• Flickr Stats how is it built.
  
• All Collection is done realtime
  
• MYISAM and INNODB is used
  
• The data is spread across 6 clusters (12 servers-6 used, 6 for fail over) mainly for data storage requirements
  
• Memcache is not used at all in the core of the product.
  

In summary this was the longest project that I worked on, other then rebuilding the backend for Flickr when I first came on. The inner workings are very complex to achieve real-time collection-while not affecting page load times of a photo page. Most of my time was spent on creating a distributed lock once my DB design was solid.

Things that would really make life easier:

MYSQL AB gets rid of MYISAM and makes PBXT its replacement. I don't need all the great features of INNODB but I would like some. I'll go more into this later.

…

Wohoo! Jon Stephens just published an excellent article on the possibilities for working with XML and MySQL on the MySQL devzone!

I'm very proud that he chose to highlight the lib_mysqludf_xql library of MySQL User Defined functions authored by Arnold Daniels. Some time ago, Arnold joined the MySQL UDF Repository and so far he's been the most active member of the group.

Arnold also took the …

I’ve written an article highlighting some recent developments with XML support in MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 6.0. Topics include:

• Outputting MySQL data in XML format; includes a look at the 3rd-party lib_mysqludf_xql library
• Getting XML into MySQL; includes a discussion of the LOAD XML statement (new in MySQL 6.0)
• The ExtractValue() and UpdateXML() functions (new in MySQL 5.1)
• Security issues, including a look at a little nasty known as “XPath injection”

You can read it at the MySQL Developer Zone.

Alexander Barkov contributed a nifty stored procedure and a very helpful pre-publication review. Thanks, Bar!

I constantly wonder what my former co-workers would say if I popped into work wearing what I have been accustomed to wearing since I joined MySQL AB in July 2007. Would they actually get used to me showing up in nothing but shorts, sleepily stretching out in front of the computer, boiling a a cup of tea and then trundling into the office laptop in one hand and hoping that no video conference would be required today?

It’s the beauty of MySQL: 80% of the company works on a distributed basis, as in out of their homes. With IRC, phone and email, if you can avoid video, you can pretty much be sitting naked while you work if that is your preference. But wait, there’s more. It means that you can work from anywhere in the world: An airport, in the car, in the train and ultimately in a completely foreign country.  I promised that six months after I joined the company I would reflect on …

In yet another sign that the world's leading software companies are losing their inhibitions around open source, Adobe announced today the launch of the open-source BlazeDS project, high-performance remoting and messaging technology used to "connect back-end data sources to rich Internet applications written with its Flex development tool." This is very cool.

BlazeDS will be made available for free under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL). Adobe will initially hosts the open-source project and next year plans to create a separate site to host BlazeDS and its Flex developer tool which it intends to open source, said Phil Costa, director of product management for Adobe's Platform Business Unit.

The software is not meant to replace other messaging products, such as enterprise service buses, Costa said. Instead, it can get data from messaging software …

Today MySQL releases the first beta version of MySQL Connector/ODBC 5.1. This means that Connector/ODBC 5.1 is now feature complete. Go download it!

Connector/ODBC 5.1 is suitable for most MySQL versions in active use today. It works with MySQL 4.1, 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0. If anyone is still on 4.0 or earlier releases, you should have upgraded ages ago; consider Connector/ODBC 5.1 “the final straw”.

As I wrote in September when we released the alpha version,

It is a partial rewrite of the the original MyODBC 3.51 code base, originally developed by Monty and Venu Anuganti, including individual parts of the current 65K ODBC 5 code base.

The new ODBC 5.1 driver, like 3.51, supports all relevant platforms …

Stefan Hinz, MySQL’s Docs Team Lead, just showed me the new restructured documentation overview page http://dev.mysql.com/doc/. The intention of the restructuring is to make it easier for you to find the information you need.

We’ve amended the MySQL Reference Manual section with a subsection labeled “Excerpts from the Reference Manual“, examples of which are a standalone Connectors book (covering all MySQL connectors and APIs) and guides for each individual MySQL Connector.

The key new document there is the “MySQL Server Version Reference” that should make life easier for everyone who needs cross-version …

When I say volume partition, I'm referring to how to separate the different structure of your MySQL components to different volumes. For a newbie, it is so easy to just install MySQL using its default configuration. This means that your binary logs (assuming you are using it) will be in the same volume as your data files.

There is nothing wrong with this if you have a small database, but once your database grows, you will see an impact of what you did. What you sow, is what you reap. Let me explain this further, remember that binary logs needs to be written to the hard disk and the same goes for the data files. Imagine if there are two processes writing to your hard disk at the same time, what would happen? Setting aside the technological jargon, it will take longer to perform the necessary action.

This is the reason why you have to be careful in partitioning your MySQL into different volumes. Make sure that the binary …

In this article, we discuss the XML functionality available in MySQL, with an emphasis on new features coming online in MySQL 5.1 and MySQL 6.0. We assume that you already have a working knowledge of XML, and that you know what the terms ?valid? and ?well-formed? mean. We also assume that you have some knowledge of XPath.

So we're back from the company meeting which took place last week in Hurghada, Egypt. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of people for the first time in person to work together and have some fun.

Because of charter flight schedule this was rather long meeting - we had whole week in the Egypt in 5 star all inclusive resort (FYI: It is nowhere near European/American 5 stars in terms of quality or price). We had work sessions for 4.5 days, One day we took full day excursion to Luxor and another half a day we took introductionary diving and snorkeling tour. Some of us having late plane departure got almost another day to relax on the beach.

If you're wondering about budget we tried to keep it at just over 1000$ per person which varied a bit depending on cost of travel, such as travel from Krakow or Novosibirsk was surely expensive than from Kiev and Moscow.

Being visitor on plenty of conferences and now …