Over the last month I have been working on a ZFS Tuning for Databases presentation. I'll be presenting it live tomorrow 8/26/09 at 8 AM PST.

This based on a lot of work done at Sun as well as in the community. With the massive adoption of Solid State Devices (SSDs) (thank you iPOD) the storage market just got a whole lot more interesting. Incorporating SSDs into a ZFS pool is a breeze. This presentation is meant to help you get the best out of the ZFS + SSD combination for databases. We look into Postgres, MySQL and Oracle. I also provide a quick into into Sun's unified storage 7000 series systems.

If you are interested do Register Now

Sun is launching systems with multisocket  6-core Opterons (Istanbul) today. Last week I got access to  Sun Fire X4140 with 2 x 6-core Opterons with 36GB RAM. It is always great to see such a 1RU system packaged with so many x64 cores.

# psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 6 virtual processors (0-5)   x86 (chipid 0x0 AuthenticAMD family 16 model 8 step 0 clock 2600 MHz)     Six-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8435 The physical processor has 6 virtual processors (6-11)   x86 (chipid 0x1 AuthenticAMD family 16 model 8 step 0 clock 2600 MHz)     Six-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8435

I decided to take the system for a test drive with Olio. Olio is a Web 2.0 toolkit consisting on a web 2.0 event calendar application  which can help stress a system. Depending on your favorite scripting language you …

Sun is launching systems with multisocket  6-core Opterons (Istanbul) today. Last week I got access to  Sun Fire X4140 with 2 x 6-core Opterons with 36GB RAM. It is always great to see such a 1RU system packaged with so many x64 cores.

# psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 6 virtual processors (0-5)   x86 (chipid 0x0 AuthenticAMD family 16 model 8 step 0 clock 2600 MHz)     Six-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8435 The physical processor has 6 virtual processors (6-11)   x86 (chipid 0x1 AuthenticAMD family 16 model 8 step 0 clock 2600 MHz)     Six-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8435

I decided to take the system for a test drive with Olio. Olio is a Web 2.0 toolkit consisting on a web 2.0 event calendar application  which can help stress a system. Depending on your favorite scripting language you …

Sun is launching systems with multisocket  6-core Opterons (Istanbul) today. Last week I got access to  Sun Fire X4140 with 2 x 6-core Opterons with 36GB RAM. It is always great to see such a 1RU system packaged with so many x64 cores.

# psrinfo -vp The physical processor has 6 virtual processors (0-5)   x86 (chipid 0x0 AuthenticAMD family 16 model 8 step 0 clock 2600 MHz)     Six-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8435 The physical processor has 6 virtual processors (6-11)   x86 (chipid 0x1 AuthenticAMD family 16 model 8 step 0 clock 2600 MHz)     Six-Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 8435

I decided to take the system for a test drive with Olio. Olio is a Web 2.0 toolkit consisting on a web 2.0 event calendar application  which can help stress a system. Depending on your favorite scripting language you …

This is the 150th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Someone accidentally left Dave Edwards‘ cage unlocked, and he escaped, thus leaving me with the pleasurable duty of compiling the 150th weekly Log Buffer.

Many people other than Dave are finding release this week. Giuseppe Maxia explains some details of MySQL’s New Release Model. Andrew Morgan announces a New MySQL Cluster Maintenance Release. Aleksandr Kuzminsky of the MySQL Performance …

About six months ago, the question of storing images in a database came up. This is one of my favorite topics, and has many database-agnostic parts.

Personally, I think “tell me about storing images in a database” is actually a great interview question, because you will be able to see the difference between someone who has just memorized “what’s right” versus someone who is really thinking. It also helps you see how someone will communicate — if they just say “NEVER do it, it’s as bad as crossing the streams!” then they are a type of person that gives you a short answer, without much explanation, and without many nuances. (That may be what you are looking for, but usually you want someone who gives reasons for why they strongly feel one way or another).

Consider the following cases:

What about storing …

During my PGCon 2009 presentation there was a question on the saw tooth nature of the workload results on the high end side of benchmark runs. To which Matthew Wilcox (from Intel) commented it could be scheduler related. I did not give it much thought at that time till today when I was trying to do some iGen runs for the JDBC Binary Transfer patch (more on that in another blog post) and also Simon's read only scalability runs . Then I realized that I was not following one of my one tuning advice for running Postgres on OpenSolaris. The advice is to  use FX Class of scheduler instead of the default TS Class on OpenSolaris . More details on various scheduler classes can be found on docs.sun.com.

Now how many times I have forgotten to do that …

During my PGCon 2009 presentation there was a question on the saw tooth nature of the workload results on the high end side of benchmark runs. To which Matthew Wilcox (from Intel) commented it could be scheduler related. I did not give it much thought at that time till today when I was trying to do some iGen runs for the JDBC Binary Transfer patch (more on that in another blog post) and also Simon's read only scalability runs . Then I realized that I was not following one of my one tuning advice for running Postgres on OpenSolaris. The advice is to  use FX Class of scheduler instead of the default TS Class on OpenSolaris . More details on various scheduler classes can be found on docs.sun.com.

Now how many times I have forgotten to do …

During my PGCon 2009 presentation there was a question on the saw tooth nature of the workload results on the high end side of benchmark runs. To which Matthew Wilcox (from Intel) commented it could be scheduler related. I did not give it much thought at that time till today when I was trying to do some iGen runs for the JDBC Binary Transfer patch (more on that in another blog post) and also Simon's read only scalability runs . Then I realized that I was not following one of my one tuning advice for running Postgres on OpenSolaris. The advice is to  use FX Class of scheduler instead of the default TS Class on OpenSolaris . More details on various scheduler classes can be found on docs.sun.com.

Now how many times I have forgotten to do …

A year ago, the outline was being written. A lot of work was crammed into the intervening months, and I am happy and proud to announce that the MySQL Administrator’s Bible has been published, and is sitting on the shelf at many major booksellers already. The official publication date is today — Monday, May 11th, 2009 — although some stores have had copies for a week, including Amazon.com.

The MySQL Administrator’s Bible, published by Wiley Press (available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/MySQL-Administrators-Bible-Sheeri-Cabral/dp/0470416912/, fully covers how to administer MySQL 5.1. It is suitable for people new to MySQL, although as an experienced MySQL DBA I can say that I learned a lot while researching and writing this book, and I believe that even veteran DBAs can learn from this book.

This book for …