I’ve been a little behind in recent blogging efforts, and realized that in less than a month we’ll be back at Percona Live: MySQL Conference and Expo 2014, aka PLMCE. Last year’s PLMCE was my first, as well as the event where Tokutek announced the open sourcing of TokuDB.

It’s hard to believe that a year has gone by, but the customer adoption in both enterprise and community users has been awesome. TokuDB is available from our website for both MySQL and MariaDB, and is also available directly from MariaDB and …

With TokuMX 1.4 coming out soon, with (teaser) wonderful improvements made to sharding and updates (and plenty of other goodies), I’ve recently reminisced about how we got TokuMX to this point. We (actually, really John) started dabbling with integrating Fractal Tree® indexes into MongoDB in the summer of 2012, where we (really, he) prototyped using Fractal Tree indexes only for secondary indexes. As cool as that …

William Zola over at MongoDB gave a great talk called “The (Only) Three Reasons for Slow MongoDB Performance”. It reminded me of an interesting characteristic of updates in MongoDB. Because MongoDB’s main data store is a flat file and secondary indexes store offsets into the flat file (as I explain here), if the location of a document changes, corresponding entries in secondary indexes must also change. So, an update to an unindexed field that causes the document to move also causes modifications to every secondary index, which, as William points out, can be expensive. If a document has indexed an array, this problem is exacerbated.

What …

You love MySQL and MariaDB for its ease of deployment, but what if you could increase performance and save significant time and money when your application starts to scale without having to change your applications?
Register Now!

SPEAKER: Tim Callaghan, VP of Engineering at Tokutek
DATE: Tuesday, January 28th
TIME: 1pm ET

Join this interactive webinar with Tokutek’s VP of Engineering, Tim Callaghan, as he walks through the potential pitfalls when using MySQL or MariaDB for Big Data applications, and how to effectively use TokuDB to increase performance, reduce database size and achieve true schema agility.

Attend this webinar to learn:

Use your MySQL expertise to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of MongoDB.

SPEAKER: Tim Callaghan, VP of Engineering at Tokutek
DATE: Tuesday, December 17th
TIME: 1pm ET
Register Now!

MongoDB is a popular NoSQL DBMS that shares the ease-of-use and quick setup that made MySQL famous. But is MongoDB really up to the job? Is it right for your applications? If you understand MySQL well, you know how database systems work.

Join Tim Callaghan, VP/Engineering at Tokutek as he recaps his and CEO of Continuent, Robert Hodges, session from 2013′s Percona Live London. Learn how to lean on your knowledge of topics like schema design, query optimization, indexing, sharding, and high availability to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of MongoDB. System design is all …

What does it mean if MySQL returns the ‘Incorrect key file for table’ error for one of my queries? The answer is complicated and depends on which storage engine is returning the error. We have debugged two cases which we describe here.

File system out of space

When running the random query generator, one of the queries failed.

Query: SELECT * FROM (mysql . general_log AS table1 INNER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA . INNODB_BUFFER_PAGE AS table2 
ON ( table2 . SPACE = table1 . user_host ) ) ORDER BY table1 . thread_id LIMIT 168 
failed: 126 Incorrect key file for table '/data/mysql7/performance_schema_vardir/tmp/#sql_6b8_17.MYI'; 
try to repair it

Since this query requires a sort, MySQL creates a hidden temporary table called ‘#sql_6b8_17.MYI’ to hold the intermediate results. While the query was executing, some operation performed on the MyISAM table returned an error. What could it be?

MySQL maps the …

Attending Percona Live in London next week?

Don’t miss the chance to hear Tokutek’s Vice President of Engineering, Tim Callaghan, discuss how to use your MySQL knowledge to become an instant MongoDB Guru and the advantages of using Fractal Tree® indexes in MySQL and MongoDB. Tim will be speaking about these topics in two separate sessions at 12:00pm and 5:00pm on November 12.

For more information on these sessions and Percona Live-London, visit https://www.percona.com/live/london-2013/users/tim-callaghan.

Since our initial release last summer, TokuMX has supported fully ACID and MVCC multi-statement transactions. I’d like to take this post to explain exactly what we’ve done and what features are now available to the user.

But before beginning, an important note: we have implemented this for non-sharded clusters only. We do not support distributed transactions across different shards.

At a high level, what have we done?

We have taken MongoDB’s basic transactional behavior, and extended it. MongoDB is transactional with respect to one, and only one, document. MongoDB guarantees single document atomicity. Journaling provides durability for that document. The database …

You love MySQL for its ease of deployment – but are you worried about how your application will perform when it starts to scale?

SPEAKER: Gerry Narvaja, Tokutek
DATE: Wednesday, November 6th
TIME: 1pm ET
Register Now!

Join this interactive webinar with Gerry Narvaja of Tokutek as he walks through the potential pitfalls when using MySQL for Big Data applications, how you can avoid unnecessary tolls on time and resources and tips on how to get the most out of your MySQL applications with open source TokuDB.

Attend this webinar to learn how to:

• dramatically increase performance without having to rewrite code
• reduce the total cost of your servers and flash/SSD storage
• perform hot schema changes

The …

While integrating TokuDB into MySQL 5.6, we found that MySQL 5.6 does not support more than one XA storage engine. For example, there is an assert in the ha_recover function that fires when the total number of XA storage engines is greater than one. After disabling this assert, we found lots of bugs in the MySQL 5.6 implementation of the TC_LOG_MMAP class, which is used when running with the binlog turned off.

There are two alternatives that we know of to fix this problem in MySQL 5.6:

• First, we could merge code from MariaDB 5.5 into MySQL 5.6. The advantage of this approach is that we have been running this code with TokuDB in MariaDB 5.5 for a long time, so we have confidence in its correctness.
• Second, we found that MySQL 5.7.2 has made changes to allow multiple XA storage engines. This is great news for TokuDB since we have one less MySQL patch to worry about. Our simple scan of the MySQL 5.7 source showed …