Containers like Docker and Rocket are getting more popular every day. In my conversations with customers, they consistently ask what containers are and how they can use them in their environment. If you’re as curious as most people, read on. . .

How did this happen?

From what I understand, containers grew out of Google’s (and others’) need for massive horizontal scale. Now, this is hardly a unique problem. At the time there were several different solutions out there that could help deploy and orchestrate the applications and infrastructure necessary to scale — namely virtual machines (VMs) and their orchestration services (like Vmware’s vCenter). At the uber-massive scale that companies like Google were pushing, however, server virtualization had some serious drawbacks. Enter containers. . .

What is a container?

Essentially, the main difference between a container and a virtual …

This Week in Website Performance is a weekly feature of the Monitis.com blog. It summarizes recent articles about website performance. Why? Because your friends at Monitis.com care.

Full table scan vs full index scan performance

Author: Stephane Combaudon.

Using full index scans are not always faster than a full table scan. Stephane explores the situations in which a sequential read through of a full table performs better than using randomly-read full index.

Big Data …

There has been a lot happening in the MariaDB community recently, and there has been growth. Here are some of the highlights. Thank you to all our current contributors, and to others that want to contribute, shoot community[at]askmonty[dot]org an e-mail.

MariaDB 5.2.3 binaries for Solaris and Debian Sparc

Our Sparc community contributor, Mark, has continued to make popular binaries for Solaris 10 and Debian Sparc. He’s kept up to speed with MariaDB 5.2.3, so please visit him and download the binaries.

MariaDB 5.2.3 on the openSUSE Build Service

Community contributor Michal Hrušecký has packaged MariaDB for openSUSE and its available via the …