Dana Nourie's Blog

April 2008 Archives

Sun Writers Cover the 2008 JavaOne Conference

Sun writers have begun covering the 2008 JavaOne Conference. Get information on Java University, CommunityOne, the latest technologies, views on technical sessions and Birds-of-a-Feather (BOF) talks, and special interviews with attendees and evangelists.

2008 JavaOne Conference Blogs

Be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed so you can read all of the entries as they appear. Dana Nourie

An Introduction to BLOB Streaming for MySQL Project

Speaker, Paul McCullagh
Blobstreaming.org

This session explained why BLOB streaming may be relevant to your project, and how you can get started streaming BLOBs.

For ordinary types of data, MySQL sends the buffer from the client to the server. Streaming involves making a connection from the source to the destination continuously, storing and streaming simultaneously. But BLOBs are not ordinary data.

BLOBs were invented by Jim Starkey. A BLOB is backronym for Basic Large Object, or Binary Large Object, and is a collection of binary data stored as a single entity in a database management system. Blobs are typically images, audio, or other multimedia objects, though sometimes binary executable code is stored as a BLOB. Database support for BLOBs is not universal.

The problem of storing BLOBs in a database is multifaceted.  BLOBs create big rows in memory, and sequential scans are not possible. The database can become too big to handle, and then the database won't scale well. In addition, BLOBs slows down replication, and BLOB data must be written to the binary log.

So, why put BLOBs in the database? So that BLOB operations are transactional and have valid references, and so you have the data all in one place, which is good for testing, Small BLOBs are handled better by databases, and it's convenient to handle all your data the same way. Additionally, with BLOBs in a database, your backups are more consistent. Lastly, putting the BLOBs in a database makes replication possible.

To overcome these issues, the MySQL Project streams BLOB data directly in and out of the database.You can store Blobs of any size in the database, and create a scalable back-end that can handle any throughput and storage requirement. The object is to provide an open system that can be used by all engines.

The Scalable BLOB Streaming Project solves the above problems with a BLOB repository, so a collection of BLOBs are stored outisde of database rows, and the references are stored in the table. The advantages of this is that it allows for incremental backup, automatic defragmentation and compastion, and repository blob data that will not be written to the binary log and can be scaled out.

The goal of the Scalable BLOB Streaming Project for MySQL is to provide a scalable, stream-based, infrastructure for the storage and retrieval of pictures, films, MP3 files, and other binary and text objects (BLOBs) to and from the database.

The first step has been taken with the creation of the BLOB Streaming engine for MySQL, a storage engine that allows BLOB data to be uploaded and downloaded directly to and from a MySQL table, using the standard HTTP protocol. Read the rest of this blog

MySQL Conference Keynote & Workbench

MySQL Conference

The MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, CA starts this week, and I am looking forward to the sessions. Today was tutorial day, but my day officially begins Tuesday morning and will go until Thursday.

I started using the MySQL database about nine years ago when I was creating web sites. Most web service providers used MySQL for their customers, and they still do. MySQL was popular then, and it's even more so now. Along with it's popularity, its list of features and robustness has grown over the years.

I was excited when I heard the announcement of the acquisition by Sun Microsystems. Immediately, I downloaded MySQL onto my system, and begin working with MySQL in the NetBeans IDE. It was an easy integration, and I am having a great time developing web apps that use this database.

This week I am looking forward to the many sessions I'll be attending. It was hard to choose sessions for certain times, as so many of them sound really good. I'll blog about as many of those sessions that I can, and share the juicy details with all of you who are unable to attend, or may be at the conference but in a different session.

Tomorrow morning are the keynotes, and then we are off to the technical goodies:

The Lost Art of the Self Join --- I'm looking forward to a refresher on on joins, and getting some nice concrete technical advice.

Best Practices for Database Administrators -- This sounds like it's going to be nice solid information.

Talk = Ruby + MySql.new(bie): An Introduction to Using MySQL with Ruby -- I'm most familiar with using Ruby with NetBeans, so it'll be interested to get the details and skinny on MySQL and Ruby.

If you'd like to see more information on the conference itself, check out their web site. MySQL Conference & Expo

~ Dana Nourie, Staff Writer, Sun Microsystems

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.