May 21, 2013

Mail clients and Databases

I get a lot of mail and I prefer to store it for long time if not forever. With modern hard disk sizes it should not be problem at all, but because of how mailing programs are written it causes a lot of problems. I’ve tried a lot of programs – Kmail, Evolution, Thunderbird on [...]

MySQL Binaries availability

It looks like it looks like there are going a lot of discussions about future of MySQL Community Binaries, see for example this post and Kaj’s clarifications. Obviously now it grew to a lot of speculations and many comments are far from real story. It is also really interesting to watch MySQL try to balance [...]

Where to get recent MySQL version ?

As you might noticed there are no recent MySQL Community versions available for download from MySQL Download Area This applies both to binaries (which is expected with new polices) but also to the source files which were promised to be available. So what is if you would like to use recent MySQL code while staying [...]

Alternatives of PHP ?

When I loaded GigaBytes of XMLs into mysql database with PHP script, I was thinking about PHP alternatives. Why do I need that ? 1. PHP is slow – I’m speaking about area of data processing and implementation of algorithms 2. No good cli debugger – I’m just tired of debugging with ‘echo’ and ‘var_dump’ [...]

SHOW INNODB STATUS walk through

Many people asked me to publish a walk through SHOW INNODB STATUS output, showing what you can learn from SHOW INNODB STATUS output and how to use this info to improve MySQL Performance. To start with basics SHOW INNODB STATUS is command which prints out a lot of internal Innodb performance counters, statistics, information about [...]

eWeek tests OpenSource stacks and .NET

Have you seen recent eWeek benchmarks which test OpenSource stacks and compare them to .NET ? Here is what was compared and here are results. Results make me ask number of questions – why WAMP would perform 6 times better than LAMP ? Why Python would be faster than PHP on Windows but slower on [...]

MyISAM concurrent insert

Arjen posted a good note about MyISAM concurrent-insert features, though I should mention concurrent-insert can be cause of scalablity and peformance problems on SMP boxes, especially on queries processing range-queries. The reason of problems is POSIX read-write locks, which are used to protect key_buffer from concurrent changes and called for each processed row. More info [...]

MyISAM mmap feature (5.1)

As you know MyISAM does not cache data, only indexes. MyISAM assumes OS cache is good enough and uses pread/pwrite system calls for reading/writing datafiles. However OS is not always good in this task, my benchmarks show Linux/Solaris aren’t scalable on intensive pread calls (I believe the same for Windows, but I did not test [...]