We are proud to share that OSSCube has now entered into a partnership with Cloudera, as the official training partner for Cloudera Developer Training for Apache Hadoop. The pride is, essentially, in the fact that we are the World’s First Cloudera / Hadoop Training Partner.

Cloudera provides enterprises a powerful new data platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open source software package.  Hadoop is a powerful data management platform for consolidating your data, storing your information inexpensively and reliably and understanding large, heterogeneous data sets in order to better comprehend the data deluge.

OSSCube believes this partnership will deliver first-class Cloudera / Hadoop training to developers and IT professionals to help establish them as a trusted and valuable resource looking to work with Apache Hadoop, along with developing their professional skills.

Immediately after the …

Working with replication, you come across many topologies, some of them sound and established, some of them less so, and some of them still in the realm of the hopeless wishes. I have been working with replication for almost 10 years now, and my wish list grew quite big during this time. In the last 12 months, though, while working at Continuent, some of the topologies that I wanted to work with have moved from the cloud of wishful thinking to the firm land of things that happen. My quest for star replication starts with the most common topology. One master, many slaves.

It looks like a star, with the rays extending from the master to the slaves. This is the basis of most of the replication going on mostly everywhere nowadays, and it has few surprises. Setting aside the …

Dear data integration fans,

I’m a big fan of “appropriate” data modeling prior to doing any data integration work.  For a number of folks out there that means the creation of an Enterprise Data Warehouse model in classical Bill Inmon style.  Others prefer to use modern modeling techniques like Data Vault, created by Dan Linstedt.  However, the largest group data warehouse architects use a technique called dimensional modeling championed by Ralph Kimball.

Using a modeling technique is very important since it brings structure to your data warehouse. …

So far we've looked at many aspects of MySQL, not in any great depth, but hopefully with enough information to get you started and whet your appetite for more.  Now we start to look into areas that aren't in the basic tutorials.

Replication is the technology that allows data to be stored on multiple servers. Typically this is used in "scale out" applications.  "Scale out" is used in contrast to "Scale up" where to scale a solution you buy a bigger box to run it on, where "scale out" means you buy more boxes.  Each has its benefits and drawbacks, with the usual benefit of scale out being that you get more bang for your buck.

The way replication works in MySQL is pretty simple.  One server is identified as the master, and writes every transaction to a file, the binary log.  Other servers (and there may be many) act as slaves and request information from the master. The slave keeps track of where it got up to …

Fall is being coy this year in the Northeast. We've been having on and off spells of very mild, almost summer-like weather over the last few weeks. That trend seems to be finally ending, alas, as there is possible snow forecasted for the weekend in New Hampshire. As the old joke goes, if you don't like the weather here, just wait five minutes.

The fall also brings hunting to the area. The annual moose season just concluded (you need to enter a special lottery to get a moose permit), but deer season is just about to open. My son and I won't be participating this year, but we recently purchased the appropriate tools of the trade, a shotgun to hunt in southern NH (where you can't hunt deer with a rifle) and a Mosin Nagant 91/30 for the rest of the state. The later is probably overkill, but my son saved up his pennies to buy it, being a student of both WWII and all things …

This month marked SkySQL's first anniversary.  It also marks my 6 months with the company, after being with MySQL AB (and then Sun and finally Oracle) for over 5 years. As good a time as any for a look back and some musings of the future.

In late 2005 I took a position in the web team (a part of Marketing) at MySQL AB.  It was a great company to work for, with a great team of people and a truly great spirit.  The idea that they were making a difference every day was palpable. I then saw it taken over by Sun Microsystems and shortly after by Oracle Corporation.  We went from 500 employees to 30,000 and then to 100,000.  My job satisfaction started to decline.  I felt more like I was battling for every concession rather than revelling in what we were able to achieve.  I needed a change.

When I joined SkySQL it was like going home - I knew pretty …

Typical MySQL environment involves one Master receiving writes and multiple slaves to scale the reads. The “slave” term has been used in MySQL because the Slave servers have to perform every task in copying from the Master binlog, then updating their relay logs and finally committing to the Slave databases. The Master plays no role in replication here other than storing the replication events in the binlog.
With this kind of Master- Slave set up, there are several limitations-
-       Slave lag -       Stale or old data -       Data loss -       Manual failover which is error-prone and time consuming
In SchoonerSQL, there is no concept of “Slaves” inside synchronous cluster. We refer to it as "Read Masters" because of our synchronous approach and different replication architecture. It is …

In our last episode we looked at transactions and how to create them.  In this episode I'll look at some of the implications of transactions, especially in a web application.

Transactions and Replication

We will discuss replication in depth later in the series, however it is sufficient for the moment to say that replication allows you to copy data in near real-time between MySQL servers and keep them synchronised.  What gets transferred are the changes that are made to your tables and data. So what about rolled-back (aborted) transactions?  Since the state after the rollback is essentially the same as the state before the transaction started, there seems little point in replicating those statements.  Indeed they are not replicated. Only completed transactions are.

I briefly mentioned that …

I will be at Zendcon next week with two presentations. What’s New with MySQL will be on Wednesday the 19th and The Care and Feeding of a MySQL Database on Thursday the 20th.

Other MySQL centric session are by Bill Karwin on SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies and MySQL 5.5 InnoDB Tuning. Plus Ligaya Turmelle will present Character Sets Suck.

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