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Google Businesses The Internet Databases Programming Software IT

Google Releases MySQL Enhancements 208

An anonymous reader noted that "Google has released its internally developed enhancements to MySQL to the open source community this week. Changes include improvements in replication, high availability configuration, and performance." It'll be interesting to see if the changes they made are of interest to other places using MySQL.
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Google Releases MySQL Enhancements

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  • Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by glwtta ( 532858 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:22AM (#18870971) Homepage
    Did they fix that thing where it always sacrifices data integrity for speed?

    (I'm not even trolling, I do want to know if they fixed that)
  • Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bigby ( 659157 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:23AM (#18871013)
    You can go with a slower speed and higher data integrity by switching from MyISAM to InnoDB tables. The choice is there, so I would use the term "always sacrifice".
  • Google-y goodness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by loafing_oaf ( 1054200 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:26AM (#18871055)

    Ah, now this is how it's supposed to work. No bull like, "We're releasing improvements as MSN-SQL," or any other nonsense. Yay Google.

  • by emj ( 15659 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:28AM (#18871091) Journal
    MySQL is dual licensed so if they add this code they can't sell their product under another license..
  • Re:Fit for duty? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by alienmole ( 15522 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:35AM (#18871215)
    Yes, but imagine the world's biggest Beowulf cluster of MySQL servers.

    Now imagine them in Google's data centers.

    Which, in fact, is where they are. Now do you see?
  • by BinaryPower ( 1089809 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:38AM (#18871249)
    Google doesn't sell a lot of software products. Some, but not a lot. It's intended purpose was to speed up their own internal system, and so they decided to share their work because it probably works well.
  • by vivaoporto ( 1064484 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:41AM (#18871289)
    Yes it does. And it was GPL, as it's said in TFA. So, no dual license if it is included.
  • Re:WTF? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Em Ellel ( 523581 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:47AM (#18871363)

    What exactly does Oracle offer besides database offerings?
    Erm, check out their web site [oracle.com] - look at the other two columns of products besides database - they offer quite a few products including little things like Oracle ERP, Peoplesoft and Siebel.

    -Em

  • by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @11:55AM (#18871467)

    This illustrates a problem with commercial OSS At least with the GPL, anyway.

    I think this illustrates a problem with trying to sell OSS as if it were closed source software, instead of relying upon contract work for improvements, customizations, services, and other closed source add ons or using that OSS as a tool yourself for some other market.

  • by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @12:18PM (#18871747) Homepage Journal
    What good is speed without data integrity? If I can't trust my data, It doesn't matter how fast I can retrieve it.

    If you have a read-only situation there's no need for full ACID compliance. I've seen some contrivances where MySQL reads happen from myASM databases, and the writes go into an InnoDB database, and something on the backend happens to replicates the changes into the 'read-only' databases reliably. I've just never had, myself, an application so speed critical that it was worth doing that instead of doing PostgreSQL for everything. But my use cases aren't everybody's use cases.
  • Re:Great! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by xelah ( 176252 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @12:45PM (#18872101)
    He doesn't mean 'foreign keys actually work', or 'inserting nonsense dates gives an error' or anything of that kind. He means things like:
        - The database doesn't corrupt tables. Ever.
        - If the power fails or the kernel goes away at an arbitrary instant, then when the database starts up again all of the data will be there, with committed transactions entirely present and uncommitted ones entirely gone.

    Secondly, it's not justified to just assume that MySQL will be faster even with it's limits on data integrity. It depends on your workload. Consider differences in locking strategy and query plans, for example. There's a benchmark showing scaling behaviour in one particular set of circumstances here: http://tweakers.net/reviews/674/6 [tweakers.net] ; this shows a fairly striking difference in scaling with load on a specific machine.
  • Re:so... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by gfxguy ( 98788 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @12:57PM (#18872261)
    Gee, thanks. What about us jack-of-all-trade schmoes who only use the basics and aren't running company wide databases? The amount of data I use the database for is actually quite small, relatively speaking. I run (among all my other jobs) our internal webserver, which means I need to write all the code, including the presentation part, and administer the database.

