Pythian Group

OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! I took videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded). Unfortunately, I was busy doing administrative stuff for opensqlcamp for the opening keynote and first 15 minutes of the session organizing, and when I got to the planning board, it was already full….so I was not able to give a session.

• Comparing Non-Relational Databases: MongoDB, Tokyo Tyrant, CouchDB by Igal Koshevoy of Pragmaticraft
• Drizzle Client Rewrite – Clark Boylan leads the requirements and design discussion for rewriting the Drizzle Client
• Drizzle Plugin Hacking
• Drizzle is Not MySQL with Changes – Brian Aker gives a talk on Drizzle, and how Drizzle is not MySQL.
• Fractal Trees – by Bradley Kuszmaul of Tokutek
• Geographic Operators in SQL (PostGIS) by Webb Sprague
• Goal-Driven Performance – Peter Zaitsev speaks about how to achieve goal-driven performance.
• Graph Engine for MySQL – by Antony Curtis
• Intro to Cassandra
• An Intro to CouchDB: What caught Ubuntu’s eye by Mike Miller (Cloudant)
• Maria – MySQL founder Monty Widenius talks about Maria, and the past, present and future of MySQL.

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OpenSQLCamp was a huge success! Not many folks have blogged about what they learned there….if you missed it, all is not lost. We did take videos of most of the sessions (we only had 3 video cameras, and 4 rooms, and 2 sessions were not recorded).

All the videos have been processed, and I am working on uploading them to YouTube and filling in details for the video descriptions. Not all the videos are up right now….right now all the lightning talks are up.

• All the lightning talks belowin one continuous video (just over 54 minutes total)
• The Graph Engine (Antony Curtis)
• Cluster/J, a new set of Java APIs to MySQL Cluster 5.1 (John David Duncan)
• Sphinx, the fulltext storage engine (Peter Zaitsev)
• iiBench, the Indexed Insertion Benchmark (Bradley Kuszmaul of Tokutek)
• JJtree in Coco
• Integrating OSS with Windows (Tom Hanrahan of Microsoft)
• Trainwreck, an agent for MySQL replication (Domas Mituzas)
• Column Stores (David Lutz of Infobright)
• I Play With Data, about doing real statistical calculations of data, when SQL gets in the way (Joseph di Paolantonio)
• Your Guide to NoSQL (Brian Aker)
• PL/Parrot The call for PL/Parrot in Postgres is put out there (Jonathan “Duke” Leto)

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Mike Hogan, CEO of ScaleDB spoke at the Boston MySQL User Group in September 2009:

ScaleDB is a storage engine for MySQL that delivers shared-disk clustering. It has been described as the Oracle RAC of MySQL. Using ScaleDB, you can scale your cluster by simply adding nodes, without partitioning your data. Each node has full read/write capability, eliminating the need for slaves, while delivering cluster-level load balancing. ScaleDB is looking for additional beta testers, there is a sign up at http://www.scaledb.com.

Slides are online (and downloadable) at http://www.slideshare.net/Sheeri/scale-db-preso-for-boston-my-sql-meetup-92009

Watch the video online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emu2WfNx4KA or directly embedded here:
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This happens to be my very first blog post with Pythian, and to kick this thing off, I would like to talk about building a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

As DBAs, we cannot separate ourselves from the grueling task of having to deal with the underlying operating system, especially as new versions come out. Running SQL Server also means understanding the operating system on which it runs. And since Windows Server 2008 has been released for almost a year now, a lot of customers are upgrading from Windows Server 2003 to this new version.

Installing SQL Server on a stand-alone server or member server in the domain is pretty straightforward. Dealing with clustering is a totally different story. The goal of this series of posts is to be able to help DBAs who may be charged with installing SQL Server on a Windows Server 2008 cluster.

The best approach is to always have an environment on which to run these tests. In my case, I run VMware Workstation 6.5 on my Windows XP laptop. Here are the steps that you need to take.

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Well, nobody from Sun showed up in person, but we got a great rendition of “Where were you when you heard THE NEWS that Sun bought MySQL?” from Mark Rubin, the MySQL Sales Engineer for the New England area, and from Giuseppe Maxia, who revealed something very interesting and riveting.

From there, Giuseppe gave a short talk on what it’s like to work at MySQL, and then we moved on to the topic of the user group meeting, “What is MySQL Cluster Good For?”

The slides for the talk are downloadable in PDF Format 61kB and Flash (SWF) format, 31kB

The video can be played at http://technocation.org/node/572/play and downloaded (404 Mb) at http://technocation.org/node/572/download.

This sixth post describes how to remove a node from a 10.2 RAC cluster in silent mode. It differs from the associated documentation in that it will show how to remove a node, even if it has been made unavailable for any reason, including an error by a DBA or a SA.

Here is the complete series agenda:

1. Installation of 10.2 And 11.1 Databases
2. Patches of 10.2 And 11.1 databases
3. Cloning Software and databases
4. Install a 10.2 RAC Database
5. Add a Node to a 10.2 RAC database
6. Remove a Node from a 10.2 RAC database (this post!)
7. Install a 11.1 RAC Database
8. Add a Node to a 11.1 RAC database
9. Remove a Node from a 11.1 RAC database
10. A ton of other stuff you should know

Now for the substance of this part.

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If you have a 12-server MySQL Cluster with:

1 Management Node
3 SQL Nodes
2 Data Node Groups, 4 Data Nodes per group

And each machine is configured to allocate 1G of memory for its function, how much data (data + indexes) can you store in total in your cluster?

You can guess, but you get bonus points if you explain why and the explanation is correct.

Someone asked me what applications were good/bad for MySQL Cluster. As I’ve now actually had experience with a Cluster setup and a real-life application of it, and dug through the manual, I present a few characteristics of applications that will work with Cluster, and why they are so (so that if you have an application that meets some of the characteristics but not all of them, you can decide whether it’s worth it to use Cluster or not).

Firstly, I’ll state this — there’s actually a very limited application to MySQL cluster. I haven’t assessed the disk-based cluster, only the memory-based one, so I don’t know what really changes with disk-based. But after you see this list, you certainly will want to re-think your use of disk-based cluster if a lot of the inner workings don’t change.

The factors are listed below, but the “ruler” I keep in my mind is the fact that MySQL Cluster was developed for telecom applications. The basic characteristic is a lot of writes, small data in amounts that can fit into memory, and the data being transient in nature. Something like a “session” table is a great application.

So here are the characteristics of a good application for MySQL Cluster, with explanations of why: Read the rest of this entry . . .