Adam Donnison hosted a session about how the *.mysql.com websites are architectured. He explaind how the situation was before they started building the current implementation and showed several drawbacks with that approach (Apache and MySQL on the same machine, no failover) and how they fixed it. He even showed how well the new MySQL Monitoring solution works without noticing that while he is showing live data, that the monitor reports a peak of requests and several red (dangerous) areas in the system. The site went effectively down when he explained how easy all this is to manage. He got very busy when we notified him, but he actually got everything up and running again within a few minutes.

MySQL 5.1 comes with a new feature called Events. This is effectively a user-friendly cron-mechanism built into MySQL. Very nice. Other goodies can be found in the manual.

I had the pleasure to say Hi to Duncan Davidson, O'Reilly's conference photographer. Check out his flickr Photo Set. He's got some impressive shots up. An he's a really nice guy :-)

Rasmus, in both his session and his keynote, painted a very good picture of the state of security of current web applications. Namely, there is none. Even if you make your website as secure as possible, an attacker is able to use your users and their out-of-date (or even current!) software to steal data and brake into systems.

"The web is broken you can all go home now."

This has nothing to do with a certain database vendor. Paul Tuckfield of (first) PayPal and (now) YouTube fame described a nifty method to speed up MySQL Replication in his keynote at the MySQL Conference.

The pitch is simple: He implemented an oracle algorithm. In more detail: In a MySQL setup, several layers of caches exist. In front of the database sits the query cache that saves the MySQL from doing actual work (query analysis, execution, disk I/O). The next two levels sit between MySQL and a the actual disk. The first is the filesystem cache that the operating system provides. The second is the block-level cache that the RAID controller provides. Considering the last, from a MySQL point of view, data has been written, when it hits the RAID controller.

All these caches serve one purpose: Reduce execution of complex or slow operations such as physically reading data from a harddrive or writing to it. MySQL Replication, in a …

Thanks to everyone who came along to Grant and my talk this morning about slack and how we bootstrap MySQL servers. Here is the slide deck as promised.

Tags for this post: mysql conference mysqluc2007 slack presentation sre
Related posts: Managing MySQL the Slack Way: How Google Deploys …

I'm sitting here at the end of the MySQL Conference 2007 waiting for "Orcas" beta 1 to uninstall.  Yes, I know I should have used a VM but that's not the issue.  The issue is that I'm missing a great closing keynote on Yahoo Pipes while I wait for setup to "generate setup script".  Folks, it's been doing that for 30 minutes!

I'm running Vista Ultimate on this Inspiron 6000 but I know these absurdities are not limited to lower end hardware.  I've got a dual-Opteron box at my house and uncompressing zip files is a joke.  Right-clicking a 30 meg zip on my home system (SATA, 2 gig RAM, dual Opteron) often takes at least 10 minutes to tell me that the rest of the uncompress will take another 20.  Enter 7-zip stage left and the same uncompress is done in about 90 seconds.  I've code for almost 20 years and I can tell you that I would have to work very hard to write code this bad.  It has to be …

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 rolled quickly into the second keynote Scaling MySQL at YouTube by Paul Tuckfield.

The introduction by Paul Tuckfield was; “What do I know about anything, I was just the DBA at PayPal, now I’m just the DBA at youTube. There are only 3 DBA’s at YouTube.”

This talk had a number of great performance points, with various caching situations. Very interesting.

Scaling MySQL at YouTube

Top Reasons for YouTube Scalability

The technology stack:

• Python
• Memcache
• MySQL Replication

Caching outside the database is huge.

It a display of numbers of hits per day it was said “I can neither confirm or deny the interpretation will work here (using an Alexa graph)”. This …

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 rolled quickly into the second keynote Scaling MySQL at YouTube by Paul Tuckfield. The introduction by Paul Tuckfield was; “What do I know about anything, I was just the DBA at PayPal, now I’m just the DBA at youTube.

My hierarchies session is done. It’s nice to be finished and free to relax.

The materials and video are available at http://www.openwin.org/mike/presentations/managing-hierarchies-in-mysql/

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