Blog entries

1.1.0 Alpha Release Now Available

Walt Weeks — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:31:58 +0100

We are excited to announce the availability of the 1.1.0 Alpha release of InfiniDB Community Edition. This is our initial alpha release for 1.1 and is not recommended for production work.

New functionality we’ve added with 1.1.0 includes:

Improved support for queries with multiple types of joins.
Improved create table performance and a much smaller footprint on disk for the system catalog, newly created tables, and tables that contaRead More...

Speaking at MySQL Conference: The Thinking Person's Guide to Data Warehouse Design

Robin Schumacher — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 03:37:42 +0100

I'll be presenting "The Thinking Person's Guide to Data Warehouse Design" at the upcoming MySQL User conference. While a lot of people think that bad SQL code is the #1 wrecking ball of data warehouses and marts, the fact is that poor database design is the first cause of both downtime and bad performance. In my presentation, I'll do my best to show how up-front worRead More...

MySQL University Recording on MySQL Column Databases Now Available

Robin Schumacher — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 03:13:27 +0100

I was privileged to lead a MySQL University session last week on MySQL-based column databases - what they are, how they work, why you should use them, cases where you shouldn't use them, benchmarks showing their performance, and more. I covered the main MySQL column databases - Infobright, Kickfire, and InfiniDB - and discussed the various features, benRead More...

First InfiniDB Community Maintenance Release (1.0.3) Now Available!

Walt Weeks — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 13:07:14 +0100

As promised, we are pleased to announce the availability of the 1.0.3 release of InfiniDB Community Edition. This is the first of our monthly maintenance releases that are scheduled throughout the spring.

This release includes a number of bug fixes that you can see at http://bugs.launchpad.net/infinidb. We have also included support for prepared statements with bind variables and a performance improvement for queries that select many columns with neRead More...

Vote and Help us Help You Better

Robin Schumacher — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 03:11:25 +0100

Right now, we support InfiniDB on a couple of different Linux flavors. As we march toward a couple of more releases this year, we want to expand our operating system support. We could really use your input on which OS's we should support next. Please go to http://www.infinidb.org/index.php. On the lower left corner you'll see our OS poll - please vote and let us know which OS you use for your production databases. Thanks!

How to use InfiniDB with OpenOffice

Robin Schumacher — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:59:15 +0100

Last week, I pointed you to a paper I recently wrote on how to use InfiniDB with Microsoft Excel. Of course, I realize there are plenty of people who don’t use Microsoft office tools and use OpenOffice instead, so I’ve just posted another paper on how to use InfiniDB with OpenOffice Calc (OO’s complement of Excel) and Base (OO’s twin of MS Access). FWIW, I found OpenOffice easier and more straightforward to use with InfiniDB and other RDBMS's than Microsoft (and I'm prRead More...

InfiniDB TnT (Tips ‘n Tricks) 1 – data type declarations

Jim Tommaney — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 11:47:40 +0100

Columnar DBMS tuning may require some new approaches versus traditional row-based tuning; gone are full/partitioned table scans, index lookups, and nested-loop join operations, instead replaced by full/partitioned column scans, access by RowID, and hash join operations. This series of articles is intended to measure potential benefits of different approaches to jump-start your expertise with this new paradigm. Today’s topic is dRead More...

A Note on Using InfiniDB and Microsoft Excel

Robin Schumacher — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 04:35:56 +0100

A recent survey found that the most used BI tool isn’t what you might think (e.g. Business Objects, Pentaho, Cognos, Jaspersoft, etc.) – it’s Microsoft Excel. And I suppose that’s not so surprising given spreadsheets are the main communication medium for financial and general business analysis.

If you use Excel in this manner, you should know that you can use Excel’s data import capabilities to directly query (via the MySQL ODBC driver) and pull data from Read More...

Interesting (and Good) News for MySQL Data Warehouse Users

Robin Schumacher — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 04:46:48 +0100

One aspect of my positions with Calpont, MySQL, and other companies I’ve worked for has been to interact with the various analysts who cover the database scene. It’s definitely an interesting part of the job, especially when you get to query some of the experts who have been around a long time and are good at making solid technology calls on where things are headed.

IDC is one such group of experts and they recently released an interesting set of predictions on where databaRead More...

Roadmap and Schedule for Next Release of InfiniDB

Robin Schumacher — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 02:52:45 +0100

We’ve had a good and successful launch of InfiniDB 1.0 (Feb 1), and while we’re pleased with that accomplishment, we’ve now turned our attention to the next release of InfiniDB, which will be 1.1. We’ve got some nice new features, capabilities, and changes planned for you that aren’t very far away. In addition, we plan on backporting some of these changes to a 1.0 patch release so current users can benefit from them now.

You can find the new, updated roadmRead More...

