Scaling out MySQL: Hardware Today and Tomorrow

Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen over at Proven Scaling LLC gave a talk about the hardware side of MySQL. They covered pretty much every aspect of hardware.

For starters, Jeremy said go 64-bit hardware and operating system. For CPU, faster is better. The current versions of MySQL and InnoDB don't take full advantage of 8 core servers, so unless you have the budget, Jeremy recommended a single quad-core or a dual dual-core setup. He recommended getting as much RAM as possible. RAM is cheap so go for 32GB, or at least 16GB.

For storage, Jeremy discussed the many options including direct attached storage (DAS), SAN, NAS, and the various hard drive interfaces. From …

Scaling out MySQL: Hardware Today and Tomorrow

Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen over at Proven Scaling LLC gave a talk about the hardware side of MySQL. They covered pretty much every aspect of hardware.

For starters, Jeremy said go 64-bit hardware and operating system. For CPU, faster is better. The current versions of MySQL and InnoDB don't take full advantage of 8 core servers, so unless you have the budget, Jeremy recommended a single quad-core or a dual dual-core setup. He recommended getting as much RAM as possible. RAM is cheap so go for 32GB, or at least 16GB.

For storage, Jeremy discussed the many options including direct attached storage (DAS), SAN, NAS, and the various hard drive interfaces. From …

Who is the Dick on my site?
Dick Hardt

Most interesting keynote. About 1,000+ slides. Many slides per minute. Definitely a new way of presenting :)

• What is identity? What is Identity 2.0?
• Identity is a complicated topic, and you normally get the tip of the iceberg. Identity changes during your stages in life.
• Works at SXIP Identity.
• I wondered what the German’s thought about identity. Identat. “They’re German” <applause>
• Answers.com had the best answers for identity.
• There’s lots of different personas about a person. Women really are the masters of different personas (clothes, wife, mother, etc.). Reinventing oneself.
• Identity allows you to predict behaviour…
• When someone is in a “role” (fireman, etc.), you think you can predict behaviour. Is this identity? It’s who …

A

Eli White from Digg presented. It was an interesting talk… He covered:

You are going to get hacked…
- SQL injection
- XSS
- CSRF (cross site request forgery)
- Session Hijacking

Slides (PDF, ODP) have SQL injection/XSS example, with the hole, the attack, and the prevention.

Technorati Tags: mysqlconf, mysql, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, eli white, …

Okay, so Markus and I did actually give the presentation yesterday  at the MySQL Users Conference and no, we weren’t booed off stage, and neither pro or anti-framework people came by to bludgeon us. Mind you, it could be that the hundred people or so were being extremely kind.

For those giving talks, remember, no matter how much you prepare, things still go wrong… In our case, when we plugged Markus’ laptop in we discovered that the projection produced an eye-watering flicker. Yay. And then, I forgot that Markus’ laptop has a German keyboard. Sigh. Despite that the presentation went well and we had some interesting post-discussion.

Couple of interesting notes though:  Only one person in the entire room had run xdebug …

MySQL Users Conference 2008 has number of Storage Engines presented which claim to Kick Ass. Walking in exhibition hall you could see KickFire, Infobright, Tokutek, ScaleDB. I have not seen NitroDB in the exhibition call this year but they are also worth to mention.
It is interesting to see all of them showing benchmarks with great numbers and glossy marketing materials explaining why they are better.

I've seen enough of marketing benchmarks at my life to really believe them. Marketing benchmarks typically show the cases when product excels but leaving limitations and cases when product does not work well and shows sub par results - and these cases always exist. Making decisions in software design you often have to made tradeoffs which makes it especially hard to get a product which performs best for ALL cases, and keep in mind performance is not the only thing you may be concerned about.

What makes it even complicated most …

For a company that wants to become the RedHat of Drupal, Kieran is pointing a lot to RedHat's competition :)

But indeed the Brainstorm idea is a good one... if Sun wants to keep up the "big user community, no contributor community" model for it's products this is the least they can do.

Kieran also calls for more crossposting between the mysql and drupal planets :)

I certainly hope all the keynotes from this year’s MySQL User Conference are posted somewhere (I suspect you probably want to have a look at the conference web site). Looking at the printed presentations will not come to the spoken presentations, especially the keynote delivered by Dick Hardt the CEO of Sxip Idenity in British Columbia on Identity 2.0

Very briefly and nowhere near as smoothly, the keynote focused on the movement of digital identity systems away from each site or “silo†controlling the identity management and closing access to your profile/role/persona data we need to move away into a much more user centric model where you control your identity. The model would focus on “issuers†which give you “the agent†your data which you then choose to relay to others. The idea being that you can …

Day two of the conference was a little disappointing, as far as sessions went. There were several time blocks where I simply wasn’t interested in any of the sessions. Instead, I went to the expo hall and tried to pry straight answers out of sly salespeople. Here’s what I attended.

Paying It Forward: Harnessing the MySQL Contributory Resources

This was a talk focused on how MySQL has made it possible for community members to contribute to MySQL. There was quite a bit of talk about IRC channels, mailing lists, and the like. However, the talk gave short shrift to how MySQL plans to become truly open source (in terms of its development model, not its license). I think there was basically nothing to talk about there. I had a good conversation about some of my concerns with the speaker and some others from MySQL right afterwards.

There was basically nobody there — I didn’t count, but I’d say maybe 10 or 12 people. I …