The term hockey stick is used to describe the effect of an app that suddenly goes viral. Take a look at the graph to the left. There is modest growth and suddenly, the app goes viral and takes off. It looks like a hockey stick, ala the term.

This article is briefly going to touch on the points of how to handle the sudden growth at the lowest cost possible with a site that I helped build: schoolFeed.com-a social network that reconnects classmates for Free.

The main features of schoolfeed.com is reconnecting classmates, ensuring that each classmate is well connected, a feed to keep classmates in touch with one another …

Recently at Surge 2011, the annual  conference on scalability  and performance, Google's CIO Ben Fried gave an illuminating keynote address. His main insight was that generalists are the people that will lead engineering teams in successfully scaling the web.

In a world where the badge of Specialist or Expert is prized, this was refreshing perspective from an industry bigwig. As tech professionals, or any professional for that matter, we don't welcome the label of generalist. The word suggests a jack-of-all-trades and master of none. But the generalist is no less an expert than the specialist. Generalists can get their hands greasy with the tools to fix bugs in the machine but they are especially good at mobilizing the …

Monitoring systems are a great thing, and we rely heavily on Nagios here at PalominoDB.  We also rely heavily on xtrabackup for (mostly) non-locking, "warm" backups of MySQL.  In order to get a consistent backup with a proper binlog position on a slave, xtrabackup stops replication for a short period of time.  If the monitoring system catches this, the pager will go off, and usually in the middle of the night.

Nagios can have specific windows when it is on or off for a particular host or service, but you have to remember that when you change the time the backup runs.  I prefer to call a script from cron, just before I call the backup script, so that I can easily see that they are related.

Note that this script works even if you have Nagios password protected with .htaccess, …

MySQL/Galera Release 1.0 has slipped from our hands, we could not hold back it anymore. The pressure was just too immense from the community, our partners, and our new sales guy (specials thanks to Sakari for kicking some engineer ass).

So, the infection is underway, and there will be no return to the steam-age with async replication. Galera is replication redefined - and this is permanent. Biggest news in this release is that we now support both MySQL 5.1 and 5.5 series. Other nice features (since 0.8.1 level) include:

• replication over SSL
• garbd - the lightweight arbitator
• causal read support
• persistent write set buffering

Not all that can be expressed with one sentence. but believe, me you are dying to to get it, because you cannot live without it.

So, there it is: …

Microsoft: “more than half your Android devices are belong to us”. And more

# Microsoft claimed that more than half of the world’s ODM industry for Android and Chrome devices is now under license to Microsoft’s patent portfolio following its agreement with Compal Electronics.

# Hadapt expanded its board of directors and confirmed its $9.5m series A funding round.

# Appcelerator entered into an agreement …

Many database management tasks become difficult as you move from millions of rows and gigabytes of data to billions of rows and terabytes of data. Such tasks include ingesting data while maintaining indexes; changing schemas without downtime; and supporting connections, replication, and backup. For some scaling problems (connections and replication), MySQL® is better than most of the competition. For others, such as indexing, schema changes, and backup, MySQL has typically been harder to use. Fortunately, the tasks MySQL does well are in its core, whereas the tasks that are more difficult can be solved with storage engine plug-ins.

I recently gave a talk at Oracle Open World 11, a copy of which can be found here. This presentation discusses how MySQL’s storage engines have recently made dramatic progress in large database manageability.

A list of …

The thread pool plugin has a number of configuration parameters that will affect
its performance. These are documented in the MySQL manual here.

To configure the thread pool for optimal operation the most important parameter is
the --thread_pool_size. This parameter specifies the number of thread groups that
the thread pool will create.

The default value of thread_pool_size=16 is very often a good starting point. We have
seen that for InnoDB Read Workloads it is sometimes possible to achieve even better
results when it is set to around 30-40. For write intensive InnoDB workloads the
optimum can be in the range 12-30. MyISAM workloads usually have an optimum a bit
lower in the range of 6-8. The default value of 16 will work well also for most
MyISAM workloads.
…

Even if you didn’t make it to Percona Live London, you can get the chance to hang out with us.
We’re giving a reception at the Revolution Bar America Square just a few meters walk from the Tower Hill Underground between 17:30 and 19:30 today (Tuesday 25 October 2011).

All friends of Percona are welcome. See you there!

Thanks to Clustrix for sponsoring the drinks.

Stockholm – October 25th 2011

Severalnines, provider of automation and management software for easily usable, highly available and auto-scalable cloud database platforms, today announces the release of ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera in cooperation with Codership, the replication experts organisation that leverages the latest developments in computer science to produce fast and scalable synchronous replication solutions that "just work" for databases and similar applications.

Introducing ClusterControl™ for MySQL Galera

…

MySQL 5.6 proposes improved partition maintenance through "partition exchange". Even if not yet available, dbi services performed some tests on the MySQL Community Edition5.6.2 m5 release (still under Development).