At the MySQL Conference the closing keynote was on Yahoo! Pipes, by Pasha Sadri, a Principal Software Engineer, Advanced Development Division, Yahoo!. I wanted to try it, but I was on Firefox 1.5 on Fedora Core 6 and there was no way I was going to build a pipe during the talk.

Fast forward a week or so later, and a boring Friday night ensued. What better thing to do, than to play with Pipes. In under fifteen minutes, I created the Edwin Pipe. What is it? Its a pipe that is all things MySQL - comprehensive source of news, whats cool, and so forth. There are some limitations - regular expression support is supposedly like Perl’s, but is not quite complete. The Unique operator is pretty cool, filtering is good (can be improved with better regex support), and maybe some sort of fuzzyness in …

A Storage Engine for Amazon S3, Mark Atwood

It looks mighty interesting, as transfers to Amazon S3 are free. I think it’ll work well in America and places where bandwidth rocks, but I don’t see this working too well in Australia. Oh how I wish the Internets will improve.

Mark has got all his stuff online at A MySQL Storage Engine for AWS S3. He was also kind enough to upload most of the notes, which made my reporting easier, and don’t forget to view the presentation.

Traditional storage engines use the local disk.

Networked engines: Federated, ODBC, HTTP, MemCacheD and S3 storage engine.

What is S3?
…

I spoke to Matt and Barry today, and it was great to see them at the DotOrg Pavilion at the MySQL Expo, since the last time we caught up was at WordCamp 2006. Since WordCamp, Wordpress.com is now spanning something like 900,000+ registered users! That number used to be over 300,000+, just a few months ago, so it looks like they’re really popular.

While Barry entertained a visitor, Matt and I got to talking about growing companies. He’s really happy with the size of Automattic, and is going to try for as long as possible to keep the company size, under fifty. He’s also found it interesting that some people are running WordPress 1.2 (ick! security holes galore), and while I worried that the database itself might not be migrate-able, he mentions that going …

Presented by Blaine Cook, a developer from Odeo, now probably CTO of Twitter (Obvious Corp spawed, I think). There’s a video and slides (yes, you need evil Flash so I haven’t viewed it myself). Then there are my notes… possibly with some thoughts attached to them. No, they’re not organized, I’m too busy and tired…

Rails scales, but not out of the box. This will cause Twitter to stop working very quickly.

600 requests/second, 180 rails instances (mongrel), 1 DB server (MySQL) + 1 slave (read only slave, for statistics purposes), 30-odd processes for misc. jobs, 8 Sun X4100s.

Uncached requests in less than 200ms in most of the time.

steps:
1. realize …

Its interesting to note some happenings in the MySQL world of late, that might be of interest to people in the database world, and those following open source software development and business models.

40% of developers say they use MySQL, according to the Evans Data Group. This is not including pilot projects, but real production use in corporate environments. A lot of MySQL’s popularity is generally attributed to the LAMP stack, though I see a change. Look at all the Ruby on Rails projects out there. They most definitely run on a MySQL backend. A good example are the products from 37signals, makers of the rather new, and cool tool, Highrise - they’re Ruby on Rails, and MySQL powered.

Is this 40% statistic …

Sorry for the short outage, due to a small coding glitch the script that updates the planet feeds got stuck and it took us a bit to find the problem... But thanks to Jay we now spotted the bug and it was fixed quickly!

The folks at del.icio.us must have made it harder to get on to the del.icio.us/popular page over the past few months.

When I first was listed on there you simply needed 10 bookmarks within the past 24 hours. I was looking at the article I published yesterday MySQL Optimization Hints and noticed that it has 28 bookmarks over the past 24 hours, and has not yet been listed on the popular page.

It appears that they still require only 10 recent bookmarks, but they have shrunk the window for what they call recent. It must be down to 10 bookmarks within 12 or 6 hours. Does anyone know the specifics?

There have been some interesting MySQL happenings lately. First we had the Enterprise/Community split. I’ll talk more about that in terms of distributions shipping it, as I’ll be liaising with them.

But today, I’m going to talk about Digg. I listen to Diggnation, a surprisingly funny podcast to keep track of the weekly Web happenings. But I’ve never actually paid the site a visit. Until today.

Its the epitome of Web 2.0. User driven content. Its not like Slashdot. I’ve seen many people compare to it, but it isn’t. Slashdot is for tech-content. Digg is for anything. Slashdot has a bunch of editors. Digg is user-edited.

And for users, if your stories get promoted to the front-page, you get ratings. The more ratings, the merrier, right? It probably also increases the trust model, as higher ratings usually mean that you’ve got good news sense. And we all know …

Some interesting things happened today…

We released a new MySQL server a few days ago, and that consequently means we’ve got a new Connector/PHP available for download. Go get ext/mysqli and ext/mysql against 5.0.26 while its hot.

And while we do support ext/mysql, we’d rather you (and your applications) used ext/mysqli. After all, wouldn’t you like to be able to use the new, much touted features that came post MySQL 4.1, like Views, Stored Procedures, Triggers, Precision Math, and so on?

So to make it a complete no brainer, we released a MySQLi Converter Tool. Its also available via subversion. The tool is branched off Revision 11 (in …

I’ve had an introductory article to MySQL Cluster 5.1 Disk Data published in the September 2006 issue of International PHP Magazine.

If you’re using Cluster or you’re interested in doing so, and you’ve not yet tried out MySQL 5.1, you’ll find that disk data storage makes MySQL Cluster more flexible, scalable, and cheaper to run than MySQL 4.1 and 5.0 Cluster. In the article, I’ve outlined some reasons why this is so. The article covers the basics of creating disk-based Cluster tables, and discusses some Disk Data do’s and dont’s. There’s also some info about some other improvements to MySQL Cluster that are being made in 5.1, as well as some diagrams and sample PHP5 code for accessing a MySQL Cluster. Just in case you’re not that familiar with setting up a MySQL …