Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

Scaling MySQL on a 256-way T5440 server using Solaris ZFS and Java 1.7

A new era

In the past few years, I published many articles using Oracle as a database server. As a former Sybase system administrator and former Informix employee, it was obviously not a matter of personal choice. It was just because the large majority of Sun's customers running databases were also Oracle customers.

This summer, in our 26 Sun Solution Centers worldwide, I observed a shift. Yes, we were still seeing older solutions based on DB2, Oracle, Sybase or Informix being evaluated on new Sun hardware. But every customer project manager, every partner, every software engineer working on a new information system design asked us : Can we architect this solution with MySQL ?

In many cases, if you dared to reply YES to this question, the next interrogation would be about the scalability of the MySQL engine.

This is why I …

The bursting of the internet bubble was good for the computer industry.

Many of us didn't like the medicine, but I can't remember a single customer upset at the idea of paying $20,000 for computing infrastructure that used to cost them $100,000. The price compression came from open source software, and a move toward general purpose servers, and resulted in companies formerly making 65% gross profit on products (Sun among them) facing a new reality.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Since then, Sun's built the biggest open source software business around (see this report for details), from platform software to application infrastructure (even a …

On Thursday, November 13, 2008 (14:00 UTC / 14:00 BST / 15:00 CET), I’ll be presenting a MySQL University session on MySQL and OpenSolaris.

The presentation will be similar to the presentation I did at the London OpenSolaris Users Group in July, you can see that presentation by visiting the LOSUG: July 2008 page.

The presentation on thursday will be slightly different - I’ll be providing a bit more hands-on information about how to install MySQL, how to configure and change the configuration and some more detail on solutions like the Webstack and Coolstack distributions.

I’ll also cover our plans for the inclusion of MySQL 5.1 in OpenSolaris, which will happen next year, and provide some examples on the new DTrace probes that we have been adding to MySQL generally.

Of course, if there’s anything specific you want me to …

At the European Customer Conference a couple of weeks back, one of the topics was the use of DRBD. DRBD is a kernel-based block device that replicates the data blocks of a device from one machine to another. The documentation I developed for that and MySQL is available here.

Fundamentally, with DRBD, you set up a physical device, configure DRBD on top of that, and write to the DRBD device. In the background, on the primary, the DRBD device writes the data to the physical disk and replicates those changed blocks to the seconday, which in turn writes the data to it’s physical device. The result is a block level copy of the source data. In an HA solution, which means that you can switch over from your primary host to your secondary host in the event of system failure and be sure pretty certain that the data on the primary and seconday are the same.

…

On behalf of Sun Microsystems, I would like to offer my sincerest congratulations to President elect Barack Obama. What an extraordinary accomplishment.

I would also like to extend my congratulations to his web team for having chosen MySQL as the platform behind their election web site, BarackObama.com.

Lest many of you get your hopes up, we cannot guarantee the White House to all MySQL users.

We announced our earnings today, and put specifics around our preannouncement from a week ago.

We also greatly increased the transparency of Sun's business by providing line item detail surrounding our most important product categories (and we broke out core elements of our Software business for the first time). If you'd like to listen to our earnings call, just click here - in addition, here's a quick synopsis of the quarter and our business overall.

At a corporate level in Q1, Sun's revenue was down 7% year over year. Growth in our emerging products was more than offset by declines in our traditional, high end products. We were surprised by the magnitude of the decline, which reflected a dramatic slowing in the US and Europe, and the effects the credit crisis is having on our customers - across nearly all geographies and …

Sorry for a short outage today – we were moving to a new server we had some problems because of software incompatibilities on the new box. Now all sites on this box should behave as usual

Ideas welcome!

General idea… base: Delta symbol (with thicker line on right hand side - a delta it’s not a regular triangle), plus one or more of the following:

• something depicting deltas: incremental small changes;
• something depicting a river delta: where streams come together before flowing into ocean;
• something depicting community: people working together, participating, communicating.

If you can draw even a little bit, rough scribbles are most welcome! We have a good artist who can turn that into magic. And, you don’t have to go with the above… come up with something else suitable!

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ourdelta/+bug/284161 where we’re tracking this; you will find other suggestions from people, including ideas that have been dismissed for visual or other …

A few weeks ago I got a copy of "High Performance MySQL" (from now on referred to as HPM) and just the other day they also send me "Refactoring SQL Applications" (aka "RSA"). Actually I had a copy of HPM at the office already, but its nice to have my own, seeing that its already severely beating up from having to live in my backup. Good to have a neat copy for the company book shelve. I have gotten to chapter 4. So far there has not been all that much earth shattering, but considering the hours I spend reading posts on planetmysql, I guess its not a huge surprise. But at the same time there is also nothing I feel is missing, so in the sense this book fulfills my expectations 100%: its a well written summary of advanced techniques that people have found in the trenches. And yes of course I did learn a few things still.

For example I was not entirely up to snuff with MyISAM's index prefix compression and recent advances in index merging. In …