Query Processing Tools Update

I just wanted to take a minute and let people know that we are continuing to work internally on the query processing tools. The querysniffer tool is feature complete for now (and I can’t imagine what else you might need with it). It grabs the MySQL data from the network and injects it into a database table storing the query, the time stored, the total execution time of the query and the host it was captured from. In addition, you can tell it to not grab the data modifying statements (inserts, updates and deletes). Also, it can replace varibles (“WHERE username=”Jack”) with something like this: WHERE username={string}. Why is this useful? So you can group the queries together. Even though one query might be searching for Jack and another query might be searching for Jill, they are both the same query. Can’t think of any other options, but I probably missed one or two.

After all that work, it becomes simple to write a web interface of php or perl to display statistics. I already have one set up internally displaying the most executed queries and the average execution and total execution time fo a query. While I will release this as part of the package, this will be something that each DBA will end up spending some time tweaking to fit their own needs I am sure.

I haven’t really started working on the benchmarking part of the toolkit yet. I have an idea of implementing a unionfs(??) so that I can run the queries against a database and then roll the database back without to much difficulty. That way I can run INSERTs, UPDATEs and DELETEs without worrying about.

We have some internal paperwork to take care of before these new additions can be released but I am confident it won’t be long until that is taken care of. As soon as it is done we will release the new code to the world.

flush hosts command

We had a little fun yesterday. We had a mysql server that stopped because it turns out that it ran out of disk space in the /var directory. Someone was uploading a large list and it exhausted the disk space writing bin logs before our monitoring tools picked it up.

The server process ended up being killed and then restarted. I then cleaned up some bin-logs so that the server had room. That seemed to solve the problem. Everything looked like it was running. However, after about 15 or 20 minutes we realized that the application itself wasn’t running correctly.

Turns out that the application had continued to try and make connections to the database server while it was experiencing problems. These attempted connections were being logged as connection errors and after the default 10 connection errors the server essentially locks down.

The reference manual lists information here:

dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/blocked-host.html

We are going to raise the connection error count on our servers to keep this from happening in the future. Consider this carefully if your servers are exposed to the Internet (ours aren’t).

If you run the flush hosts command it will resolve this problem. I am not sure if restarting the mysqld daemon would have resolved the problem (I think it would have). Even though we had restarted the daemon, it was before clearing the log files so failed connections continued to occur.

One final note…in our case the error described in the reference manual did not show up in the error log. So don’t expect it to be there if this problem occurs.

New Querysniffer Version

This is a “reprint” of a post I did yesterday.  For some reason Planetmysql didn’t pick it up and I wanted to make sure people knew about the new version of querysniffer.

We updated querysniffer just a bit. A user pointed out that the sniffer doesn’t actually start recording data until a “use” statement is issued. Ian added a flag so you can change this behavior if you want.

There is a memory leak when the sniffer runs for an exteneded period of time. We are working on that. Should have something soon. The new sniffer files are available at paragon-cs.com/queryprogs/querysniffer.tar.gz

MySQL Workbench Update

Some of you are tracking the beta program of MySQL Workbench (dev.mysql.com/downloads/workbench/5.0.html).  I just received an email that the latest version (5.0.14) was available for download.  I downloaded it and loaded up some old schemas and played around with it a little.

Let me say it is MUCH better than previous versions.  They changed the underlying graphics display method and it is SO much smoother.  If you haven’t already, take it for a spin.  It’s turning into a nice program.

Tip of the Day — MySQL Users Conference

Every spring MySQL puts on the MySQL Users Conference in the San Francisco area of the United States.  Almost 2,000 users gather for four days to listen to some of the experts of the MySQL world.  Consider it a Users Group meeeting on steroids.  There are other conferences in other countries, but this is the one that I am the most familiar and according to MySQL is the largest gathering of MySQL users and dbas.

This year the conference is April 14th through 17th and the home page is en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/content/home

I know there are many others who have talked about the MySQL conference — even recently – and more recently.   It is because we realize how important it is.

