Last night (okay… i’m posting thsi a bit later… so the other night), a group of us gathered around to hear about some work that had been done in getting a MySQL Cluster backend for OpenLDAP.

I’d heard a bit of rumors (where rumors is defined by somebody saying something on IRC and me being busy looking at other things) about this previously, but last night was the first time I a) saw it working and b) saw performance numbers.

Disclaimer: I am no LDAP expert.

So, what is it?

Normal LDAP can replicate asynchronously from one machine to another. You can even update on both and it has some conflict resolution. But… this costs in performance.

Normal LDAP can also replicate (asynchronously) to a remote location for read-only (e.g. make authentication go faster in Australia with the main LDAP server in the US).

The MySQL Cluster backend for OpenLDAP connects directly to MySQL Cluster, using …

• Damien Seguy of Nexen Services presents
• easiest session of all (phew, that's a relief)
• clever SQL recipes
• tweaking SQL queries
• shows an example where SELECT is ORDERED by a column that is actually an enum.
  • an enum is both a string and a number
  • sorted by number
  • displayed as string
  • can be sorted by string if it's cast as string
• compact column
  • compacts storage
  • faster to search
  • if (var)char is turned into enum, some space can be saved, shows example
• random order
  • order by rand(1) - obviously
  • the integer parameter is actually a seed
  …

Just a quick note that I have posted the video from my session at this year’s MySQL Conference at:

http://www.mikehillyer.com/video/HowToBeNormal.html 

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 …