I’ve started working on a session on the practice of online ombuds ? especially as it applies to Free Software and Open Source communities. The session is based on my work in the Free Software, PHP, Mozilla, MySQL and Open Source communities - in particular, recent work (which I need to get back to) on the Open Source Initiative mailing lists.

So far, the session has been pitched to the following events: CommunityOne 2008 (waiting), FOSDEM 2008 (accepted), JavaOne 2008 (declined), Open Web Vancouver 2008 (waiting) and OSCON 2008 (waiting).

I’ll start posting alpha versions of slides and so on as they are ready. …

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The initial release of the FederatedX Pluggable Storage Engine for MySQL is now
available. I developed the Federated Storage Engine when I worked at MySQL,
and really saw a lot of potential with it. However, there were many other
projects that I had to give attention to, and many features and bug fixes that
users wanted didn't come into fruition because of the busy schedule. I left
MySQL a year ago to pursue an opportunity with Grazr what has kept me equally
busy. However, I have made a resolution this year to give some projects that I
have wanted to improve the attention that they need. I still see a lot of
potential with the "federated" concept.

Federated as it is isn't what many people expect it to be. IBM for instance,
has a federation as a very integral part of DB2. The Federated Storage Engine
is a proof-of-concept storage engine -- not to say it doesn't …

At Flickr adding capacity is easy. Since we are able to scale at a function of user growth, independent of hardware classes. This makes adding new hardware easy. I'm able to adjust the server weight on the FLY to give more users to a certain class of hardware over another.


Changing schema is easy as well and now I do it much safer. In the pass I would turn off a master for each partitioned dataset all at the same time: then stay up for 20+ hours and execute an alter across the entire server farm, that was off line.

Now I do it in stages and do it throughout the week. Its a little slower but I get to sleep. Additionally with the new method I am able to do more all at the same time-like rebuild the entire dataset for a partition.

Here are my steps for doing a change that takes more then 10 hours:

remove the servers from the site config
push my.cnf.maintenance to the servers …

One performance gotcha with MEMORY tables you might know about comes from the fact it is the only MySQL storage engine which defaults to HASH index type by default, instead of BTREE which makes indexes unusable for prefix matches or range lookups. This is however not performance gotcha I'm going to write about. There is one more thing you should be aware which again comes from the fact MEMORY tables use HASH indexes by default.

I've created rather similar test table:

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. CREATE TABLE `test` (
2.   `id` int(11) NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
3.   `c` tinyint(4) DEFAULT NULL,
4.   PRIMARY KEY  (`id`),
5.   KEY `c` (`c`)
6. ) ENGINE=MEMORY

and populated it with 1.000.000 rows ALL of them having same value for c column.

Now I'm performing random deletes by primary key (DELETE FROM test WHERE …

Microsoft has an offer open-source startups are having a hard time refusing. Should they?

(Credit: Microsoft (Sam Ramji))

That's the question I asked myself while reading Mary Jo Foley's excellent article that dissects Microsoft's open-source strategy. As it turns out, it's very similar to Microsoft's general partner strategy: embrace and envelope. (Or embrace, extend, and extinguish, as used to be Microsoft's marching orders.)

Microsoft is looking at open-source software (OSS) as just another flavor of independent software vendors (ISV) software. Microsoft's goal is to convince OSS vendors to port their software to Windows. But Microsoft doesn't want OSS software to just sit on top of Windows; the company wants this software to be tied into the Windows …

Welcome to the 82nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Some MySQL news to start. They call the engine Maria. “They” being MySQL AB co-founder Monty Widenius, and Maria being his new storage engine for MySQL. On his new blog, Monty Says, Monty says Maria is, “. . . a crash-safe alternative [...]

1. Zend and Microsoft have done a lot of work in the last year to make PHP run well on Windows. I never understood why Microsoft devoted resources to that, but now it is clear: it's going to make technical integration between the two organizations go much more smoothly.
2. This will hopefully be the death knell of the awful "Windows Live" branding for consumer web stuff.
3. Maybe now somebody will release a .NET OpenID 2.0 library that actually works.
4. Big losers here from a tech supplier perspective: FreeBSD and MySQL.
5. Another potential big loser is Adobe; having a gigantic global audience will help with adoption of Microsoft's various Adobe-killing initiatives like Silverlight, which would never otherwise have penetrated the consumer web without a large built-in audience like Yahoo's.

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