Pythian Group

Welcome the the 87^th of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First up, a couple of items responding to news about H-Store, the new database technology. Nigel Thomas of Preferisco wonders if H-Store is a new architectural era, or just a toy?

Too much information, in turn, asks, Is H-Store the future of database management systems?

MySQL

Also aware of how technological change affects day-to-day DBA business, Dave Stokes of Dave’s Stuff has a tip for MySQL certification candidates: “[They] need to know about a little known but important function . . .” — PROCEDURE ANALYSE(). He writes, “It is mainly used to suggest optimal column sizes. Forty years ago you needed to worry how to properly encode data so that it would fit on an eighty column punch card. Thirty years ago when hard disks were the size of stove or dishwasher, there was a need to conserve as much space as possible. Today people carry gigs of data in their pocket and a terabyte of disk is available at local stores next to other consumer products. So you can be less than optimal in your storage of data for the most part. There are exceptions.”

Dave also asks that, as MySQL joins Sun and introduces their data into Sun’s systems, MySQL certification candidates update their email address info.

Matt Asay of the Open Road covers IBM’s announcement that is has ended development for MySQL storage engine, SolidDB. “Some among us (myself included) once worried that IBM was joining with Oracle to besiege MySQL when it acquired SolidDB, one of MySQL’s primary storage engines. It turns out, however, that IBM didn’t have such nefarious plans.”

Guiseppe Maxia, The Data Charmer, illustrates how the easy use of DISTINCT is lazy.

On Diamond Notes, a tip on speeding up imports by sorting, coming from a 60-hour, 106 million row MyISAM import.

CrazyToon offers answers to the question, how do you set up master-master replication in MySQL?, laying out the basics of this arrangement.

Baron Schwartz was mining the same vein this week. He has a piece on Xaprb on how to sync tables in master-master MySQL replication.

so many trails … so little time has an item showing how to sync two tables in MySQL.
“Usually replication is the suggested answer, but it might be a little overkill… In this case the right tool might be a mix of the new MySQL features, federated tables, extended insert synthax, stored procedures, events, triggers … quite a fest.”

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Welcome to the 86^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Let’s jump right in.

MySQL

This was the week in which Sun Microsystems’ acquisition of MySQL went through. Wow, that didn’t take long at all! Zack Urlocker reports on the celebration at MySQL AB when the deal was completed, and looks ahead at the immediate future, which includes the “Meetup Mashup” tour. There’s a nice pic of MySQL CEO Marten Mickos and some of the gang looking well pleased, part of our ongoing reportage of DBAs with bottles. Zack has some more thoughts on the Open Sources blog, on integrating MySQL with Sun.

In his Technical Notes and Articles of Interest, Ronald Bradford observed the occasion and added some commentary — on the official Sun-MySQL website and the marketing material presented therein; the same on the mysql.com site.

The two organizations’ CEOs have been getting around this week. Robert Scoble conducted a (kind of watery) video interview with Sun’s Jonathan Schwartz. And guess who shows up — it’s Marten again!

Monty says some things about the first “normal” build of the Maria storage engine, and also some regarding the new arrangement: “I hope that within Sun we will get resources to change our current polices, priorities and in some ways the whole engineering organization to make the development model much friendlier to outside participants. It should be as easy for an outsider to get a patch into the MySQL server as someone working for MySQL.”

On MySQL Dump, Julian Swanhart discusses incrementally refreshing materialized views with MySQL 5. He writes: “One of my favorite features of the Oracle database is support for Materialized Views . . . I’ve often lamented that MySQL lacks this feature, but everybody I talked to seemed to feel that the feature was just “too big”, “too difficult” or “frankly impossible” to implement. Well, frankly, nothing motivates me more than telling me that something is impossible.”

Jeff Stoner, inhabitant of Stoner’s World, has an item about his use of monitoring MySQL and Red Hat Cluster. “In a perfect world, the only reason MySQL would pass between nodes is for server maintenance, under the control of a human. In reality, crap happens. Redhat Cluster manages all this, but I still want to know that a failover happened (is hardware going bad? did a software bug cause a failure? etc.)”

The DBA Dojo has an exposition on MySQL Multi Master-Master on EC2. “It is about improving the availability of your databases on EC2 and allowing easy backups without affecting either master instance. . . . I am going to test using mysql-proxy to perform that role of load-balancing a multi master replication cluster next. Then we are going to hammer the hell out of the configuration using mysqlslap, then sysbench and then the granddaddy of OLTP benchmarks DBT.”

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