    Sorry, we can't all be gurus, but I still need to back up my tables every so often.
  • Re:Great! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Matt Perry ( 793115 ) <perry@matt54.yahoo@com> on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:07PM (#18872387)

    You can go with a slower speed and higher data integrity by switching from MyISAM to InnoDB tables. The choice is there, so I would use the term "always sacrifice".
    According to the docs MyISAM is the default table format [mysql.com]. So how about "sacrifice by default." Sure, you can change the default to InnoDB but why isn't it set to InnoDB already? I find it strange that you have to enable data integrity features in a RDBMS.
  • by diegocgteleline.es ( 653730 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:15PM (#18872501)
    Also, because it's just cheaper for them if they get it merged in the mainstream mysql tree. Basically, it's stupid not to release it.
  • Re:so... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tempestdata ( 457317 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:20PM (#18872589)
    Well said, not everyone can be the guru of everything. This macho geek attitude of 'If you cant do it in this super efficient, optimal way, you have no business doing it' is very detrimental to the OSS community. I am a software engineer, but I do basic admin stuff too, there are admins in my company who are obviously better than me.. but that doesn't mean that I cant take care of some of the duties too. I dont have to be supremely competent.. just competent enough.
  • Re:so... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Krazy Nemesis ( 795036 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @01:35PM (#18872775)
    Yeah, but the setup time and learning curve is atrocious, and you run the risk of shooting your own foot off.
  • Re:so... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jazzkat ( 901547 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @02:17PM (#18873329)
    BigMan, If you're coming from SQL Server, you'd be better off downloading and using Postgres 8.2.4 for windows, from here [postgresql.org]. PG is BSD licensed, which means you can bundle it with your commercial .NET-based apps for free.

    The management interface for PG is on-par with SQL Server Studio; I use both on a daily basis. It's also "20 minutes to set up and start populating data". As an added plus, Postgres has all of the "standard" syntax and referential data integrity turned on out of the box.

    You use MySQL if: a) you're developing a LAMP app for an inexpensive webhost that only allows MySQL databases, or b) all of your developers cut their teeth on MySQL and therefore productivity will drop if you ask them to use standard compliant syntax, or c) You're using an app (like SugarCRM or WordPress), the developers of which insisted on using funky MySQL-only features (instead of standard portable syntax) and therefore it's too much work to port to a standard syntax.

    In all other cases, you use Postgres or some other commercial database. Postgres scales much better than InnoDB on any combination of a) larger numbers of read-write transactions, b) larger numbers of connections, c) more processors, d) larger datasets (including and beyond 400-500GB).

    Cheers, -J
  • Re:so... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xappax ( 876447 ) on Wednesday April 25, 2007 @02:51PM (#18873867)
    I dont have to be supremely competent.. just competent enough.

    I agree in general, because I'm in the same situation, being "Administrator of Computer Stuff". But come on, folks. Being an expert in mysql is one thing, but understanding how to write a shell script or use a simple command-line utility like mysqldump is pretty basic stuff that even "master of none" types like me are comfortable with.

    There is a lot of reflexive elitism and egotism among techies, but if someone doesn't have a foundation of basic "linux literacy", telling them not to meddle with important systems is often warranted. I think people who consider themselves computer-savvy can sometimes get defensive when their knowledge about a particular topic is shown to be lacking because they feel it's a reflection on their overall "geek cred". So they point out all the other technologies they're competent in as though that somehow mitigates their lack of knowledge in this one. This, too, is a kind of "macho geek attitude", in that people will refuse to admit that they're n00bs and need to spend a lot of time learning before they can use a new technology.

    When I come up against something I don't know how to do well, I spend my energy trying to learn how to do it better, not vehemently asserting why I don't need to.

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