If you are MySQL professional you owe it to yourself and your company to go “join the pod” at the Users Conference.  You will learn more in four days than you thought possible.  Hope to see you there!!

Multi-core Fun

If you follow my blog you know I harp (some might say constantly) on how I think that MySQL needs to evolve the server code to support an extreme (currently) number of core processors.  Along those lines, I ran across this article linked to from Slashdot.  Basically, it is the rundown of a roundtable discussion by some top chip people.  It was interesting to me how they took different approaches to the coming problems.

Dr. Charles Bell — MySQL Online Backup: An Introduction @ UC

Dr. Bell summarized new features found in the implementation of backup and restore in version 6.0.

SQL Driven — run from the command line

Database level backup

tables
views
stored procedures
stored functions
triggers
events

Enterprise level consistitency — from point in time

non-blocking DML operations on Innodb and Falcon

streaming backup data (only to local server file now..should extend to tape or other servers)

tablespace support for falcon

no data engine backup eg: blackhole, merge (didn’t quite understand why this is useful but he gave some reasons)

synchronization with binary log for point-in-time recovery

defaults to mysql datadir although you can specify a directory in the backup filename

example:

BACKUP DATABASE database_name TO ‘database.bak’;

RESTORE command is destructive

backup log information looks useful but Dr. Bell indicates it will be changing probably.

Future plans:

coverage for all MySQL storage engines
use plug-in architecture
backup to other media/servers
standalone mysqlbackuptool
full server, database and enhanced point-in-time recovery

Still a work in progress but looks very promising!! Honestly, the backup parts of 6.0 might be the most important features of the upcoming 6.0 servers. Falcon looks nice and sounds nice, but backups rule the day when the $%#@ hits the fan. I personally am excited to finally see development on this front.

Resources:

forge.mysql.com/wiki/OnlineBackup

Innodb Plug-in

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.

Want to Try Out Some Free Software?

I am looking for someone who would be interested in trying out some software. Give it an honest spin. I need a review written for the upcoming summer issue of MySQL Magazine (mysqlzine.net).  Maybe two or three pages including screenshots.  The magazine is slated to be released on July the 15th and the article will need to be in by June the 15th.  Please contact me : bmurphy AT paragon-cs.com.  Authors get a small amount of money so there is some incentive!!

MySQL Daemon Goes Belly Up — But We Know Why!!

We have been running MySQL server 5.0.45 in production here since December. Not a hitch until April the 4th. Then, while I was on vacation of course, one of our masters servers seg-faulted and died. I looked into things, but really couldn’t tell much. The one odd thing was that I had MyISAM tables marked crashed in the error log BEFORE the actual crash. While I thought that was very odd, I didn’t put two and two together. Not to give things away, but the crashed MyISAM table was the big clue. The next week I left for Santa Clara and the MySQL Users Conference on the 8th. I was only in the office for two days before I was off to California so the crash on the 4th probably didn’t get as much attention as it should have.

As I have blogged about, the conference was great. I returned home on Friday, the 18th. Turns out while we were on the plane that the same server crashed again. This was twice in two weeks. Exact same (non) symptoms — ie nothing obvious. I had talked to a couple of people at the conference about the situation and the lack of any discernible evidence (other than the MyISAM tables). Both people I talked to said it would probably be hardware. By this point I already thought so myself, but it just reinforced my belief. I thought it was either hardware or my servers just miss me when I am not around! We had set up another server to be the slave of the newly promoted master that replaced the crashed server so there was no real rush to get the hardware from the colo. Yesterday we went to the colo for some work and brought back the server that had crashed I plugged it in on our workbench and started up memtest. This morning when I came in … eight memory errors.

So, if you have MyISAM tables and they get marked as crashed in your error log and the server didn’t actually crash you should consider it very likely you have some type of hardware problem. Memory just happens to be the most likely candidate.

Hope this helps someone when they don’t know why the server crashed!!