MySQL Parallel Query Processing of 60 Billion rows via InfiniDB

Jim Tommaney — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 09:23:43 +0100

Let’s extend the analysis of MySQL parallel query processing with InfiniDB against 60 Billion rows:

The Star Schema Benchmark scale factor for 10k generates 60 billion rows fact rows, with the largest dimension tables at 300 million and 100 million. Previous results were shown at a scale factor of 1000, generating 6 billion facts and 30 millRead More...

Attention Open Source BI Guru's - We Need Your Help!

Robin Schumacher — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 03:30:45 +0100

We're getting quite a few people now using InfiniDB and the top open source BI tools. As we're not experts in these tools ourselves, we are looking for help to do product viability testing to determine what issues (if any) we need to correct in InfiniDB to properly work with these tools. If you know one of the tools below well and are interested in tackling this type of project, we'll certainly compensate you for the time you spend. Contact me at rschumacher AT calpont DOT com.

Pentaho
JRead More...

Calpont/InfiniDB is Hiring!

Robin Schumacher — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:18:53 +0100

Are you interested in working with an outstanding development team that is creating some of the finest database technology that’s out in the analytic/data warehouse marketplace? If so, let us know because we’re hiring! We’re continuing to grow our team and are in need of the following:

Senior Developer

This position will work directly with our current engineering team in developing our database server. To be considered, you’ll need the following:

StrRead More...

InfiniDB load 60 Billion SSB rows trended

Jim Tommaney — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 10:35:23 +0100

I wanted to offer another InfiniDB load rate metric using the SSB lineorder fact table. In this case we are using a scale factor of 10,000 which translates to 60 Billion rows. As a point of reference, the recent Percona benchmark was at a scale factor of 1000 (6 billion rows) http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2010/01/07/star-schema-bechmark-infobright-infinidb-and-luciddb/ .
The load rate per hour varied only slightly across the entire run, averaging about 4Read More...

More on InfiniDB Release Intentions and Practice

Robin Schumacher — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:15:26 +0100

We received some nice feedback on our care and feeding of InfiniDB blog entry, and we appreciate all of you who were kind enough to respond. We did fail, however, to communicate a few other intentions we have regarding how we plan to release and label the InfiniDB software so here’s some more thoughts from us on this important matter:

For new releases, we plan to follow the traditional alpha, beta, RC framework. Alpha means an upcoming release is not yet feature complete and moreRead More...

Care and Feeding of InfiniDB

Walt Weeks — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 19:42:46 +0100

I wanted to quickly let you know our plan for maintaining both the Community Edition of InfiniDB as well as our Enterprise Edition. Our current intentions are the following:

The InfiniDB Community Edition (free and open source) will be the first to receive bug fixes and maintenance releases. We make the commitment to issue an updated maintenance version once per calendar month. These updates will be thoroughly tested by our own internal QA department to ensure they arRead More...

InfiniDB 1.0 is Now Available!

Robin Schumacher — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:39:21 +0100

I’m very pleased to announce that the FINAL 1.0 version of the InfiniDB Community Edition database is now available for use. I’d like to thank all of you who helped get us through the alpha, beta, and RC cycles to the 1.0 release of InfiniDB.

You can now download the 1.0 InfiniDB Community Edition binaries and source code and start creating fast running data warehouses, marts, or any other read-inteRead More...

Oracle Exadata’s Storage Indexes and InfiniDB

Robin Schumacher — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 08:32:27 +0100

I was re-reading through Oracle’s tech white paper on Exadata v2, and I must have missed the first time a new feature they brought out in the latest version – storage indexes:

“Storage Indexes are a very powerful capability provided in Exadata storage that helps avoid I/O operations. The Exadata Storage Server Software creates and maintains a Storage Index in Exadata memory. The Storage Index keeps track of minimum and maximum values of columns for tables stored on tRead More...

1.0.1 RC2 release available

Walt Weeks — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:54:59 +0100

We are pleased to announce the availability of 1.0.1 Release Candidate 2 of InfiniDB Community Edition. This is our second release candidate and is not recommended for production work.

This is our last release candidate as we will be releasing 1.0.2 Final in early February. This release includes a number of bug fixes that you can see at http://bugs.launchpad.net/infinidb. You can download the latest InfiniDB binaries, source code, and updated documeRead More...

1.0.0 RC1 release available

Walt Weeks — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 10:39:06 +0100

We are pleased and excited to announce the availability of 1.0.0 Release Candidate 1 of InfiniDB Community Edition. This is our initial release candidate and is not recommended for production work.

This release includes a number of bug fixes that you can see at http://bugs.launchpad.net/infinidb. We will continue with weekly releases this month marching towards our GA release in early February. You can download the latest InfiniDB binaries, source code, aRead More...