In this blog, we’ll look at how to achieve better-than-linear scaling.

Scalability is the capability of a system, network or process to handle a growing amount of work, or its potential to be enlarged to accommodate that growth. For example, we consider a system scalable if it is capable of increasing its total output under an increased load when resources (typically hardware) are added: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalability.

It is often accepted as a fact that systems (in particular databases) can’t scale better than linearly. By this I mean when you double resources, the expected performance doubles, at best (and often is less than doubled).  

We can attribute this assumption to Amdahl’s law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amdahl%27s_law), and later …

The default configuration file for MySQL is intended not to use many resources, because its a general purpose sort of a configuration file. The default configuration does enough to have MySQL running happily with limited resources and catering to simple queries and small data-sets. The configuration file would most definitely need to be customized and tuned if you intend on using complex queries and when you have good amount of data. Most of the tunings mentioned in this post are applicable to the MyISAM storage engine, I will soon be posting tunings applicable to the Innodb storage engine. Getting started...

Dear Kettle fans,

One of the things that’s been on my TODO list for a while was the creation of a resource exporter…

Resource exporter?

It’s called “Resource exporter” and not “Job exporter” or “Transformation exporter” because it is intended to export more than just a single job or transformation.  It exports all linked resources of a job or transformation.

The means that if you have a job that has 5 transformation job entries, you will be exporting 6 resources (1 job and 5 transformations).  If those transformations use 3 sub-transformations (mappings) you will in total export 9 resources.

The whole idea behind this exercise is to be able to create a package (for example to send to someone) that has all needed resources contained in a single zip file.

Let’s …