Hitting the Road

I will be offline for a few days.  This afternoon I leave Durham, North Carolina behind and going south once more to Pensacola, Florida — my hometown.  I am beginning a new job next week.  Since I haven’t asked if I can post about it I guess who my new employer is will remain anonymous for another few days.  Next Tuesday I will be flying up to the northeast corner of the U.S. to begin training.  Looking forward to it!

On another note..don’t forget the survey!  We are having great results but I would really like to ask everyone who uses MySQL in a professional role to please participate.  The larger the number of people who take ten minutes to fill out the survey the better the results.  Survey here: MySQL Survey

I would like to take a minute and publicly thank iContact (icontact.com) for the exciting work that I have done of late.  I had the honor to work with a talented group of people who are dedicated to their work.  Thanks all!!!

dbWatch News Release

Seems I have turned into a bit of a news source. The dbWatch product looks like it might be an interesting product for those who work in a heterogeneous database product.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:

Rob Shuster, VP US Sales

dbWatch USA

6122B S. Eagle Pass Rd.

Gold Canyon, AZ

85218

Phone: 800-270-9892

dbwatchusa.com

info@dbwatchusa.com

dbWatch Software Announces US based Sales & Support Oslo, Norway — June 23, 2008 – dbWatch Software has launched a US sales and support organization. The flagship product, dbWatch™ (v8.1), is a heterogeneous database monitoring/reporting tool currently supports Oracle, SQL Server, and MySQL.

Marek Jablonski, CEO states “As a DBA you are often stuck with multiple platforms (both OS and database systems) and multiple unmanageable tools from database providers. dbWatch™ is a single tool allowing the DBA to monitor all databases and generate professional custom reports.”

Clear Channel Norway IT Director, Jan Erik Rasmussen, reports “dbWatch provides an effective overview of our databases, and allows me to sleep well at night.”

Three dbWatch™ editions are available: Standard ($195), Professional ($1,995 to $9,995), and Enterprise ($14,995). A free 30-day evaluation is available for download.

For information: dbwatchusa.com or

Contact: info@dbwatchusa.com

Phone: 800-270-9892

A CloudFront is Moving In

Amazon yesterday announced the arrival of what they term a content delivery system that adds one more piece to the puzzle that is cloud computing.

Ever hear of Akamai? They provide what amounts to web caching on a global scale. If you are in Asia, accessing a web site that is located in Europe, the site content might be served from Hong Kong. Of course, this is only if content caching is set up with a service such as Akamai. This is much faster and more efficient than getting the content from the European data center where the actual web server is located. Make sense? Good!

Previously, this required a major commitment of money and time to be able to do this. Not anymore.

Amazon is now rolling out the same service (called CloudFront in Amazonspeak), integrated with S3, that will provide a better experience for your customer just as Akamai does. Caching servers are located in the following locations:

United States

Ashburn, VA
Dallas/Fort Worth, TX
Los Angeles, CA
Miami, FL
Newark, NJ
Palo Alto, CA
Seattle, WA
St. Louis, MO

Europe

Amsterdam
Dublin
Frankfurt
London

Asia

Hong Kong
Tokyo

Cost is based on where the content is delivered from, and it looks reasonable—even a bargain. The US pricing is roughly comparable to the standard pricing, and the European location pricing actually looks cheaper (why, I have no clue).  The Asian locations have not been available before, but currently their cost is a little steep in my opinion. One good thing is that if you wait for three to six months with Amazon, they will lower the cost. All pricing is listed here.

How do you integrate the caching with your current Amazon setup? It’s very simple actually. A simple API, as with other Amazon services, allows you to configure the content so that it can be served from CloudFront instead of the normal content location. If you already have experience with Amazon services you should be able to serve content from CloudFront in under an hour.

If you are already using Amazon to serve web pages, this is a no-brainer. If you aren’t, maybe this is what tips you into using the Amazon services.

Here is the homepage for CloudFront.

