At next week’s Strange Loop conference, I will give a talk on “Understanding Indexing”. The session is 10 am Monday, September 24th, and will be held in the Midland States Room.

Application performance often depends on how fast a query can respond and query performance almost always depends on good indexing. So one of the quickest and least expensive ways to increase application performance is to optimize the indexes. This talk presents three simple and effective rules on how to construct indexes around queries that result in good performance.

This is a general discussion applicable to all databases using indexes and is not specific to any particular MySQL® storage engine (e.g., InnoDB, TokuDB®, etc.). …

In my three previous blogs I wrote about our implementation of Fractal Tree Indexes on MongoDB, showing a 10x insertion performance increase, a 268x query performance increase, and a comparison of covered indexes and clustered indexes. The benchmarks show the difference that rich and efficient indexing can make to your MongoDB workload.

It’s one thing for us to benchmark MongoDB + TokuDB and another to measure real world performance. If you are looking for a way to improve the performance or scalability of your MongoDB deployment, we can help …

Next week Michael and I (Bradley) will be travelling to Silicon Valley to present a tutorial on Data Structures and Algorithms for Big Databases at the 6th XLDB Conference.

The tutorial, which is 4 hours on Monday afternoon, aims to cover the following topics (but it’s looking like we’ll have to drop several items for lack of time.)

This tutorial will explore data structures and algorithms for big databases. The topics include:

• Data structures including B-trees, Log Structured Merge Trees, and Streaming B-trees.
• Approximate Query Membership data structures including Bloom filters and cascade filters.
• Algorithms for join including hash joins and Graefe’s generalized join.
• Index design, including covering indexes. …

In my two previous blogs I wrote about our implementation of Fractal Tree Indexes on MongoDB, showing a 10x insertion performance increase and a 268x query performance increase. MongoDB’s covered indexes can provide some performance benefits over a regular MongoDB index, as they reduce the amount of IO required to satisfy certain queries.  In essence, when all of the fields you are requesting are present in the index key, then MongoDB does not have to go back to the main storage heap to retrieve anything.  My benchmark results are …

Last week I wrote about our 10x insertion performance increase with MongoDB. We’ve continued our experimental integration of Fractal Tree® Indexes into MongoDB, adding support for clustered indexes.  A clustered index stores all non-index fields as the “value” portion of the index, as opposed to a standard MongoDB index that stores a pointer to the document data.  The benefit is that indexed lookups can immediately return any requested values instead of needing to do an additional lookup (and potential disk IOs) for the requested fields.

To create a clustered index you just need to add “clustering:true” as in the following example (note that version 2 indexes are Fractal Tree Indexes): …

The challenge of handling massive data processing workloads has spawned many new innovations and techniques in the database world, from indexing innovations like our Fractal Tree® technology to a myriad of “NoSQL” solutions (here is our Chief Scientist’s perspective). Among the most popular and widely adopted NoSQL solutions is MongoDB and we became curious if our Fractal Tree indexing could offer some advantage when combined with it. The answer seems to be a strong “yes”.

Earlier in the summer we kicked off a small side project and here’s what we did: we implemented a “version 2” IndexInterface as a Fractal Tree index and ran some benchmarks. Note that our integration only affects MongoDB’s secondary indexes; primary indexes continue to rely on MongoDB’s indexing code. All the changes we made to the MongoDB source …

Businesses increasingly operate in a 24×7 environment, where complex analytics must be performed on live, continuously incoming “Big Data.” To address this, TokuDB has developed Fractal Tree®  technology, a revolutionary new indexing capability that enables SQL databases running advanced web applications to grow from gigabytes to terabytes while improving insert speed, query performance, compression, and enabling zero-downtime schema changes.

Date: September 5th
Time: 2 PM EST / 11 AM PST

REGISTER TODAY

TokuDB is used by MySQL and MariaDB customers worldwide to increase their database performance by 20x-80x on Big Data applications that conventional RDBMS’s cannot handle. Instead of waiting hours or even days to run queries or …

A few weeks ago Bradley Kuszmaul and I attended the Dagstuhl Seminar on Database Workload Management.

The Dagstuhl computer science research center is (remotely) located in the countryside in Saarland, Germany. The actual building is an 18th Century Manor House, first retooled as an old-age home, and then a computer science research center. Workshop participants typically spend the whole week talking and working together.

Dagstuhl Computer Science Center

Shivnath Babu (Duke University), Goetz Graefe (Hewlett Packard), and Harumi Kuno (Hewlett Packard) did a great job organizing. …

Benchmarking is a tricky thing, especially when it comes to compression. Some data compresses quite well while other data does not compress at all. Storing jpeg images in a BLOB column produces 0% compression, but storing the string “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA” in a VARCHAR(20) column produces extremely high (and unrealistic) compression numbers.

This week I was assisting a TokuDB customer understand the insertion performance of TokuDB versus InnoDB and MyISAM for their actual data. The table contained a single VARCHAR(50), multiple INTEGER, one SET, one DECIMAL, and a surrogate primary key.  To support a varied query workload they needed 6 indexes.

Here is an obfuscated schema of the table:

col1 varchar(50) NOT NULL,
col2 int(40) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
col3 int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
col4 int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
col5 int(10) NOT NULL DEFAULT '0',
col6 set('val1', 'val2', ..., ‘val19’, 'val20',) NOT NULL DEFAULT …

I’ll be presenting TokuDB at the Emerging Business Technology Meetup in Boston this Thursday night at 6pm at 290 Congress St (near South Station).  The meeting topic is “NewSQL: SQL Technologies Keeping NoSQL Promises” and also includes presentations from Akiban and VoltDB.  Each of us will be highlighting our technology and use-cases, with a panel discussion and open Q&A to follow.

This is a well attended group with 102 currently registered for the meeting and room for 48 more.  If you want to come and haven’t yet signed up you can RSVP …