MySQL Connect 2013 has been a great edition. There was of course a lot of nice announcements of improvements in the the core MySQL server technology. One of the major announcement that received a lot of buzz was MySQL Fabric. MySQL Fabric is an infrastructure component aimed at simplifying construction of a highly available, sharded, [...]

Going to MySQL Connect was truly a blast. We got a lot of good questions and feedback in the sessions and there were a lot of interest in both MySQL Fabric and the MySQL Applier for Hadoop.

A big thank you to all that attended the talks, I got a lot of good questions and comments that will help us build good solutions.

The talks are available on SlideShare:

• MySQL Sharding: Tools and Best Practices for Horizontal Scaling 
• MySQL Applier for Apache Hadoop: Real-Time Event Streaming to HDFS
• Sharding PHP with MySQL …

One of the major announcements made at the MySQL Connect conference just over a week ago was the labs release of MySQL Fabric, which supports management of MySQL Server farms in a sharded deployment.  It’s available on labs.mysql.com, which means it is just an early release with some rough edges.  One of those rough edges that I’d like to see resolved soon is that it’s difficult to install on Windows, as there is no installer package provided.  There is some documentation on how to install Fabric (you’ll find it in section 15.8.2 of the PDF that makes up the downloadable documentation), but it’s focused on Linux platforms, so I thought I would post the process that …

MySQL Connect 2013 is coming up with several interesting new sessions. Some sessions that I am participating in got accepted for the conference, so if you are going there, you might find the following sessions interesting. For your convenience, the sessions have hCalendar markup, so it should be easier to add them to your calendar.

MySQL Sharding, Replication, and HA (September 21, 5:30-6:30pm in Imperial Ballroom B)

This session is an opportunity for you to meet the MySQL engineering team and discuss the latest tools and best practices for sharding MySQL across distributed server farms while maintaining high availability.

Come …

I checked some updates to Shard-Query into SVN. Partitioning support has been extended for MySQL 5.6+ to ALL partitioning types.

This includes all previously unsupported types including RANGE LIST/COLUMNS partitioned tables that are partitioned over more than one column, and HASH/KEY/LINEAR variants as well. Shard-Query now exclusively uses the PARTITION hint for partition elimination instead of WHERE clauses in MySQL 5.6. For 5.5 and previous versions, support remains limited to LIST,RANGE, and LIST/RANGE COLUMNS over a single column.

The old mysql interface DAL has been replaced completely by the PDO DAL.

There is no major difference for end users except that you have to check that the return of the query() method is an object with the is_object() function instead of checking that it is a resource with the is_resource() function. I updated bin/run_query, which is the example application.

I …

This post is structured like a series of questions and answers in a conversation.  I recently had a number of conversations that all pretty much went this same way.  If you, like others, have many basic questions about how to proceed when faced with an append-only store for the first time, well then hopefully this post will help provide some answers for you.  The post focuses on column stores, the most common append-only store, but there are others.

Why do I want to use a column store? Column stores are optimal for OLAP analysis

Column stores offer substantial performance increases for OLAP  compared to row stores.  Row stores are optimized for OLTP workloads.  While a row store can be used for OLAP, it may not perform well because a row store has to retrieve every column for a row (unless there is a covering index).  This is one of the reason’s that I’ve said that covering index allows you …

Nice article about SimCity outage and ways to defend databases: http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2013/03/16/simcity-outages-traffic-control-and-thread-pool-for-mysql/

The graphs showing throughput with and without the thread pool are taken from the benchmark performed by Oracle and taken from here:
http://www.mysql.com/products/enterprise/scalability.html

The main take away is this graph (all rights reserved to Oracle, picture original URL):

Scalability is where throughput can grow and grow, as demand grows. I need to get more from the database, the question …

This is a good read, claiming: "Relational Databases Aren't Dead. Heck, They're Not Even Sleeping", http://readwrite.com/2013/03/26/relational-databases-far-from-dead. A key quote:
"While not comprehensive, the uses for NoSQL databases center around the acquisition of fast-growing data or data that does not easily fit within uniform structures."
There were 2 parts in the statement about NoSQL's uses. I'll start with the latter:


"data that does not easily fit within uniform structures" - NoSQL is probably the right choice, hmm although I always encourage thinking and architecting in advance. And also online structure changes do exist in the RDBMS world and recently in MySQL: …

SAP on HANA. Funding for Guavus and ScaleArc. And more

It’s alive! @451research‘s 2013 Database survey is available now at bit.ly/451db13 #mysql #nosql #newsql #postgresql etc etc

— Matt Aslett (@maslett) January 9, 2013

#SAPonHANA is official. Read the press release for the SAP Business Suite powered by #SAP …

It is time for christmas presents: some sharding support and cache locality optimizations are coming with PECL/mysqlnd_ms 1.5. PECL/mysqlnd_ms is a plugin for the mysqlnd library. The plugin adds replication and load balancing support to any PHP MySQL API (mysql, mysqli, PDO_MySQL) if compiled to use the mysqlnd library.

As a MySQL user you can choose between a wide variety of clustering solutions to scale-out. Your options range from eventual consistent solutions to strong consistent ones, from built-in (MySQL Replication, MySQL Cluster) to third party or home-grown. PECL/mysqlnd_ms is a client side load balancer that aims to serve all. …