MySQL Query Analyzer review

I had the chance to review the new Query Analyzer program from Sun over the last few days. I am very interested in how it performs as I have previously not had a chance to see the program in action (or the Enterprise Monitor program either for that matter). So, before getting into what the Query Analyzer can (and can not) do let’s look at what Sun says it does.

From the November 19th, 2008 press release:

The MySQL Query Analyzer saves time and effort in finding and fixing problem queries by providing:

Aggregated view into query execution counts, run time, result sets across all MySQL servers with no dependence on MySQL logs or SHOW PROCESSLIST
Sortable views by all monitored statistics
Searchable and sortable queries by query type, content, server, database, date/time, interval range, and “when first seen”
Historical and real-time analysis of all queries across all servers
Drill downs into sampled query execution statistics, fully qualified with variable substitutions, and EXPLAIN results

Can you do all this with other tools or by hand?

Absolutely. Some of the those very tools I have discussed before. Most I have used at least once or twice. The question is really can Query Analyzer do this better? Find out the answer at the end!!

Installation
The Query Analyzer program is part of the Enterprise Monitor program. For those who are not familiar, Enterprise monitor is used for monitoring MySQL servers. Big surprise right? It works by having an “agent” installed on the server to be monitored which then passes information back to the central server which displays gathered information in an web-based interface.

I will confess. The installation of the service manager was performed by Sheeri. However, going through the notes she left it appears to have been rather straightforward. I picked it up where the configuration begins.

I will note one problem with configuration. Once the package is installed you have to do some setup before actually using the program. This is where it got a bit tricky. The test setup is on a system without direct Internet access (prevented by a firewall, for security reasons). The package has your key, your enterprise account name (email) and password. It connects to the Sun servers to verify your credentials and activate the program. Well, not if your server doesn’t have a direct connection to the Internet!

In that case you use a product key. Well, being new to this I had no idea where to get that from. I searched around a bit on the enterprise website and did not find it.  On the enterprise website I opened a ticket with Sun with a level of S3 (meaning this is non-production impacting..testing setup). I had a correct reply in FOUR minutes.

Sun support response time is very good! On the downside, this information probably should have been in the knowledge base.

This actually finished up the configuration of the Service Manager (the core functionality). Now to install the Service Agent which goes on the server(s) you are going to monitor. In this case the Agent was also being installed on the test system. As with the Service Manager the actual install was straightforward.

The program started up correctly the first time I tried. The proxy by default starts on port 4040 and I kept this as the setting.
Running the Program
Once this little quirk was resolved I began running some queries and seeing them show up in the Query Analyzer.

First impressions are that Query Analyzer does exactly what Sun says that it does. As you queries pass through the proxy and on to the database they are also sent to the Service Manager program. It slices,dices and display the data gathered in close to real time on the Query Analyzer tab of the dashboard.

Here are the various ways you can sort your queries:

By Query
By Database
By total execution count
By Execution time

total query execution time
maximum query execution time
average query execution time

By Rows

total rows
maximum

By Bytes

total bytes
maximum bytes
average bytes

by date/time query was first seen

One click is all it takes to change the sorting method.

The Query Analyzer table can let you see at a glance what is going on with your system. Here is a a screen shot of the Query Analyzer (click to enlarge):

By default the Query Analyzer displays data for up to 24 hours. This can be altered by pulling down the “Time Display” option in the filter bar and choosing the “From / To” option instead of “Interval”. This will change the filter bar to have date based pick lists so you can specify a longer date range. Be warned – with a significant amount of data this can impact performance.

Any query can be drilled down into and examined, even showing the EXPLAIN of the query  if it took longer than 500 ms. Utilizing this you can begin your resolution of the problem in the typical MySQL manner.
The Final Analysis
I am not aware of anything else available either commercially or freely available that does this type of analysis for MySQL. The only similar functionality done by other products is through reading of the slow query log. While this can provide some of the information, the Query Analyzer does a better job at real-time analysis of the collected data with your sorting options.

