Diamond Notes

I almost never write about non-MySQL related things. But this is too cool not to talk about. I have always used what amounts to stock Wordpress blogging software. I have been curious for some time how much I actually blog. Well, browsing for plug-ins today I came across the Blog Metrics plug-in. It has all kind of cool stats. Here is a sample of results and what I have done for the last fifteen months:

Blog Metrics

Author stats for the last 30 days

Author stats

When I changed setups a while ago I changed login names..that why it show two authors - “admin” and “bmurphy”. So, if you have a blog this is a very useful plug-in to keep track of your blogging.

So multiple people have blogged about this announcement already.  The Innodb company has announced a new plug-in that can be a drop-in replacement for the current Innodb code in MySQL 5.1.  Evidently it is really easy also.  It has some interesting new features including non-blocking index creation if I am understanding things correctly.  That  to me seems to be the big new feature to me.

However, the reason why I am pointing this announcement out when others already have is that Peter Zaitsev did a talk today about the scalablitiy issues of Innodb dbs this afternoon.  I blogged during the talk here.  He pointed out (with benchmarks) multiple times that the 5.1 server (with Innodb tables) was actually not working as well as 5.0 currently does. If I understand correctly he didn’t have a chance to test the new plug-in (not for certain though — I was unclear about that).  They possibly could have fixed these regression issues in the new version but I would love to see tests of it.  Just a thought before we all get to excited :)  I like the idea personally that the Innodb plug-in isn’t so tightly coupled with the MySQL server. Good to see them releasing something.  Hope they continue!  Scaling improvements above 8 cores would be nice.

A few minutes ago I uploaded the new issue of the MySQL Magazine.  I am very excited about this issue as the quality continues to increase!  Not only do we have a great group of articles, Sheeri Cabral (our new Community Advocate Award winner) did a fabulous job creating an entire new layout and look for the magazine.  It looks absolutely outstanding.  I have told her several times how much I appreciate it, but let me once again take the time to say I appreciate the tireless work she did on the layout.

Here is a list of the table of contents:

A Tour of MySQL Certification

Coding Corner

On Efficiently Geo-Referencing IPs with MaxMind GeoIP and MySQL GIS

Introducing Kickfire

Automatic Query Optimization with QOT

As always, the magazine is free for download and is available from http://www.mysqlzine.net and http://www.paragon-cs.com/mag. Enjoy!!

What is in the Sun buyout for the MySQL person?

• Performance and Scaling (indicating that they will be working on running MySQL on higher-end hw)
• Support
• Marketplace (partner “ecosystem” with powerful sales channel)

Design Priorities

Reliability (bugs fixed in 5.1: 997 in 2007 plus 386 in 2008)

5.1 GA release by end of June

Performance

5.1.24rc shows an improvement of 10-15% in throughput versus 5.0

Ease of Use

MySQL Workbench GA today

Awards

Applications of the year

Facebook, Virgin Mobile France and Ebay

Partners of the year

Zmanda, Microsoft, and Computacenter

Community Members of the Year

Code contributer - Baron Schwartz

Quality contributer - Diego Medina

Community Advocate - Sheeri Cabral

Overall, much of the talk is general market talk.  There is quite a bit of talk about how a major Sun commitment to scale MySQL on larger servers.  This is the one thing that I would really like to Sun/MySQL follow through on.  Only time will tell.

I came across this this morning:

http://www.cio.com/article/333613/Sun_Claims_Big_Leap_with_MySQL_Upgrade_Next_Week

This certainly seems to indicate the 5.1 will be released during the Users Conference as GA.

Ironically, Thursday night, while having dinner with Baron, Peter Z and Vadim (no..I wasn’t interviewing for Percona!!) we had a brief discussion about this very topic.  I think everyone agreed that we wouldn’t be surprised if it was released next week.

