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titan
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The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 12:14 am

Over at O'Reilly...
Dustin Puryear wrote:
Well, this is nifty. A start-up named Kickfire has released a MySQL appliance. There is nothing “nifty” about a network appliance of course; that is, unless the appliance has specialized hardware and software to outperform a similarly configured in-house configured server.

And that is the point behind Kickfire.

They have designed a specialized processor for SQL servers and integrated this with MySQL using customized code. Apparently, the box screams.

I first read about this on Jason Perlow’s blog, and he goes into greater detail, including notes about how this may set a trend for appliance based SQL servers running PostgreSQL, Oracle, and even Microsoft SQL Server. MS-SQL on an appliance? Now that would really be nifty.

Transaction Processing Performance Council
Kickfire

Looks pretty sweet.
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mortifiedPenguin
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 3:39 am

With such a thing, is the loss of general processing capability an issue? I know very little about databases but I do know that specialized hardware does things outside of its specialization fairly poorly (i.e. telling a GPU to nonparallelizable tasks that are better suited for the CPU).
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blitzy
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 4:17 am

thats odd, if they can get better performance out of dedicated hardware it begs the question of why hasn't it happened sooner.. not like its a new market
 
titan
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 7:31 am

mortifiedPenguin wrote:
With such a thing, is the loss of general processing capability an issue?

Probably not. Anyone who buys this thing is likely buying it because it's a better value than general processing. Companies that are sufficiently large will build servers to run just one database. Third party data warehouses would probably like that appliance too because that's all they need the thing to run.

blitzy wrote:
thats odd, if they can get better performance out of dedicated hardware it begs the question of why hasn't it happened sooner.. not like its a new market

Dedicated hardware has always had better performance than general hardware when it comes to a specific task. I'm guessing it didn't happen sooner because SQL is a little more difficult to process.
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steelcity_ballin
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 7:42 am

Of what database work I've done, none of it being of an enterprise level, I'd imagine that this would be useful for very large databases and the applications they interface with to dedicate processing and memory resources to. So your web server is only serving pages and content and the database itself has a dedicated work horse behind it. Am I understanding it properly?
 
titan
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 8:46 am

pete_roth wrote:
Am I understanding it properly?

That seems to be the idea. Although I think it's more for data warehouses than Web sites, it shouldn't be a big deal. NewEgg.com might become a little quicker if they used this.
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emorgoch
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 3:12 pm

blitzy wrote:
thats odd, if they can get better performance out of dedicated hardware it begs the question of why hasn't it happened sooner.. not like its a new market


Simply put: The separation between hardware vendors and software developers.
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Thu May 01, 2008 3:16 pm

titan wrote:
NewEgg.com might become a little quicker if they used this.

Sorry, but NewEgg is based in .NET and uses MS SQL. That said, what it already does is quite impressive for a .NET-based storefront. They seem to have done a phenomenal job of getting it to scale.
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Flying Fox
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Fri May 02, 2008 7:56 am

Is this thing going to be cheaper than a regular box?
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titan
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Re: The MySQL Appliance

Fri May 02, 2008 11:11 am

Flying Fox wrote:
Is this thing going to be cheaper than a regular box?

That's what I'm guessing. I haven't emailed them for a quote or anything because I don't need something like that. (My PII 233MHz is quite capable for the moment.)
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