It is applications either using Over 10.000 IOs Per second (latency sensitive) or using Over 500MB/s bandwidth (bandwidth sensitive). I wonder how many of MySQL Users are running applications of these scale, for single MySQL Server ? Please comment if you do.

I believe we see more of applications busy from IOPs numbers, especially now when we easily can get Flash storage which allows to get well over 10K IOPS without going to external storage. 500MB/sec would be exceptional for traditional MySQL as MySQL optimizer with its nested loops joins does not favor sequential scans even for analytic queries executions. Also lack of parallel query execution makes limits how much IO full table scan queries can consume.

If we look at single Server these numbers are quite high however if we look at total numbers for “sharded” MySQL the numbers are not that high – many what would be considered medium scale MySQL installations would get there. With MySQL we seems to prefer to run more low end server and storage configurations.

I believe there are several reasons for that. First because MySQL can be used for free we do not need to optimize the hardware for license costs. With Oracle license costs based on number of CPUs we want to make sure these CPUs are busy and as such need to run storage powerful enough to achieve this. In MySQL world we very often run our CPUs very underutilized while storage is completely used.
Second reason I believe is ability of MySQL to use powerful system (including powerful storage) – Is quite limited with single thread replication as well as other restrictions. As Vadim points out in this and this whitepapers you can get a lot better performance with multiple MySQL instances on powerful storage. When you move to multiple instances and you have to “shard” your data in some way anyway there is no difference whenever you run these instances on single Server or many and as such you can use less powerful servers if only it is more cost effective.

Finally at MySQL we often start “sharding” or splitting data other way because operationally working with large table and data sizes in MySQL can be painful, lacking online operations to alter table, defragmentation etc. Yes there are replication based and trigger based techniques to archive this but it is not the same thing. How many of us are running 5TB per MySQL instance ? 20TB ?
Over 50TB ?

I believe this is to continue to be significant difference between MySQL and Oracle deployments, yet as MySQL is getting better and better handling large scale systems (both in terms of performance and operationally) and as MySQL is making its way into Enterprise Developments I expect us to see more and more Large Single Instance developments as it often allows applications to be a lot more simple.

View full post on MySQL Performance Blog

As I said earlier though – I don’t really care about Oracle… they have no impact or meaning in my life… so if they want to either play silly grammatical games OR be unaware as to the actual meaning of words in English – that’s fine. But then Matt Lord said something that really pissed me off:

 Any religion and its dogma can be problematic in the real world, whether or not it involves any kind of deism or not.

Too often people confuse FOSS with the cathedral and the bazaar, shared development, shared ownership and other high minded ideals and frameworks. In the end, it’s a trademarked and in-house developed product that is released as FOSS. It’s not a cross, don’t try to impale yourself on it.

It’s not that big of a deal people! We’re surrounded by beauty and tragedy, this is just work.

Now, first of all, I like Matt Lord. And with that in mind, I have the following to say:

I am fully in support of trademarks and trademark protection. I am fully in support of people making a living doing what they do – especially if they are doing it by providing a service. I recognize that Oracle owns the trademark MySQL and can do with it as they see fit.Oracle does, in fact, own the product called MySQL, with all of the rights that go along with that… and honestly I do not think they are being bad shepherds of that product. Whether I like Oracle or not, it is undeniable that they are now a part of the MySQL picture, and I say good for them.

The reason I get pissed off is the attitude that it’s not that big of a deal. The MySQL trademark and the business around MySQL is a BIG DEAL to Oracle, and if I were to try to put forward the opinion that they should just, you know, stop caring about it, people would think I was crazy. Why is it so unreasonable then for me to care about the portion of this that I happen care about? Why is it not ok for me to NOT be in this for the money, for me to NOT be in this just as work?

I think it might be worthwhile reading The Cathedral and The Bazaar again – because it describes the two different models you are talking about rather than being a single entity that one might confuse FOSS with. The Cathedral, as described in the book, is the model traditionally taken by the MIT and Gnu-derived projects,  (although emacs has a more open dev model now) and is currently also employed by Oracle on MySQL. In fact, it has been the MySQL model for quite some time – well before Oracle entered the picture. It involves a mostly closed dev process from which code drops are made unannounced and at the whim of the folks in the Cathedral. It’s not de-facto a bad thing, it’s just a description of a process. With the Cathedral, ironically enough, it is the ideals of Free Software (that the software itself be free) that are more important and that an open development process is less important. The Bazaar, on the other hand, is the process Linux uses – where all of the development is done in a distributed manner and in the open. The assertion in the book, and one of the philosophical differences between Free Software and Open Source (which makes the use of FLOSS or FOSS completely ludicrous) is that having an open development process is more valuable than just the software being free, although the by-product of an open development process is that your software sort of has to be Open Source. The irony here that I mentioned earlier is that, of course, Oracle approaching its Free Software offerings via the Cathedral model gives it none of the benefits you would think a corporation might want from an arrangement such as Eric Raymond’s Open Source Bazaar model might afford them, and instead themselves choose to operate under a set of zealous ideals much more akin to Richard Stallman.

