via GIPHY I was just responding to some Disqus comments on a recent blog post. Admittedly it had a provocative title Will SQL databases just die already. What do you think? Join 34,000 others and follow Sean Hull on twitter @hullsean. A reader pointed out that some No-SQL databases do support joins. Huh? My face … Continue reading A roughneck walk down database alley →

A couple of question I get a lot from MySQL customers is “how will this hardware upgrade improve my transactions per second (TPS)” and “what level of TPS will MySQL perform on this hardware if I’m running ACID settings?” Running sysbench against MySQL with different values for per-thread and global memory buffer sizes, ACID settings, and other settings gives me concrete values to bring to the customer to show the impact that more RAM, faster CPUs, faster disks, or cnf changes have on the server. Here are some examples for a common question: “If I’m using full ACID settings vs non-ACID settings what performance am I going to get from this server?”

Let’s find out by running sysbench with the following settings (most are self explanatory – if not the man page can explain them):

• sysbench –test=oltp –db-driver=mysql –oltp-table-size=1000000 –mysql-engine-trx=yes –oltp-test-mode=complex …

If you’ve been reading up on the various NoSQL offerings and have wanted to try out one but don’t know how to get started, this is one of the easiest ways. I chose MongoDB for this example because I’m going to start using it for a project that needs features that MySQL isn’t as fast at: namely denormalized data with billions of rows. MongoDB has plenty of drivers for other scripting and high-level languages but I’ll focus on the PHP driver today. If there is interest I can do a write up on Python usage later. This example is limited to CentOS, Fedora, and Redhat 5 servers that use the yum package management system. For more information you can reference their download page: http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Downloads

First install the prerequisites:

• sudo yum install gcc php php-pear

Then install the mogo php extension via …

Just a quick notice to let everyone know that there is a new version of Kontrollkit available. There are some required bug fixes to the formerly new python backup script and some Solaris compatible changes to the various my.cnf files. You can download the new version here: http://kontrollsoft.com/software-downloads, or here: http://code.google.com/p/kontrollkit/

Quick note to let our users know that there was an XML tag closure error on the “alert_22″ subroutine in the “bin/kontroll-reporter-cli.pl” script. This does not affect the webapp portion of Kontrollbase – only reports generated via the command line reporter script. It is not a fatal error but will cause the XML file to […]

I’ve been wanting to write a backup script for a while now that does the following: reads the partition information for the directory that you are backing up into and computes the used/available/percentage-available space. Then it reads the total data size from the MySQL tables and ensures that you have enough space on disk (for [...]

If you have been wondering why the overview and graphs pages say “no data to display” on the graphs when you first install Kontrollbase, it’s because there’s no data in the database being returned from the queries that generate the graphs – this is because a new install has no data to graph. This has […]

If you’ve noticed that your recent upgrade did not go as planned and now the application does not load – please check this page: http://wiki.kontrollsoft.com/wiki/UpgradingReleases for notes on upgrades between versions. Typically you need to execute a SQL file against the current schema to bring it up to date. If you have any questions please [...]

This is a small revision and will only be available through SVN. However, it is an important one to speak about as it solves a former issue when running the application on a screen smaller than 1024px wide. While most users may not have noticed this since they have larger monitors it has been noticed [...]

After some testing and setup we have decided to use Eventum for our support ticketing needs. This featureful system will be in use for all of your support questions related to Kontrollbase – the MySQL analytics and performance tuning web application, as well as Kontrollkit – the collection of server automation scripts. You can read [...]