While I am not familiar with other vendor’s database servers, I work with people who are. So I asked them. From what I understand there is somewhat similar functionality to the various programs that work with the slow query log, but nothing that is quite like the real-time analysis that Query Analyzer proves. If I am wrong, kindly suggest similar tools!

While the use of the proxy program provides added complexity, it also brings flexibility to the program.

Does the Query Analzyer do what it says it does? Yes! The only significant downside to this program is the cost. However, if you have Enterprise support it’s already included. So that’s not bad. I would not recommend that you buy Enterprise support JUST to get Query Analyzer — maybe Sun should package the Query Analyzer as a separate product? Reasonably priced (say, $200 or less) I would be the first person to tell you to buy it for any company with production systems.

As I said at the start, there other programs out there that can do grunt work that Query Analzyer does and help you resolve issues with slow queries. They don’t do this in real time and in addition the ease of use after configuration is what sets this apart. The simple graphical interface makes it dead simple  for everyone to see what is causing traffic to snarl. It would be nice if it resolved the problems for you…but I don’t know of any software that does that!!

MySQL Administator’s Bible Book Giveway Winner!!

Last week I offered a chance for a reader to win a copy of the MySQL Administrator’s Bible. The reason why is that I was recording an interview with Brian Aker about the Drizzle project and wanted to hear what you thought I should ask Brian. There were some excellent responses. I worked as many of them as possible into the interview although there were some that for legal reasons we could not cover.  Even if your question was not included your name was included in the drawing. Thanks everyone for the input. The interview with Brian will be part of the  Open Source Database podcast scheduled to be released on July the 24th.

And now for the winner!

Congratulations Chadwick. I hope you enjoy the book.

You Know It’s Going to be a Long Day . . .

when this is the my.cnf on the client’s computer that you just cracked open to do a performance review . . .

$ cat /etc/my.cnf

datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
user=mysql
# Default to using old password format for compatibility with mysql 3.x
# clients (those using the mysqlclient10 compatibility package).
old_passwords=1

max_connections         = 8000
wait_timeout            = 300

log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

$

It’s going to be a long report . . .

SSD Market Continues to Heat Up

I had originally posted this on the 16th of September, but I had been changing hosting providers and such and it has managed to drop through the cracks.  So, if you didn’t see it before here it is..

I have long held the opinon that SSD (Solid State Disk) drives are going to be a major part of the database future. I just checked and I wrote a blog posting about them two years ago. I am not alone in this opinion.  It has long been realized that both I/O access speed and throughput increases have not kept pace with the increases in CPU power and the steadily decreasing cost of RAM. Storage space has increased, but both access speed and throughput performance have only had marginal increases in performance.

Solid state disks have long held the promise of lowered access speeds, especially when it comes to random access.  Even so, prices for SSD drives have been high and space small (compared to standard hard disks). That is slowly beginning to change. I suspect that within five years SSD drives in RAID arrays for database servers will be just as common as standard disk arrays are today.

Pliant Technology announced today what they call an Enterprise grade series of SSD drives that they claim has twice the throughput of the leading competitors. Computer World has a good writeup of the announcement here. Interesting technology that Pliant claims can produce a maximum of 180,000 IOPS from a single 3.5? SSD drive.  While undoubtedly expensive, for those who are I/O bound with few other options this could be a God-send.

Be prepared . . the time is coming sooner than you think that SSD drives are your main system drives and traditional hard drives are used for backup.

Nice little tool

I wanted to play with the new version of MyQuery that was just released. In order to use it, I needed to use a ssh tunneling tool. I have used various hacks in the past but I wanted something that was at least moderately well done.

A bit of googling uncovered Bitvise’s Tunnelier. It is a free for personal use tool that is designed just for tunneling. It seems to handle it with some aplomb. Ten minutes after I downloaded it, I was online with a remote server using MyQuery.

If you are using a Windows desktop and want to use some of the various graphical client programs that don’t include port forwarding this could very easily fill your needs. I just wish I had found it a long time ago.

Oracle still on the hot seat?