I’m sure that analogy is not pleasing to either Stallman or Ellison.

Although I understand that the ideals behind Free Software may not be important to you, I do not think that there is any constructive reason in the context of a discussion about Oracle’s business practices asserting trademark ownership to imply me subscribing to those ideals is silly. It would be very difficult to accurately describe the success of any of the currently valuable pieces of Free Software as not due in any large part to those of us who routinely impale ourselves on the cross of Free Software. MySQL AB’s business strategy itself, which involved attaching FUD to discussions of the GPL to incite people to buy licenses that they quite simply did not need … (a perfectly valid if devious business strategy) was predicated on the existence of such an enormous shit-ton of users that they could focus on converting a percent of a percent of those users into customers and still wind up selling the business for a billion dollars. That shit-ton of users grew out of the emergence of LAMP as the dominant pattern for the Web. LAMP arose because it was technically much better than any of the alternatives… and the pieces of LAMP became dominant because of the work of a set of people who do, in fact, care about the ideals of either Free Software or Open Source.

You seem to be quick to put things in business perspectives and to remind people that it’s ok for Oracle to do business. I agree. It’s ok. But we wouldn’t have had MySQL to work in the first place for if it wasn’t for a bunch of people for whom it was not just a job, for whom it was not just work and for whom the ideals you are looking down on are not silly things.

So disagree with me all you want to about the effects of Oracle’s choices on the health of MySQL. Defend Oracle all you want to on whatever terms you want, in whatever way you want to define a set of values such that they are positive. I’m right there with you on some of it, I might disagree with you on other bits, and that’s just life and how we go on being people … but please do not smirk and snicker and roll your eyes and tell me that the things that I think are important are not. I assure you, I find them to be very important and I do not believe I am the only person who does.

View full post on Planet Drizzle

From the 451 Group:
“MySQL flirted with the open core licensing model in early 2008 with plans to introduce new features into Enterprise Edition that would not be available under an open source license.”

MySQL didn’t flirt with, it was going to do it.

Why? Because we were asking the question, “how do we pull in customers to make more money”.

MySQL was going to put the new backup API, which never materialized, into an Enterprise branch.

It was a lousy idea for the following reasons:

1) There was no internal API in the server for this, so the engineering was going to be messy and expensive.

2) We didn’t own the technology that was needed to even do this (Oracle owned Hot Backup)

3) Percona has an awesome tool for doing this, that is Open Source (http://www.percona.com/software/percona-xtrabackup/)

4) Backup is a core feature everyone needs, and some of those “everyones” are the folks who manufacture tools that you want to have work with your product.

5) When we were going to announce it, we hadn’t even written it/completed it. It was vaporware.

It would have been a horrible move, and would have caused Chaos for no particular reason. It was dead on arrival, and when it was to be announced as a strategy since it didn’t even exist.

Lets look at Oracle’s move. Both the authentication module, and the Thread Pool come into the MySQL server as plugins. If the engineering of the MySQL server continues in the current direction (which is somewhat flattering to Drizzle I might add), then they are on a good path (if I can find my blog entry where I talked about this as a good strategy, I’ll link back to it here).

Much of the hubbub around Open Source, Community, etc, in regards to this are a bit inflated I feel. They haven’t touched the core product, and they are creating API. Are they possibly hurting themselves in regards to ubiquity?

Doubtful.

Would I pick those two pieces? No, but they aren’t the last two I would pick either. If Sun had continued as a company?

Something similar to this would have been done as well.

From an engineering and usage stand point?

The first person who sniffs at the authentication mechanism who knows anything about security is going to freak.

The Thread Pool can only be used by a very limited number of users (and there are some restrictions on what can be done in the server while it is in use). MySQL’s IO was never designed for the Thread Pool, and there is a lot of engineering work that would need to be done to make it work.

Still? People will use both, and I am betting some customers will want them badly enough to pay.

If they are really badly needed? Well then someone will write an open source version of both.

I have no great love of Oracle, but this is really not a big deal at all. The original GPL’ing of the Public Domain/LGPL clients was a much bigger deal.

View full post on Planet Drizzle

It requires X.

You know one of the things that makes MySQL better than Oracle? You can install it in 5 minutes and you don’t have to launch a Java GUI.

You know when it makes sense to launch a Java GUI to install server software?

NEVER

EPIC FAIL 

View full post on Planet Drizzle

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