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The slides from my 2008 MySQL Conference Presentation can be downloaded from here.

• 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 …

Here is the quick notes from the session scaling heavy concurrent writes in real time by Dathan Pattishall. Its bad that he left Flickr i.e. Yahoo. Hopefully they will find a replacement, if not contact me I have few people who are interested.

• Who am I
  • since 1999 working on mysql
  • scaled many companies (FriendFinder, Friendster, Flickr, now RockYou)
  • Favorites federation, partitioning, shards, RAID-10
• Requirements
  • scale better
  • store data forever
  • associate time with the data
  • allow for …

It is always surprising what I learn when I go to a conference these days. Years ago, I could go to any talk and just suck it all in. Now, it is the little nuggets. The topics as a whole do more to confirm what I have already developed while running the Phorum project and building the infastructure for dealnews.com. That confirmation is still nice. You know you are not the only one that thought a particular solution was a good idea.

One of the confirmations I have had is that the big sites like Flickr, Wikipedia, Facebook and others don’t use exotic setups when it comes to their hardware and OS. During a keynote panel, they all commented that they did not do any virtualization on their servers. Most did not use SANs. Some ran older MySQL versions but some were running quite recent versions. I have kept thinking that I …

10,000 Tables Can?t Be Wrong: Designing a Highly Scalable MySQL Architecture for Write-intensive Applications by Richard Chart

Chose MySQL for performance and stability, and less important but still there, experience and support. Support is becoming increasingly more and more important.

Starting point: 1 appliance supporting 200 devices
Problem/Goal: Extensible architecture with deep host and app monitoring, over 1000 devices with 100 mgmt points each
Distributed collection over a WAN, with latency and security concerns
Current reality: several times the scale of the original goal
Commercial embedded product, so they actually pay for the embedded MySQL server

Future: The fundamentals are sound: next generation of the product moves up another order of magnitude

Data Characteristics
>90% writes
ACID not important
Resilient to loss, because gaps in data do not …

So, I am at the MySQL Conference this week with my Phorum co-developers. We got to talking last night about how old Phorum is. We knew it was about 10 years. We pulled up some old archived zip file of version 1.5 and found in the this in the comment block.


* Created 04/16/1998


Whoa! That means that yesterday was the 10th birthday of the Phorum project. I would guess that is the date I originally put the code up on my personal web site for people to download. I remember sending that email to the PHP General mailing list. I told people they could have the code if they would help debug it. Later I officially made a GPL license and then a BSD style license as I became more knowledgeable about the open source and free software world.

So, for kicks we decided to install version 1.6 on the phorum.org site. Keep in mind the release date for that was March 30, 1999. The only hurdles …

Here is the quick notes from the session Helping InnoDB scale on servers with many cores by Mark Callaghan from Google (mcallaghan at google dot com).

• we have a team now, to help scale MySQL to do the enhancements (9 people,  I hope yahoo management reads this)
• Overview
  • describe the problems on big servers
  • work done by InnoDB community
  • ask MySQL/InnoDB to fix the problems by taking the patches
• Community team
  • InnoDB/Oracle
  • Google MySQL team
  • InnoDB community
  • Percona - Peter and Vadim
…

The Future of MySQL by Monty Widenius and Jay Pipes.

• Why this talk
  • MySQL and Sun should become more transparent
  • Easier to discuss and act when you have facts
  • when user know the limitations, they know how to go around
• Threads
  • one connection/thread doesn’t work well
  • no priority threads
  • no way to ensure we have X threads
• Symptoms
  • Too many context switches
  • we are not using multi-core efficiently
  • does not scale that well after 4-8 cores
• Solution
  • –thread-handling=pool-of-threads (6.0) …

I've so far missed every single keynote and breakfast. Fortunately, all the good ones have been recorded.

I'm sitting here in Paul's PBXT talk, and it's really cool. It was really cool last year, and it's only gotten better.

When someone asks me about the various future MySQL storage engines, my answer always is "It depends on which is better for your load. Maria or PBXT, or both?"