Percona Offers InnoDB Replacement

Open source the way it ought to be. Today, Percona announced a replacement for InnoDB that improves performance and fixes bugs. The new engine is called XtraDB.

According to Vadim at Percona:

It's 100% backwards-compatible with standard InnoDB, so you can use it as a drop-in replacement in your current environment. It is designed to scale better on modern hardware, and includes a variety of other features useful in high performance environments.

The release is pure GPL (v2) and commercial support is available from Percona. If percona keeps this up, they just might become the new MySQL.

The source is available from Launchpad and from Percona. Binaries are also available and OurDelta will start using XtraDB in future builds. Percona expects a 6 month development cycle. I don't see on here how they plan to incorporate contributions but that may just need a little time to figure out. They do say that they have already incorporated most patches that are available and that make sense for their customer base..

This announcement excites me much more than Drizzle ever did.

LewisC

Technorati : database, mysql, open source, osdb

SQL Newbie Book

I have written a new book on SQL DML. This is a total beginner book: how to commit and rollback, how to query, how to add data, etc.

Probably not of interest to most of the people who read this blog but if you know of anyone completely new to SQL, this would make a great Christmas present. Only 14.95. It is completely vendor agnostic, although the examples all use Oracle and MySQL.

You can view the Table Of Contents, Preface and Index here. I plan to release some of the chapters for free on the blog and will make the PDF of the book available at a discount. I have several more books like this (DDL, Intro to Relational Databases and Cloud Computing) under construction. I also plan to do some intermediate and advanced books in the future.

LewisC

Technorati : database, learning, mysql, sql

Starting Survey results - Survery Countries

Well, I have started formatting the results from the survey. This will take a little while as the survey software doesn't make it easy to download and clean it up (without paying for a subscription). As soon as the data is cleaned up I will post the entire data set and a link for everyone to download.

However, while I work on the data, I will provide some summary results. Here is a list of countries who had respondents. If a country is not listed, it had 0 responses/

Country	Percentage	# Respondents
Argentina	0.31%	1
Australia	3.44%	11
Belgium	1.25%	4
Bosnia and Herzegovina	0.31%	1
Brazil	5.63%	18
Bulgaria	1.25%	4
Canada	4.69%	15
Colombia	0.63%	2
Croatia	0.31%	1
Czech Republic	0.94%	3
Dominican Republic	0.31%	1
Ecuador	0.31%	1
Estonia	0.31%	1
Finland	0.31%	1
France	4.38%	14
Germany	2.50%	8
Greece	0.63%	2
Guatemala	0.31%	1
Hong Kong	0.31%	1
Hungary	0.31%	1
India	3.13%	10
Indonesia	0.31%	1
Israel	0.31%	1
Italy	1.88%	6
Latvia	0.63%	2
Malaysia	0.31%	1
Mali	0.31%	1
Mexico	3.75%	12
Netherlands	1.88%	6
Norway	0.31%	1
Paraguay	0.31%	1
Peru	0.63%	2
Philippines	0.63%	2
Poland	1.88%	6
Portugal	0.31%	1
Russian Federation	1.56%	5
Serbia	0.63%	2
Singapore	0.31%	1
Slovenia	0.94%	3
South Africa	0.94%	3
Spain	2.81%	9
Sweden	0.94%	3
Switzerland	1.25%	4
Thailand	0.31%	1
Turkey	1.25%	4
Ukraine	0.31%	1
United Kingdom	6.88%	22
United States	35.00%	112
Uruguay	0.31%	1
Other	1.56%	5

Check out a summary of Primary Databases and a few questions on open source software usage.

LewisC

Technorati : database, open source, osdb, survey

Last Week For Database Survey

This is the last week to participate in a database usage survey. If you haven't already done so, please take a few minutes to answer 25 questions.

LewisC

Technorati : database, mysql, survey

Over 200 Responses in Less than 2 Weeks

Less than two weeks ago, I posted my Database Survey. As of just a few minutes ago, I have had 215 responses. That's pretty awesome. I'd like to get at least twice that though.

I haven't looked deeply at it yet to see if there are any trends. I think it will be best to wait until the survey is closed. I did look at some of the responses, kind of as a quality check. Looks like MySQL is fairly well represented. I didn't see any DB2 responses (for primary database). I did see plenty of Oracle and a few Postgres.

I will leave it up for another 2 1/2 weeks (for a total of 4 weeks). If you haven't taken it yet, please do so if you get a few minutes. It only takes 5-10 minutes as there is only 25 questions.

Also, if you have a blog, post on forums (without spamming), or have any other ways to spread the word, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

LewisC

Technorati : commercial, database, open source, survey

Infoworld Picks MySQL as Best Database

Infoworld published the 2008 Bossies, Best Of Open Source Software. There are 8 categories and none of them are database:

• Collaboration
• Developer tools
• Enterprise applications
• Networking
• Platforms and middleware
• Productivity applications
• Security
• Storage

I had to look through several of them before I found the database category under Platforms and middleware. Slide 4 is the magic slide:

It says:

Database

While SQLite3 is extremely convenient for development and testing databases, and PostgreSQL has powerful Generalized Search Tree indexes and is very close to being enterprise-ready, MySQL is the choice for many Web sites thanks to its excellent read performance, transparent support for large text and binary objects, and incredibly easy administration. Stored procedures, functions, triggers, and updateable views were added to MySQL in version 5, overcoming the largest technical objections to its deployment at many sites. MySQL also has a large, helpful user base, and some poster-child deployments including eBay, Yahoo, and Craigslist.

I'm not sure why SQLLite would even be on the list. There are plenty of other OSDBs that I would put my bets on before SQLLite. Not that SQLLite is bad, it's just not a "best of" kind of thing. I don't imagine the Postgres folks are too happy at the "also ran" placement. "Close to being enterprise-ready", ouch.

I have to agree that MySQL has a large, helpful user base. I actually think that is one of the best things about MySQL.

LewisC

Technorati : database, mysql, open source