Joanne Garlow one of the Senior developers here at NPR , will be giving a talk this Tuesday at the 2010 O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo in Santa Clara, CA.  The talk is entitled ‘Migration from Oracle to Mysql : An NPR Case Study’ and will focus on some of the ‘lessons learned’ during our recent Oracle to Mysql migration, it will also cover some of the tools that we found useful during the migration as well as some of the issues we encountered concerning character encoding and concurrency.

If you are thinking about converting your backend databases from Oracle to Mysql and you are attending this conference, you should attend this talk, as I am sure it will be very informative and quite helpful to you going forward.

We recently deployed an Oracle virtual machine for development and testing purposes. Imports and database migration scripts were taking several hours on existing VM’s, so we hoped this new machine with more RAM (32 GB) and more CPU horsepower (quad core Intel Xeon’s) would allow for those operations to move along much more quickly.

We soon got reports from users that this server was in fact much slower then the existing less powerful Oracle VM’s. After doing some poking around (with vztop) we discovered that there were no issues with cpu or memory resources, however the server was performing terribly when it came to I/O.

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