MySQL

TweetMeme Migrates to Sun's MySQL Enterprise Database Subscription Service

2 July 2009 — Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced that TweetMeme, the innovative online application that tracks the popularity of links sent via Twitter, has subscribed to Sun's MySQL Enterprise database offering in order to keep up with the microblogging service's explosive growth.

 

Sun Microsystems, Inc. announced that Tweet Menu, the innovative online application that tracks the popularity of links sent via Twitter, has subscribed to Sun's MySQL Enterprise database offering in order to keep up with the microblogging service's explosive growth.

Created in 2008 by pioneering Web 2.0 startup Fav.or.it, TweetMeme gives the rapidly expanding Twitter community a means of easily seeing and sorting the most popular links on Twitter. TweetMeme also provides a realtime search facility of fully expanded, qualified and indexed links so that users can get answers to queries about very recent events or news.

With Twitter's user-base growing at approximately 82% month-over-month for the first half of 2009, TweetMeme has had to manage incredible scalability demands being placed upon its database infrastructure. As a member of the Sun Startup Essentials programme, TweetMeme has cost-effectively upgraded from Sun’s MySQL Community Edition to MySQL Enterprise deployed on Sun Fire x86 Servers. With this new “Scale- Out” deployment, TweetMeme is now analysing, categorizing and indexing 50,000+ links per hour as well as serving over 600 Million retweet buttons per month. TweetMeme is confident that it also now has the right infrastructure to accommodate significant future growth.

“TweetMeme has seen incredible growth in 2009 as the number of Twitter users and the volume of traffic they create has dramatically increased.” said Nick Halstead, founder of Fav.or.it, the company behind TweetMeme. “With the combination of Sun Startup Essentials and MySQL Enterprise, we are able to scale our business whilst saving significant time and money.”

MySQL Enterprise includes Sun's expert technical support for the database and memcached as well as advanced monitoring tools, which enable TweetMeme to optimise application performance whilst maximising application uptime.

“Through the Sun Startup Essentials programme, Sun is perfectly placed to deliver huge value to TweetMeme with MySQL Enterprise software and Sun Fire x86 servers,” said Richard Mason, Vice President, Sun Software Europe. “We are delighted that yet another innovative online business has chosen MySQL Enterprise as the cornerstone of their infrastructure.”

Sun Microsystems  announced the results of a regional survey that shows 44 percent of all large and medium-sized companies in the Nordic and Benelux countries are using open source software (OSS). The survey was conducted by the international market research company TNS Gallup, on behalf of Sun.

According to the TNS Gallup survey, 46 percent of all Nordic organizations use OSS today, compared to 41 percent in the Benelux region. Finland is on top of the list of OSS usage with 54 percent. The survey also shows that deployment of open source should increase within the next two years – with one-third of the CIOs using open source today say they plan to increase their OSS within two years. 23 percent of CIOs in the Nordic countries who have not yet deployed open source software state that they plan to do so within two years, in comparison to 25 percent in the Benelux countries. Large companies use open source to a greater extent than medium-sized companies.

Additionally, more than half of the companies in the Nordic and Benelux regions use open source in both critical and non-critical applications. Of the organizations that use open source today, 49 percent of the organizations in the Nordic region use Sun’s MySQL database. This places the Nordic region ahead of the Benelux countries, where 43 percent of the companies have adopted MySQL.

"We believe that the increased demand for open source in general and MySQL in particular is driven largely by the global economic downturn," says Magnus Stenberg, MySQL Sales Manager for Nordic's & Benelux region at Sun Microsystems. "This survey shows that CIOs highly prioritize cost savings, reliability and ease of use -- a major reason why 46 percent of the companies in the Nordic and Benelux countries use MySQL for database management."

The countries included in the survey are Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. The results are based on interviews with 310 CIO’s and IT-managers (50 in each country, 10 in the Luxembourg). The 500 largest companies within the private and public sectors were selected in each country, except for Luxembourg where the base of large and medium companies was low. Consequently, the 70 largest companies in Luxembourg were selected and 10 interviews were conducted.

Research results in brief:

• 44 percent of organizations in the Nordic and Benelux regions use open source software in their IT infrastructure. The country with the highest usage of OSS is Finland, with 54 percent.
• 46 percent of Nordic organizations use OSS compared to 41 percent in Benelux.
• One third of the CIOs using open source today plan to increase theirOSS usage within two years. 23 percent of the CIOs in the Nordics who have not deployed open source today state that they plan to do so within two years, in comparison with 25 percent in the Benelux countries.
• 55 percent are using OSS for both critical and non-critical projects.
• The use of MySQL is higher among larger companies with more than 2,000 employees.

The first beta of Version 8.4 of the world's most advanced open source database, PostgreSQL, was just released by the PostgreSQL Global Development Group. After fourteen months of development, 8.4 is ready for testing by PostgreSQL users all over the world in order to make it our best release ever.

Version 8.4 includes hundreds of patches and dozens of new features. Among them:

• Windowing Functions
• Common Table Expressions & Recursive Joins
• Default & Variadic parameters for functions
• Parallel Restore
• Column Permissions
• Per-database locale settings
• Improved hash indexes
• Improved join performance for EXISTS and NOT EXISTS queries
• Easier-to-use Warm Standby
• Free Space Map auto-tuning
• Visibility Map (reduces vacuum overhead)
• Version-aware psql (backslash commands)
• Support SSL certs for user authentication
• Per-function runtime statistics
• Easy editing of functions in psql
• New contrib modules: pg_stat_statements, auto_explain, citext, btree_gin

Please download and install version 8.4 and test out these new features as soon as you can! You can especially help the PostgreSQL developers by trying new features in combination, and by doing a test port of your production applications to version 8.4. Performance comparisons with 8.3 are also very helpful. Tell us what you find!

• Beta Information Page
• Release Notes
• Source Code
• Windows Installers and Binaries: see the Beta Information Page

Translation teams are at this time asked to begin completing the message translations for the 8.4 release. The PostgreSQL project always needs more translators! If you are bilingual please consider joining a translation team to help translate PostgreSQL (mailing list).

The usual duration of the beta testing period for a new version of PostgreSQL is 6 weeks. However, that time can vary significantly depending on what bugs our testing discovers. The PostgreSQL project does not release until all significant known bugs are fixed.