Anyone involved with MySQL knows that Oracle agreed to purchase Sun earlier this year. Unfortunately for Oracle things haven’t gone as well as they might have hoped. Earlier today it was announced by the EC (Europenan Commission) tasked with reviewing the merger that the EC is delaying approval of the merger and they would be performing an in depth investigation of Oracle’s role in managing the MySQL database.

Daniel Wall, lead legal counselor for Oracle, said in a prepared statement on June the 26th:  “we were almost able to resolve everything before the Second Request deadline. All that’s left is one narrow issue about the way rights to Java are licensed that is never going to get in the way of the deal.”

I guess he was wrong.

Oracle has said publicly it wanted to close the purchase of Sun by the end of August which is the close of Oracle’s financial quarter. Since I am posting this on September the 3rd it can be confidently said they didn’t achive their goal.

In late July 62% of the Sun stockholders approved the Oracle acquisition of Sun at a stockholders’ meeting. While it was certainly a majority, I suspect that the involved parties wished the percentages where a bit higher. It appears that everyone is not the Oracle bandwagon. Even so, on August the 20th the DOJ approved the merger.

The last thing Oracle wants with the Sun purchase  is a protracted legal battle similar to the PeopleSoft acquisition. This transition has already hurt Sun’s bottom line and talent is leaving Sun at an alarming pace. Of course the MySQL talent diaspora is well documented, but others are leaving as well. This includes the recently departed JRuby team who left to join Engine Yard. Despite what some companies might think, the most important part of any acquisition is the talent . .the people. I don’t have the time or space to turn this into a post on the employees, but I think it is a very valid concern.

This brings us to today. The only problem remaining is for the EU to approve the merger.  The announced delay is because the commission wants to investigate the issue of MySQL competing with Oracle (the database server). I thought it would be helpful to outline the possible outcome of the EU commission’s review. Results of the is review are required to be released within 90 days working days (January the 19th, 2010).

This verdict has three possible outcomes:

1) approval with no changes

2) conditional approval with required changes.

3) Outright rejection

Those changes could be anything ranging from requiring a change in the license terms to spinning off of MySQL and associated products into a seperate subsidiary or even outright selling of MySQL and it’s assets.

If there are any changes required for approval, Oracle will essentially have to give in to any requirements. As a large multi-national company who sells something like 60% of its products/services outside the United States it is going to have to cooperate with this commission in the long run. Oracle might choose to fight it legally if it can but I think that the end result will be that Oracle will be making the necessary changes.

If you are affected by this decision it might be wise to take action and let the EC  know what you think. If you have any concerns you should contact Neelie Kroes’ office in the EC.

Little Quiz

The following is from a clients server:

$ cat /etc/my.cnf

datadir=/var/lib/mysql
socket=/var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock
user=mysql

log_slow_queries=/var/lib/mysql/slow-queries.log

# Default to using old password format for compatibility with mysql 3.x
# clients (those using the mysqlclient10 compatibility package).
old_passwords=1

log-error=/var/log/mysqld.log
pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid

max_connections = 600

# myisam options
key_buffer_size = 16M
myisam_sort_buffer_size = 16M
join_buffer_size = 1M
read_buffer_size = 1M
sort_buffer_size = 2M

#innodb options
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 5G
innodb_file_per_table
innodb_log_file_size = 128M

# miscellaneous
log-bin
expire_logs_days = 7
table_cache = 512
thread_cache_size = 100
wait_timeout = 1800
connect_timeout = 30
max_allowed_packet = 16M
max_connect_errors = 1024

# defaults
default_storage_engine = innodb

Server is up and running but doesn’t show the right values for some variables. What’s wrong? I had to scratch my head for a couple of minutes on this one as it wasn’t immediately obvious (to me). Nothing was logged in the error log…

Answer in comments!!

32-bit vs 64-bit

<rant>

Oh dear. I was hoping that by now this would be a non-issue. It seems that many of us (including the majority of my clients) are late to the party.

