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.

Tags for this post: mysql conference mysqluc2007 registration …

First session on Monday morning at the 2007 MySQL Conference is Joe O'Brien (who's title is "artisan") giving a tutorial on Rails.

I've fiddled with Ruby over the past year and have run through the process of setting up Rails and "generating" a scaffolding but it never gets much farther than a simple page or few simple pages with very basic functionality. I'm hoping this will be a good jumpstart to move things along even if it covers a lot of what I know already.

Interesting...Joe starts by talking about the DHH Creating a weblog in 15 minutes screencast and says "if you've seen it, forget it". The video makes Ruby on Rails looks like it is about code generation or templates. It is not about that. …

It is hard to believe a year has passed since the last MySQL Conference. It also seems like so much has happened since then.

From a community perspective one major difference from last year is how many of the active community members have become MySQL employees in the last year. Congratulations to all the folks who joined the force.

It is good to see all of these familiar faces, and to meet new ones. The speakers lounge was buzzing with activity, and the conference halls will be shortly as things get rolling.

The MySQL Conference has started. It will be a long week, still yet to prepare my own presentation for tomorrow. Old friendships already renewed, plenty of faces to names already, and we have yet to hit the first session.

Today is tutorial day, this morning I’m with Paul McCullagh Mr PBXT in Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling

The MySQL Conference kicks off this week in Santa Clara through Thursday.  We have tutorials and various customer and partner meetings today.  Some of the tutorials are sold out, but you can still register on site.  The main conference program starts Tuesday and there will be news announcements each day.

There's been a couple of late additions to the program which should be pretty cool, including a session called HA MySQL on EC2.  It sounds like a lot of acronyms, but it's very interesting stuff.  It's all about using Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud to create a virtual hosted scale out solution to high availability MySQL applications that you pay for "by the drink."  So if you imagine a web application which can have huge swings in demand and capacity, you can simply provision more computing power at …

HA is for High Availability. And, "real" depends on what you mean. People used to measure availability in "nines". A typical demanding level, used in telecommunications, is called five-nines because it represents 99.999% availability. Over one year span, this leaves you with about 5 minutes of total allowed downtime. To have a better idea what it means, you have to assume the reliability of your system, i.e. how often it can fail or be brought down--for any reason: software, hardware, or maintenance. Say, it is once per week. This is 52 times during a year. With that, your time to recover is narrowed down to 6 seconds. Very likely, to have some additional safe margin, you would like to recover in 1-2 seconds. The game becomes serious. You know there is no way you can physically repair any computer in 1-2 seconds. You need to have redundant hardware and to have at least a hot-standby configuration (active/standby) to perform failovers.

In the …