Crunching XML files with MariaDB

In January I wrote my first post about node.js and MariaDB . In February I continued with a second post about using jQuery and some GIS calculations. Now it is time for the third and this time the main focus is not so much on GIS functionality, but instead on the capabilities MariaDB has for handling piles of unstructured data. In this case I’ll be focusing on crunching a pile of XML files without importing the XML data itself.

MariaDB 10.0, which had its GA launch in early April, includes the Connect engine. …

Significant performance boost with new MariaDB page compression on FusionIO

The MariaDB project is pleased to announce a special preview release of MariaDB 10.0.9 with significant performance gains on FusionIO devices. This is is a beta-quality preview release.

Download MariaDB 10.0.9-FusionIO preview

Background

The latest work between MariaDB and FusionIO has focused on dramatically improving performance of MariaDB on the high-end SSD drives produced by Fusion-IO and at the same time delivering much better endurance for the drives themselves. Furthermore, FusionIO flash memory solutions increase transactional database performance. MariaDB includes specialized improvements for FusionIO devices, leveraging a feature of the NVMFS filesystem on these popular, high performance solid state disks. …

MariaDB and WebScaleSQL

On Thursday MySQL technology saw a huge boost. It’s hard for anyone now to argue that MySQL isn’t in the game of extreme scalability and performance, which some NoSQL vendors have been using as a tagline for the last years. To see four of the largest MySQL and MariaDB users come together to bootstrap a branch of MySQL for extreme scaling needs is simply fantastic. The improvements done inside these companies will now be available to the rest of the community. In all fairness Facebook and Twitter, in particular, have been making their improvements publicly available also before. Google has also made some improvements available publicly over the years and have lately been active in the MariaDB project with code reviews, bug fixes and other patches. …

jQuery and GIS distance in MariaDB

I’ve continued building on my MariaDB GIS and node.js example application that I wrote about two weeks back, https://blog.mariadb.org/node-js-mariadb-and-gis/. The application shows how to load GPX information into MariaDB, using some MariaDB GIS functionality, and making use of the node.js platform together with MariaDB’s non-blocking client.

With the GPX data converted into GIS points in the MariaDB database, I wanted to further expand a little on both the GIS aspect and also look at how some additional data could be shown in the application by using jQuery’s Ajax calls to update a piece of the web based application UI.

MariaDB upgrades to PCRE-8.34

Today we upgraded the PCRE library bundled with MariaDB-10.0 to PCRE-8.34. This PCRE release includes some improvements, fixes for better stability and performance, and gives more compatibility with the Perl regular expressions.

I’d like to give details on the PCRE changes that especially affected MariaDB.

PCRE now includes support for [[:<:]] and [[:>:]]  as used in the BSD POSIX library (written by Henry Spencer) to mean “start of word” and “end of word“, respectively. This is a good news for those project (like MariaDB) migrating from the Henry Spencer’s library to PCRE, as this non-standard syntax seemed to be used quite widely. …

Node.js, MariaDB and GIS

The availability of the node.js binding for MariaDB’s non-blocking client library together with the GIS capabilities of MariaDB inspired me to make an example of using node.js and MariaDB to import so-called GPX tracks to a MariaDB database and then show them on a map. GPX tracks are what are stored by many GPS devices including running watches and smartphones.

My project makes use of MariaDB’s non-blocking client library together with the node.js platform and on top of that uses the GIS functionality found in MariaDB 5.5 and 10.0.

To start with let’s go through the software and components I’m using:

  • Node.js – The popular Node.js platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime.

Dynamic replication filters — our wheel will be square!

This is both hilarious and sad. The new MySQL 5.7 milestone release presents a new feature — replication filters are now dynamic. This is a great and long awaited feature, no doubt about it.

In short, for years MySQL slaves could filter the incoming stream of replication events based on the database or table name these events were applicable to. These filters were configured using the my.cnf file (or command-line), in particular with the following variables:
replicate_do_db
replicate_ignore_db
replicate_do_table
replicate_ignore_table
replicate_wild_do_table
replicate_wild_ignore_table
Naturally, users wanted to be able to change the values of these options without having to restart the server. …

Bzr and launchpad tricks: firefox plugin

If you work with bazaar, you have seen its URIs. You can find the complete list is in the bzr help urlspec. Although I commonly use only a subset of that, like bzr+ssh://bazaar.launchpad.net/~maria-captains/maria/5.2-serg/ and http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%2Bbranch/mysql-server/5.5/.

In addition I often use Launchpad aliases, such as lp:~maria-captains/maria/5.3-serg/, lp:maria/5.3, and lp:869001.

And finally, there are common abbreviations that we have used in MySQL, and others that we use in MariaDB, for example bug#12345 and wl#90.

What’s annoying, I need to remember that wl#90 corresponds to http://askmonty.org/worklog/?tid=90 and type the latter in the location bar of the browser, when I want to look this task up. …