MySQL
There’s an interesting dynamic going on right now in the DBA world. MySQL’s growth and installed base, as a function of its size three or five years ago, is perhaps five if not ten times larger than it was. In 2002 when Pythian’s MySQL services launched, we took on the platform at the explicit request of an existing customer that was primarily an Oracle shop, but that was adopting MySQL for some bolt-on systems. Today, MySQL is our fastest-growing practice in terms of new customer acquisition. The point I want you to take away from that is simply this: there are about five to ten times more high-value environments running MySQL in the world today than there were three years ago.
I just read a fascinating article on clustering architectures for databases from Kevin Closson of Polyserve (now HP). All I can say is that he has one of the most informed and incisive views and insights on clustering, SMP, high-availability and high-performance environments in the industry. I thought I would share this with the broader community because I think a lot of MySQL, SQL Server and EnterpriseDB folks who need to read this and think about this subject might otherwise miss it, simply because they may not be regular readers of Kevin’s blog.
Now for some logrolling at its finest. I thought I’d try to help Sheeri, the MySQL She-BA, spread the word about the 21st episode of her OurSQL podcast as it is the second of a two-part interview with Pythian pres. Paul Vallée. The topic is, “The Rise of the MySQL DBA.”
Taking the cue from Jay Pipes, as so many other bloggers have done, I present the five things I would most like to see in a future release of MySQL.
So you ran into some basic limitations with MyISAM when your site got busier. Even single row updates would lock the whole table and slow things down to a crawl. Then you updated to InnoDB to get the benefit of row-level locking, but now the site is even slower than before. What gives? Here’s whats happening….
I came across Oracle Coherence today. Seems like this is another approach to clustering than Oracle RAC. Seems like this is a way to scale middle tiers that require shared data without actually using the central database for that. On the other hand, looks like a clustering framework with rules defined by developers as opposed to Oracle RAC that is designed and built to be a black box delivering database services. Has anyone (yeah, I’m asking developers reading the blog) played with it and knows how it feels?
A short post to draw your attention to this article by Kevin Burton titled “MySQL and the Death of Raid”. Although it’s written from the MySQL point of view, he does bring up some interesting points on the advantages of what he calls a “RAISe” or Redundant Array of Independent Servers” architecture (actually I coined the RAISe acronym just now :-) ) over the traditional RAID approach of hardening the availability and performance of your disk. Take a look and let me know what you think.
Looks like our blog has turned into a MySQL blog over this week, so I have to do something about it. Luckily, I have zillions of pending posts, so I’ll start with posting my presentations materials from this conference with my remarks on how it went in general.
Day three at MySQL Conference 2007
It seems Google couldn’t wait to have their code evaluated for merging into the main source tree, and decided to release it to the general public as patches to 4.0.26 for the community to evaluate. What have we added and enhanced?
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