I just uploaded my slides from my Open DB Camp / Froscon talk to Slideshare:

Speaking of conferences, in general, and OpenSQLCamps in particular, there is one a week from now, and I will be speaking! It is organized as a single room track at Froscon, Germany, by Felix Schupp (Blackray/Softmethod) and Volker Oboda (Primebase). The content is mostly a collection of database related talks originally submitted via the main Froscon call for papers. (In other words, unlike many previous camps, the schedule is all set.)

I'm a little excited about this one, because for the first time in my career as speaker I will be giving the keynote. The title of my talk is

How I learned to use SQL and how I learned not to use it

A week ago Baron wrote a blog post which can only be described as the final nail in the coffin for MMM. At MySQL AB we never used or recommended MMM as a High Availability solution. I never really asked about details about that, but surely one reason was that it is based on using the MySQL replication. At MySQL/Sun we recommended against asynchronous replication as a HA solution so that was the end of it as far as MMM was concerned. Instead we recommended DRBD, shared disk or MySQL Cluster based solutions. Of course, to replicate across continents (geographical redundancy) you will mostly just use asynchronous replication, also MySQL Cluster used the standard MySQL replication for that purpose.

This year was the first year the public could nominate candidates for these awards. We got in many nominations and this really helped the panel to get an overview of everything that is noteworthy in the MySQL ecosystem right now. Thank you to everyone who participated by sending in nominations.

In the first category the panel received and debated over a dozen suggestions. There are so many great people in this community, it is easy to think of people who truly deserve to be awarded. There were however two persons who clearly stood out with a track record of years and years of broad and really key contributions to the MySQL community. These two persons also clearly stood out both in number of nominations and number of votes. Therefore, the...

Jonathan Levin has an excellent blog post titled How to make MySQL cool again. It is almost word for word something I've wanted to write for a long time. Now I don't need to, thanks Jonathan.

Once again Blogger failed to post my comments to his site, so I will make some comments as a new post of my own instead. Jonathan actually lists things that exist already but isn't getting used enough. My list contains also a few things that I don't know if they exist or not.

Hi Jonathan

I often wonder what's behind the increased trend behind Hadoop and other NoSQL technologies. I realize if you're Yahoo that such technology makes sense. I don't get why everyone else wants to use it.

Reading Stephen O'Grady's self-review of his predictions for 2010 for the first time gave me some insights into how such people think:

Democratization of Big Data

Consider that RedMonk, a four person analyst shop, has the technical wherewithal to attack datasets ranging from gigabytes to terabytes in size. Unless you’re making institutional money, budgets historically have not permitted this. The tools of Big Data have never been more accessible than they are today.

Just a short note again on HandlerSocket developments: PHP bindings to the HandlerSocket client library have been spotted in the wild: https://code.google.com/p/php-handlersocket/ (I'd like to credit someone, but I have no idea who user "avuenta" is on Google Code. Is it you Dathan?)

I found this on Dathan Vance Pattishall's blog. I haven't personally had time to try it out yet as I'm still deep into my current project (of which I hope to blog in January).

"...php-handlersocket which is a PECL type version (C driver with exposure to PHP). It does the job but needs some work that I'm doing now."

Just wanted to highlight that Percona Server has now added HandlerSocket to its most recent release, being the first "MySQL fork/distribution" to ship it in easy to consume binary downloads.

HandlerSocket brings NoSQL to MySQL, and does so with a vengeance! It was developed at DeNa, by Akira Higuchi and is already used in production in their MySQL servers. The announcement on my former collague Yoshinori Matsunobu's blog flaunts a 7x performance improvement over the standard SQL interface in MySQL. The most astonishing part is that their MySQL is now faster than Memcached, even if the latter doesn't store anything to disk, so with this NoSQL-for-MySQL solution it makes sense to remove the caching layer completely!

In this post I will share results on some "benchmarking" I did on the database created in the previous post: MariaDB 5.2: Using MariaDB as a document store and Virtual Columns for indexing. In addition to just playing with the new syntax, I wanted to actually benchmark using virtual columns against some other techniques. If you didn't read that previous post yet, please do so that you know the schema that is being used and the whole point of what we are doing.

The premise for this benchmark was already given last week:

Before I write the next blog, I invite you to guess the result of the benchmark. I had two conflicting rules of thumb as hypothesis:

This is a followup to my previous post about Virtual Columns. In this post I will do a more in-depth test on using virtual columns in a use case where MariaDB is used as a document store.

Document oriented DB basics

Relational databases store data in 2-dimensional tables, rows and columns. Document oriented databases do not store Word documents or novels, rather the "documents" are essentially serialized PHP arrays, Java-objects, etc. The most popular document format today is JSON. JSON "documents" have exactly the same syntax as a JavaScript array, originally JavaScript programmers would just eval("data = " + jsondocument); to get the data into a variable (unserialize). For more information about JSON and how a JSON database would work, see the Wikipedia article and for instance the MongoDB manual.

Another format that has been used for document stores is XML documents, and many programming languages can serialize objects into XML.