Feed: MemSQL Blog.
Author: Jacky Liang.
MemSQL Forums are available anytime you have a question about MemSQL, want to know more about MemSQL, or are willing and able to help others. And now the MemSQL Forums, coming up on their one-year anniversary, have their first Community Star: Ziv Meidav, a big data architect.
The community of MemSQL users, developers, and employees gather at the MemSQL Forums to ask questions, offer support, and discuss strategies for leveraging MemSQL. Got a nasty error message? Post it on a Forum. Want to suggest a feature? Same thing.
What the MemSQL Forums Do
The MemSQL Forums are organized into topics. Topics include:
- Announcements. All the latest from MemSQL and partners.
- Feature Requests. What you want to see in MemSQL going forward.
- Cluster Operations. Managing your MemSQL clusters.
- Documentation Feedback. Suggest improvements to MemSQL’s well-regarded documentation.
- MemSQL Studio. Get your questions answered about MemSQL’s cluster monitoring and debugging tool.
- MemSQL Management Tools. Ask about tools in the MemSQL Toolbox package and MemSQL Ops.
- Third-Party Integrations. Using MemSQL with third-party tools and frameworks that work with MemSQL, such as Kafka and Spark.
- MemSQL Development. If you’re developing against MemSQL, put your questions and comments here.
- Uncategorized. A catchall category.
- Site Feedback. Tell us how to improve the Forums.
The great thing about the Forums is the mix of people aboard. MemSQL engineers, experienced MemSQL users from organizations large and small, new users, and students all come on, asking and answering questions, from the simplest to the most arcane. Everyone pitches in to help.
The Forums are particularly valuable to users of MemSQL who don’t have an Enterprise license, but instead run MemSQL for free. This works on-premises as well as in the cloud, up to certain limitations as to nodes and resources used. For such users, the Forums are the only source of support. And users of MemSQL’s free level are regular contributors to the Forums.
One of the things that makes it fun to create and use MemSQL is that it is, fairly literally, a computer science project. Building and using “the next great database,” which is our goal, touches on all sorts of problems. They range from the momentary and entirely practical – “my cluster just crashed” – to the architectural, mathematical, and sometimes almost philosophical. It all gets hashed out on the Forums.
Ziv to the Rescue
Like many MemSQL users and fans, Ziv asks penetrating questions on the MemSQL Forums. Ziv’s Forums activity shows comments on columnstore performance for JSON data, a question on MemSQL Studio, and a group of comments on a performance issue – which turns out to be a fairly deep topic.
It all started with a SELECT statement that had varying execution speeds, ranging from 40ms to 500ms, when run on the MemSQL 7.0 beta. Ziv posted extensive details, and MemSQL’s Haoran Xu chimed in with an initial response.
This started a long exchange, totaling 17 pages over 5 days. It ended with Haoran recognizing a bug in the beta, described in detail in his final message in the exchange. MemSQL found and fixed the cause of the bug immediately, and the new and improved code will appear in MemSQL 7.0 soon.
As you see here, the Forums, with questions like Ziv’s, help MemSQL people as well as customers. Through the Forums, we learn about bugs, documentation issues, feature requests, and more. Software work can be very individual; through the Forums, MemSQL people worldwide and customers can work together to make MemSQL better.
Conclusion
The MemSQL Forums are a great resource, community, and unofficial school for MemSQL users and employees to teach and learn from each other, while solving problems and minimizing downtime. They’re available to anyone who has a free account from the MemSQL Customer Portal or signs up with a valid email. And if you participate in the forums, perhaps you’ll get chosen next month as our next Community Star.
There is, of course, an easy way to get started with MemSQL. Download MemSQL for free and start using the MemSQL Forums today!