will dig into those at the end.

First a bit of introduction.  Tungsten manages clusters of off-the-shelf database connected by master/slave replication.  There are replication and management services on …

Have you ever run into a problem where MySQL replication did 95% of what you needed but not the remaining 5% to solve a real problem?  Hacking the binlog is always a possibility, but it typically looks like this example.  Not a pretty sight.  Wouldn't it be easier if replication were a bunch of building blocks you could recombine to create custom replicator processes? 

Tungsten 1.3 has a new feature called pipelines that allows you to do exactly that.  A pipeline consists of one or more stages that tie together generic components to extract, filter, store, and apply events, which is Tungsten parlance for transactions.  Each stage has a processing thread, so multi-stage pipelines can process data independently and without blocking.  The stages also take care of important but tedious issues like remembering the transactional …

I would like to announce a couple of new Tungsten versions available for your database clustering enjoyment.  As most readers of this blog are aware, Tungsten allows users to create highly available data services that include replicated copies, distributed management, and application connectivity using unaltered open source databases.   We are continually improving the software and have a raft of new features coming out this year.  

First, there is a new Tungsten 1.2.3 maintenance release available in both commercial as well as open source editions.  You can get access to the commercial version on the Continuent website, while the open source version is available on SourceForge. 

 The Tungsten 1.2.3 release focuses on improvements for MySQL …

I have been a little bit stubborn on my concession that cloud computing is really going to be the wave of the future. Though lately I have been playing with a lot of cloud related technologies and am hooked. Spin up 10 (or 100) Linux servers in a minute from a web page with no real systems management skills and then you start seeing the power of cloud computing. As I try to get smarter on cloud computing I compiled the following list of resources that I have found helpful.  If you have a great cloud resource please feel free to let me know what I am missing on.

Cloud and Virtualization Guides and Whitepapers

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Software-as-a-Service (Saas) is one of the main growth areas in modern database applications.  This topic has become a correspondingly important focus for Tungsten, not least of all because new SaaS applications make heavy use of open source databases like MySQL and PostgreSQL that Tungsten supports.

This blog article introduces a series of essays on database architectures for SaaS and how we are adapting Tungsten to enable them more easily.  I plan to focus especially on problems of replication and clustering relevant to SaaS—what are the problems, what are the common design patterns to solve them, and how to deploy and operate the solutions. I will also discuss how to make replication and clustering work better for these cases—either using Tungsten features that already exist or features we are designing.

I hope everything you read will …

There has been no shortage of lively discussion on open source software licenses with recent shifts in the top licenses, perspectives on the licenses or lack of them for networked, SaaS and cloud-based software, increased prominence of a Microsoft open source license and concern over the openness (or closedness, depending on your perspedtive) of the latest devices. Amid all of it, we’re pleased to present our latest long-form report, CAOS 12 - The Myth of Open Source …

A lot of people are into the whole cloud computing scenario these days. However, no one has talked about offering DBA-like services in the cloud, all automated, so that startups don’t have to get their own DBAs.

Enter FathomDB. They are poised to offer databases as a service (maybe they’ll charge per database - so you can in theory run both WordPress and Mediawiki, if you prefix wp_ and mw_ in your table creation, for example). They are using MySQL. They’ve also taken the worry of running a database out - they will backup, they will setup (so you don’t have to issue GRANT commands :P), and they will also monitor your databases for you.

But what really takes the cake? The fact that they will also offer performance advisors. This totally reminds me of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (aka …