http://tomictech.com Thu, 19 Mar 2009 18:43:57 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en The rumoured acquisition of Sun by IBM makes sense on many levels. IBM has always been a strong proponent of business-friendly open source and is probably more invested in Java than Sun itself. The indirect impact on recently-acquired MySQL is a bit personal for me, however. Many moons ago, I worked ... http://tomictech.com/?p=28 I'd like to take a step back from technical issues to distill some of my thoughts on the challenges of data warehousing in the 21st century. Having worked on a number of warehouse projects in different industries over the years, I've encountered many challenges, some failures, some successes. One thing is ... http://tomictech.com/?p=19 I have been using partitioning in MySQL 5.1 since it has been in late beta, and with the odd bump I've been quite satisfied with its stability and ease of use. Perhaps the days of maintaining nasty application logic to maintain tables like table_yyyymm manually are finally over! While some control ... http://tomictech.com/?p=16 It's been a while since my last post! I have a few half-written entries, but I figured I just get one out there so I don't appear to have dropped off the face of the planet :) Being more of a DBA than a sysadmin myself, I've noticed that there is ... http://tomictech.com/?p=15 The mysql proxy project has tremendous potential to make mysql administration and usage easier. I decided to throw some load at it to get a feel for how stable and performant it is. On EC2, I set up 6 "small" images in an example proxy setup:- One client machine to ... http://tomictech.com/?p=14 A good rule of thumb is that a DBA should not let the size of his/her database grow to much more than 50% of the available disk space. I'm sure everyone has a story of being burned in some way by not following this advice. Before promoting 5.1 to some beefier ... http://tomictech.com/?p=13 Testing MySQL sequential IO performance with different IO schedulers - Part 1I stumbled upon an interesting article discussing the different Linux I/O schedulers that are available in the 2.6 kernel, and also discussing some of the deficiencies of the 2.4 "Linus elevator" I/O scheduler. The default scheduler as of Kernel ... http://tomictech.com/?p=12 If there is one thing that a DBA or data warehouse architect can count on, it is that data volumes will increase while budgets will decrease.This is why MySQL 5.1 and its partitioning capabilities are so interesting. I'm going to demonstrate how you can build a small/medium-sized data warehouse or ... http://tomictech.com/?p=11 mysql 5.1 is nearing release, with the present release candidate 5.1.24. The most important new feature, in my eyes, is the new partitioning capability. When I get some time, I will write up a more complete post on my experiences so far with 5.1 partitioning, but I am going to try ... http://tomictech.com/?p=10 Over the years, the database world has been buzzing with the strategic threat posed to the established players by upstart open-source database systems. Oracle and IBM would no longer be able to gouge defenseless small and medium-sized businesses of non-trivial portions of their IT budgets for a mere database licence. ... http://tomictech.com/?p=9