Ahead in the Cloud - The power of Infrastructure as a Service
CTO Amazon.com, Dr. Werner Vogels

Pretty much everyone in the audience uses Amazon!

Announced: Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2.

Hitting one page, might actually go to 250 different services, before the page is generated for you. Shows the use of a tool (Amazon internal), that graphs it.

SaaS: Develop -> Test -> Operate

Hardware costs? Software costs? Maintenance? Load balancing? Scaling? Utilisation? Idle machines? Bandwidth management? Server hosting? Storage management? High availability? All this is the differentiated heavy lifting that Amazon bases their services on.

SaaS comes at a very big cost that you have to address.

70/30 switch: 30% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated value creation; 70% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated heavy lifting.

At Amazon, we …

Memcached by Brian Aker, Alan Kasindorf (dormando). Here are some quick, somewhat sparse notes. Follow the slides, it will help.

Slides: http://download.tangent.org/talks/Memcached%20Study.pdf

Memcached was actually created for LiveJournal. It has evolved a bit over time. Chaos to user based clustering, and then Brad implemented memcached. LiveJournal has about 30GB of cache available between 8-12 machines. The DB reads were down like 10x the moment they started using memcached (its much better now).

Its not only for simple objects (not just a single row)- you can use it for complex queries, and the result can be stored in memcached. Eins.de, Patrick Lenz, is also the freshmeat.net guy. He put memcached on the same machine as the MySQL database server (he has 32-bit machines, and MySQL can only use a certain amount of RAM, so the rest was …

The irony of it all doesn’t escape me at all. I remember sitting in a small meeting room with my former BioWare colleague Jeff Marvin a couple of years or more ago and we were having a heated debate. The BioWare web site framework was something that we had primarily written in house (many years before) and I was vehemently opposed to moving to an off-the-shelf web framework.

Jeff was arguing quite rightly about some of the many good points about Web Frameworks. I was arguing, quite rightly, some of the many bad points of Frameworks. And so, we came to a stalemate, mostly, and that was that.

Fast forward several years and now working at MySQL (now part of Sun Microsystems) I came into a team that had inherited a home-grown …

I got my registration for Google App Engine this morning after being Waitlisted previously.

Between flying for about 15 hrs tomorrow and then the 2008 MySQL Conference & Expo where I’m presenting and running an Exhibitors booth, fat chance I’ll get to look into this much over the next week.

Pity!

I’ve noticed a change of buttons lately on sites where you can bookmark/share the relevant information. So I’ve done a cross sample of A Computer Site - www.dell.com, The MySQL Acquirer - www.sun.com, A News site - www.cnn.com and a technology information site - www.techcrunch.com

What got me to go back and research is I’d never seen a FaceBook icon before, or perhaps I’d never paid enough attention.

At the end most sites now wash out to a site called Add This.

Indeed I have a goal of launching a consolidated site of my online presence at ronaldbradford.com at some time soon, and even now I have found I’ve made some SEO 101 mistakes, just in my testing site, and my temporary placeholder.

As a database expert I see plenty of database 101 mistakes with most clients, so part of why my site is going nowhere is I don’t want to make SEO 101 mistakes, especially as I’m not launching a new site, but a migration of existing content to one site.

I see nobody at O’Reilly has made improvements to the redirection mess of the MySQL Conference website as described by Farhan Mashraqi in Someone please change mysqlconf.com redirection, and so rather then linking to …

Considering the few posts made recently, regarding Telecommuting, I thought I’d put in my $0.02, adjusted for inflation.
See Cal’s Post and this awesome job opportunity.
I want to discuss the various tools and options available to the telecommuter in 2008.

Disclaimer: I don’t want to make this another post on the benefits of Telecommuting, as I strongly believe there is no silver bullet for the problems an individual or a company faces. There are many drawbacks to telecommuting, and the positives don’t always neutralize the drawbacks.

Background: I’ve been telecommuting since 2003, that’s when I decided to quit working for the ‘man’. I chose a laptop to give myself …

Here is some of my thoughts on migrating MySQL to Sql Server. It came out of an email discussion. I’d love to hear your thoughts on migrating to a different database platform, not just MySQL to Sql Server.

I actually thought about writing a white paper or even a course on migrating from MySQL to Sql Server, but never got the time to do it. Sometimes a project doing similar things can serve as a launchpad for this endeavour, but that never came along, at least not yet. I am very interested in database interoperability field though. I’ve done MySQL and Oracle admin in the past and have published some MySQL and Oracle stuff in blogs. I have much better technical skills on Sql Server than any other RDBMS platforms, primarily because I’ve worked on it longer.

Here are some of my thoughts. I think most of it applies equally on migration from Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Postgresql, etc., to Sql Server, or the other way around. It …

Recently we put together a consolidation benchmark to see how an open-source stack performs against the proprietary stack from Microsoft. Solaris, MySQL, and Sun Web Server running on the open-source UltraSPARC T2 processor were pitted against a Microsoft SW stack running on a 4-socket QC Xeon server. This benchmark highlights the continued trend to incorporate MySQL open-source databases and how it works under virtualization (Solaris Zones).

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 (1.4 Ghz UltraSPARC T2 processor) and Solaris Containers managing a consolidation of Open-Source Software components (MySQL Database and Sun Java System Web Server) provided 2.4 times better performance than the HP DL580 system (four Xeon quad-core processors) and a major virtualization software, Microsoft Windows 2003 Server EE, Microsoft SQLserver database and Microsoft IIS webserver.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the MySQL database in Solaris zones is …

Recently we put together a consolidation benchmark to see how an open-source stack performs against the proprietary stack from Microsoft. Solaris, MySQL, and Sun Web Server running on the open-source UltraSPARC T2 processor were pitted against a Microsoft SW stack running on a 4-socket QC Xeon server. This benchmark highlights the continued trend to incorporate MySQL open-source databases and how it works under virtualization (Solaris Zones).

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 (1.4 Ghz UltraSPARC T2 processor) and Solaris Containers managing a consolidation of Open-Source Software components (MySQL Database and Sun Java System Web Server) provided 2.4 times better performance than the HP DL580 system (four Xeon quad-core processors) and a major virtualization software, Microsoft Windows 2003 Server EE, Microsoft SQLserver database and Microsoft IIS webserver.

The Sun SPARC Enterprise T5220 using the MySQL database in Solaris zones is …