Percona Live Europe is now more than a week away. l left Amsterdam with a positive thought: it has been the best European event for MySQL so far. Maybe the reason is that I saw the attendance increasing, or maybe it was the quality of the talks, or because I heard others making the same comment, and I also saw a reinvigorated MySQL ecosystem.
There are three main aspects I want to highlight.

1. MySQL 5.7 and the strong presence of the Oracle/MySQL team
There have been good talks and keynotes on MySQL 5.7. It is a sign of the strong commitment of Oracle towards MySQL. I think there is an even more important point. The most interesting features in 5.7 and the projects still in MySQL Labs derive or are in some way inspired by features available from other vendors. Some examples:

• The JSON datatype from …

After reading Jonathan Levin's article about infobright I decided I had to try Infobright.

So I downloaded the 32-bit tarball. Normally I would have gone for a 64-bit build but those only came in RPM and DEB flavour.

Then I tried to run infobright community edition (ICE) in a MySQL Sandbox, but that failed as the resolveip utility failed to give an answer for localhost.


error while creating grant tables
Neither host 'daniel-thinkpad' nor 'localhost' could be looked up with
/home/dveeden/opt/mysql/4.0.7-ice/bin/resolveip
Please configure the 'hostname' command to return a correct
hostname.
If you want to solve this at a later stage, restart this script
with the --force option

Then I used docker. This went really smooth. You can …

Join me Wednesday, September 18 at 10 a.m. PDT for an hour-long webinar where I will introduce the basic concepts behind column store technology. The webinar’s title is: “Introduction to open source column stores.”

What will be discussed?

This webinar will talk about Infobright, LucidDB, MonetDB, Hadoop (Impala) and other column stores

• I will compare features between major column stores (both open and closed source).
• Some benchmarks will be used to demonstrate the basic performance characteristics of the open source column stores.
• There will be a question and answer session to ask me anything you like about column stores (you can also ask in the …

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 …

There was once a big hooplah about the MySQL Storage Engine Architecture and how it was easy to just slot in some other method of storage instead of the provided ones. Over the years I’ve repeatedly mentioned how this wasn’t really …

Inspired by a post from Juice Analytics.

We are a conflicted people. We love our TV and movie violence but worry that it ruins our children’s minds. We want to reduce healthcare costs, but don’t want to restrict the free market.

Conflicts like these leave little room for a satisfactory answer. Basic principles are in conflict and deeply-rooted desires run up against painful consequences. We

Apache OpenOffice.org proposal approved. SkySQL Tekes new funding. And more.

# The proposal for OpenOffice.org to become an Apache incubator project was unanimously approved.

# Rob Weir discussed how the relationship between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice need not be a zero-sum game.

# Simon Phipps offered his thoughts on the potential positive and negative outcomes.

# Tekes, the main public funding agency for research, development, and innovation in Finland, …

Infobright and InnoDB AMI images are now available

There are now demonstration AMI images for Shard-Query. Each image comes pre-loaded with the data used in the previous Shard-Query blog post. The data in the each image is split into 20 “shards”. This blog post will refer to an EC2 instances as a node from here on out. Shard-Query is very flexible in it’s configuration, so you can use this sample database to spread processing over up to 20 nodes.

The Infobright Community Edition (ICE) images are available in 32 and 64 bit varieties. Due to memory requirements, the InnoDB versions are only available on 64 bit instances. MySQL will fail to start on a micro instance, simply decrease the values in the /etc/my.cnf file if you really want to try micro instances.

*EDIT*
The storage worker currently logs too much …

I see that “Big Data” has become the new buzzword with a spike of hype around it. Everyone’s jumping on it. Companies are eager to promote their products as “Big Data,” just as they were eager to be associated with Web 2.0, Service-Oriented Architectures, and all the rest. Predictably, there’s basically zero agreement on what it means.

I’ve seen “Big Data” mentioned in the context of 1TB, which I think is rather moderate sized. But worse yet, I’ve seen 100GB labeled Big Data. I’ve even seen 5GB labeled Big Data. No links — I don’t want to draw attention to them.

I don’t know what Big Data is, but the stick-of-gum-sized flash drive in my pocket holds 16GB. It’s pretty Small. I mean, I forget it’s even there — it’s definitely not Big. I don’t know where I’d draw the line, but if it fits in a commodity server’s memory, which 100GB can do easily these days, it’s not Big Data. I don’t even …

What’s missing from WebM? VoltDB launches. The importance of profitability. And more.

Follow 451 CAOS Links live @caostheory on Twitter and Identi.ca
“Tracking the open source news wires, so you don’t have to.”

# Simon Phipps examined what’s missing from WebM, from an open source perspective.

# Mike Stonebraker’s VoltDB officially launched its open source in-memory OLTP database.

# Jim Whitehurst argued that one of Red Hat’s most valuable contributions to open source is its profitability.

# Infobright appointed former Aleri CEO Don DeLoach as its new …