People…it’s now September of  2009. Next month starts the last quarter of 2009.  If you have a 64-bit chip in your server for the LOVE OF GOD please run a 64-bit operating system. And easily 90% of the servers shipping have 64-bit procs. I don’t know of any shipping dedicated servers that are running 32-bit procs but I suppose there are some left somewhere in the universe.

Do you know how difficult and costly it can be to upgrade your server to a 64-bit OS? Costly in terms of money and downtime (which may as well be money). All because you didn’t realize when you bought the server that you would ever use more than four gigs of RAM. Or you thought you might have some trouble getting your application to work with the 64-bit libraries or whatever. Data sets can increase at almost exponentially rates and your server performance is almost a direct corollary to the amount of RAM you have available to utilize for the database server. What worked for you even six months ago might not be enough for you today. And without jumping through some serious hoops there is no effective way to use memory above 4-gigs on a 32-bit system.

The new Dell R710 (which is replacing the 1950) has a baseline price of around $1500. This server will support  two quad core Xeons and 144GB of RAM. Yes, that is correct, 144GB of RAM. It has 18 slots for memory. This will be NORMAL SERVER in months..not years.

Please raise your right hand and solemnly swear  ”I will never put anything on my database server but a 64-bit operating system.” Thank you for your cooperation and congratulations you just saved yourself both time and money. Now if someone could just order me a dell R900 please…

</rant>

Open Source Database Podcast Episode One Released

The new Open Source Database Podcast is a companion to the Open Source Database Magazine. Episode one has now been posted and is available for download. For now I am including the show notes below. I will post these notes on the website soon along with all future show notes.

The feed for the podcast is at osdbzine.net/podcast/osdbpodcast.xml and a direct download of the episode is available here.
Episode Summary
This is the first episode of Open Source Database Podcast. This pod cast is about both open source database servers and the people who develop and use them. The plan is for most episodes to be centered around interviews with various people in the open source community. Kicking things off with this inaugural episode is an interview with Brian Aker who is the creator of the Drizzle database.
I will apologize now for the beginning and ending of the podcast where the recording level is too loud. My only excuse is I have new equipment I am working with and I am not used to it yet!

Resources
Sun’s announcement about purchase by Oracle: sun.com/aboutsun/pr/2009-04/sunflash.20090420.1.xml

MySQL Server 5.4 overview: dev.mysql.com/tech-resources/articles/mysql-54.html

Postgres Website: postgresql.org/
Brian Aker’s blog: krow.livejournal.com/
Drizzle: drizzle.org
Drizzle code: launchpad.net/drizzle
Open Source Database Magazine: osdbzine.net

Production Notes
Recorded using Audacity and an Alesis MultiMix 8 USB mixer. The interview was recorder over Skype with the Alesis mixer.
Release date: July 24th, 2009

That’s a really slow database

I opted out of an mailing list of a really well known vendor today. I received the following email:
We are writing to confirm that you have chosen to opt-out of receiving all marketing information from xxxxx. Please allow 10 business days for this change to take effect. You might receive email communication from xxxxx during this time as we update our database.
If you did not initiate this change, or if you decide to change your opt-out status, you can subscribe to receive certain (or all) communication from xxxxx by updating your profile xxxxx.

So it takes 10 (business) days to update your database. You really might want to investigate MySQL. It works overnight and on the weekends. And it sounds like it would be quite a bit faster!!

First Issue of Open Source Database Magazine Released!

I just uploaded the pdf of the summer issue of Open Source Database Magazine. Included in this issue:

A great article on the new features of Postgresql 8.4 by Robert Treat
Part one of a two part article on Percona’s new XtraBackup backup program

Also the news, the book shelf and Peter Brawley’s Coding Corner. Downloads are available at osdbzine.net.

Delay in Release of Summer Issue OS DB Magazine

Due to circumstances beyond my control..evidently involving the power supply of computer handling email for one of the authors .. the magazine has been delayed for a day or two while it gets sorted out. Sorry about that, but it is going to be worth the wait!