The realities of today’s successful web services are creating new demands that many legacy databases were just not designed to handle:

- The need to scale writes, as well as reads, both within and across geographically dispersed data centers;

- The need to scale operational agility to keep pace with database load and application requirements. This means being able to add capacity and performance to the database, and to evolve the schema – all without downtime;

- The need to scale queries by having flexibility in the APIs used to access the database;

- The need to scale the database while maintaining continuous availability for both failures as well as scheduled maintenance events.

Each of the requirements above warrant their own dedicated blog, which I’ll find time to write over the next few weeks.

But to get started, I wanted to discuss how the MySQL Cluster database addresses the first …

Join us for a live webinar and download a new whitepaper where we discuss how to realize new value from data collected during web session management.

Session management has long been a key component of any web infrastructure – enhancing the user browsing experience through improved reliability, reduced latency and tighter security.

Increasingly organizations are looking to unlock more value from session management to further improve user loyalty (i.e. making the web service more “sticky”) and improve monetization of web services.  There are two distinct developments that offer the promise of unlocking more value from session data:
1.    Provide highly personalized browsing experiences by …

On Sunday February 27th, I will be speaking on What's New In MySQLin the Carmel room at 11:30AM as part of the SCaLE (Southern California Linux Expo) near LAX Airport. If you are in the area, this is a great event. And if you are attending, please say 'hi' to me.

This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!

This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.

This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. …

There has been a significant increase in interest in the Memcached, the open source distributed memory object-caching system, in recent months, as a number of vendors look to exploit its popularity in Web 2.0 and social networking environments.

Like Hadoop, which has become the focus of a number of commercial plays, it would appear that the time is right for commercialization of Memcached. But what is it, here did it come from, and what are the chances for vendors to rake in serious cash? Here are the details.

What is it?
Pronounced mem-cash-dee, Memcached was originally created by Danga Interactive (the developer of LiveJournal, which was acquired by Six Apart in 2005) to speed up the performance of dynamic Web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached has become an industry standard for improving the performance of dynamic websites.

The code is available from the …

Should you use memcached? Should you just shard mysql more?
Memcached's popularity is expanding its use into some odd places. It's becoming an authoritative datastore for some large sites, and almost more importantly it's sneaking into the lowly web startup. This is causing some discussion.

Most of whom seem to be missing the point. In this post I attempt to explain my point of view for how memcached should really influence your bouncing baby startups, and even give some pointers to the big guys who might have trouble seeing the forest through the trees.

Using memcached does not scale your website! …

Should you use memcached? Should you just shard mysql more?
Memcached's popularity is expanding its use into some odd places. It's becoming an authoritative datastore for some large sites, and almost more importantly it's sneaking into the lowly web startup. This is causing some discussion.

Most of whom seem to be missing the point. In this post I attempt to explain my point of view for how memcached should really influence your bouncing baby startups, and even give some pointers to the big guys who might have trouble seeing the forest through the trees.

Using memcached does not scale your website! …

• http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/detail/874
• presented by Charles Lee of Hyperic
• Hyperic has the best performance with MySQL out of MySQL, Oracle, and Postgres in their application
• I suddenly remember hyperic was highly recommended above nagios in MySQL Conference Liveblogging: Monitoring Tools (Wednesday 5:15PM)
• performance bottleneck
  • the database
    • CPU
    • memory
  • IO …

Jeff Rothschild of Facebook’s “A Match Made in Heaven? The Social Graph and the Database”

Taking a look at the social graph and what it means for the database.

The social graph:

• At it’s heart it’s about people and their connections.
  
• Learning about people who are in your world.
  
• Can be a powerful tool for accelerating the use of an application.
  

“The social graph has transformed a seemingly simple application such as photos into something tremendously more powerful.” We’re interested about what people are saying about us, and about our friends. Social applications are compelling.

Facebook users blew through the estimate for 6 months of storage in 6 weeks. It is serving 250,000 photos per second at peak time, not including profiles. Facebook serves more photos than even the photo sites out there, and serves more event invitations …

Yesterday’s keynote panel on “Scaling MySQL — Up or Out?”

Directly download the 310MB wmv file (not if you are on the conference wireless please!), or watch it in your browser via streaming — simply click the “play” link on this page.

Keith Murphy managed to take painstaking notes with all the facts and figures. As well, Venu Anuganti presents a chart with the results as well as notes on the more detailed answers. Ronald Bradford has a brief summary of the 20 seconds of wisdom from each panelist.