Bill McColl has a rather interesting blog post http://www.computingatscale.com/?p=54 on parallelism in software. His points are all valid. I was a bit suprised to see the number of software developers with parallel programming experience being put at such a low number. Just goes to show that people are resistant to change. We have had multiple CPUs for a decade or more now.

I love the bit about how disk drives are going to be the new tape drive (in the sense that the hard drives would only be used for backup). While that might be a bit of an overstatement for quite some time, it is interesting to note that until some dramatic new storage technology comes about memory will continue to increase relatively exponentially while hard drive improvements are incremental.

And it is a very cool paradigm to have your entire OS and DB in memory and operate out of RAM with no data being pulled into memory from disk after the initial startup. Then you just write out the changes to your hard drive. If a server were built with battery-backed system RAM like they build battery backed caches for RAID controllers this would be very possible and would sidestep the issues brought up by readers on this post I wrote a few days ago. Servers with battery-backed system RAM might already be available, but I am not familiar with them.

For those who require the ultimate in DB performance this is certainly something to consider.

Always something to think about!!

Update:  I love google.  Should have done this before posting.  If you have any interest in this topic take a look here.  Plug it into your server and have up to either 500 GB or a terabyte (not sure..both seem to be indicated) of what amounts to RAM based storage.  The price is astronomical, but hey we are dreaming right?

Since Ronald Bradford mentioned that Kickfire was a major sponsor of the MySQL Users Conference I wanted to throw in a few words about them. I have been talking to Kickfire for several months about their upcoming product line and let me say it is going to be fantastic.

They will have a major presence at the conference and you will need to check out their data warehouse product. I think, as George Truijillo expresses very well here, that small and medium platform data warehousing is going to be an area of great growth over the next few years. The product that Kickfire is introducing will only help to accelerate that growth.

In the upcoming issue of MySQL Magazine I will have a full length article on Kickfire and their new product line. I have spoken extensively with the people at Kickfire and I will have a chance first-hand to see the product in a few weeks. I might be speaking a little prematurely, but I believe there will be benchmarks included.

Don’t miss the article (or the magazine). It will be released on the website and at the conference on April the 15th.

This was put up on LWN from a few days ago.  Very interesting information about what the author is call Ramback.  Basically, it is a RAM disk that automatically syncs to hard drive.  Of course this provides for durability.  While not so significant now, it might be something interesting in the future mix with massive amounts of RAM available.  He is working on getting it into the Linux kernel evidently.  Very, very alpha, but could be promising and worth a read:

article 

So when my server has 256 gigabytes of RAM I can allocate 128 to the server/mysql daemon and 128G to Ramback and use it as the hard drive.  HMMMMMMM 

Here is a nice overview of solid information just released yesterday about the upcoming release of six core processors by Intel.  These should go into production this summer.  I just hope that by the time they get to eight cores (which this new platform seems to allow them to accomplish) that MySQL can support 32 cores (4 chips x 8 cores).

hmmm….

So, I am at least an hour or two late at this and everyone and their three brothers has already blogged about it..but:

http://www.sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2008-01/sunflash.20080116.1.xml

In the past I have worked on Sun products a great deal. I was a system administrator for almost 10 years and probably half of the time was spent on Sun servers and the other half of the time was on Linux. I honestly still get warm fuzzy feelings when I walk into a data center and see a purple case. Their engineering is first class. Their support is phenomenal.

I think that they CAN help engineer a better MySQL server. MySQL has very good engineering talent. More (highly paid, highly motivated and very intelligent) minds working on MySQL can only be better. Versions 6.0 and 6.1 could be very interesting.

That being said I have two concerns:

• Sun is a huge behemoth of a company. Even MySQL could get swallowed up in the corporate beurocracy. Things could stall.
• Sun concentrates their energy on running MySQL on Solaris.

Those being said, I doubt either one will happen. You don’t spend a billion dollars on something and then set it aside. And while MySQL on Solaris will probably get more attention than it has in the past I suspect Linux and other operating systems will continue to get support. That being said, maybe I can convince management to buy me this now:

new server