My first tutorial today at MySQL Conference 2007 is Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling.

Basic Tenets

While not discussed, the premise is to Cache Everything. MemCache is a key component to any scalable system.

Lifetime of a scalable system

Using the analogy from a newborn child Jeremy stepped us through the categories Newborn, Toddler, Teenager, Late teens to 20s, Adult.

In Late teens to 20s, is where most systems die a slow death, he termed “the awkward stage”. This is where scalability is critical, and a meltdown for example can ruin you. Downtime is also just not acceptable for your user community.

When your Adult you need to perfect the …

Marten invited me to join the MySQL staff party yesterday at his own house, where everybody would socialize before the rough conference week. I must confess I enjoyed it really much: very nice place with beautiful views, great people from all around the world, Nordic food prepared by a Swedish chef, an incredible magician playing tricks with cards (he found a card in my ear!). Marten’s family was very charming and the ambience was just great. This is a great start for the week

I am spending today preparing for my session at the MySQL conference on Thursday. I'll be speaking on "MySQL and .NET in the Real World" which will cover my experience creating Approver.com and will also include a run-through of the Visual Studio integration with MySQL.

Last year I created a little command-line tool that generates MySQL data access classes for .NET 2.0. It's the tool that generates the data access layer for Approver.com. I am going to open-source this tool this week, most likely before my talk on Thursday, and I will do a demo of the tool as part of my talk at the conference. This tool is very simple -- it doesn't do as much as, say, SubSonic or NHibernate. But it does automatically generate about 80-90% of the data access code used in Approver.com, and it has a few ease-of-use characteristics that I wanted -- mainly a low learning curve, explicit support for MySQL and .NET 2.0 and no dependencies on external libraries other …

Fortune Cookie at the MySQL Pre-Conference Party.

Zmanda is a Diamond sponsor of MySQL users conference. Come Visit us at booth 415.
Various membes of our team are also presenting at the conference. If backup of MySQL databases is
of interest to you, you do not want to miss any of the following presentation:

Zmanda Speakers

Keynote: Data Protection for the LAMP Economy
Presenter: Chander Kant, CEO, Zmanda
Date: Thursday, April 26, 2007
Time: 9:50am-10:20am
Location: Ballrooms E-H

Track: Security & Database Administration
Topic: MySQL Backup: Roadmap & Vision
Presenters: Paddy Sreenivasan, VP Engineering, Zmanda
Lars Thalmann, Replication & Clustering Technology, MySQL
Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2007
…

Presented by Blaine Cook, a developer from Odeo, now probably CTO of Twitter (Obvious Corp spawed, I think). There’s a video and slides (yes, you need evil Flash so I haven’t viewed it myself). Then there are my notes… possibly with some thoughts attached to them. No, they’re not organized, I’m too busy and tired…

Rails scales, but not out of the box. This will cause Twitter to stop working very quickly.

600 requests/second, 180 rails instances (mongrel), 1 DB server (MySQL) + 1 slave (read only slave, for statistics purposes), 30-odd processes for misc. jobs, 8 Sun X4100s.

Uncached requests in less than 200ms in most of the time.

steps:
1. realize …

One thing is always certain about information technology: there is always change. This past week I was pitching in on a Citrix upgrade for my organization and I went to tweak the web interface. Though I'm not primarily a "server guy" and directory services administrator, I do have a web developer skillset (in fact, that's how I got my start where I work now). However, it's been a few years since I've done anything but touch up work with regards to web development and initially I got that blank feeling... the one where you know how to do things but it's like your mind is cycling through the archives to pull back that information and bring it to the forefront. After a thankfully brief period of "brain thrashing," I went to it.

This experience reminded me of a .NET Rocks! episode with noted Windows …

Maybe this is not unique, I haven't spent anya lot of time looking through hosting companies with respect to the version of MySQL available. I was happy t see this morning as I was following along with the Vital Rails tutorial:

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 1193499 to server version: 5.0.24a-standard-log

As folks on several MySQL blogs have already noted, Solid will be hosting informal “Meet the Experts” discussion sessions during lunch on Tuesday and Wednesday at the MySQL Users Conference. We at Solid are quite excited to engage with so many smart folks from the community. We’ve initially set the discussion topics to “Migrating from MySQL 4.0 to 5.0″ for Tuesday and “Replication in the Real World” for Wednesday. However, the format is open, so people are free to discuss any other interesting topics that come up.

In addition, Solid is allowing people to use the discussion space in their booth on a first-come, first-serve basis for their own discussions. If you have an interesting topic on which you would like to host a discussion, come on by our booth and sign up for a free timeslot.

Dhiren Patel is coordinating the Meet the Experts sessions, so if you have a question about it, stop by the Solid booth and he can …

Well, they're definitely thinking about getting started. Like last year I caught the VTA down -- it's hard to beat a $1.75 trip without having to worry about traffic. Registraton wasn't as smooth this year as last, for example I didn't get my free book (there didn't seem to be any attempt to hand those out to speakers). Whatever.

I'm now waiting for the replication talk to start.

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