A Googly MySQL Cluster Talk - Google Video

The talk I gave at Google is now up on Google Video for all to see. I don’t think I gave it as well as I did at the User Conference (largely because, I think, by this time I was really tired), but it still went well (I think).

Feedback is much appreciated - always looking for ways to improve my talks.

Oh, I’m also wearing an Augie March t-shirt.

Update: watching yourself give a presentation is a bit strange… but hopefully I can learn from watching my own talk.

Things I’ve learnt so far:

• some words are spoken a bit quickly/mumbly. probably due to not knowing how long this presentation would go for (it was a bit cobbled together in the two sessions …

In this photo: Gallery :: MySQL Users Conference 2006 :: 3 it seems that Jeremy managed to capture me (in the background) explaining to the O’Reilly conference woman (I forget her name…. Arjen knows) that it really wasn’t too hard for them to get me lunch considering that inside the building the restaurant staff managed to get food for me (so why can’t they do it outside). I also expressed my dismay at my interaction with the staff around an (afternoon/morning… i forget now) interaction involving a request for an apple (see “How not …

Greg, a fellow MySQL'er is visiting for the next couple of days and he mentioned an article he read at the airplane in Fortune called How I Work: Bill Gates. It got me to thinking about how I do my own work.

My days are segmented into three parts. In the evening I talk to people in Russia, in the morning I reserve time for people in Europe, and I work with Americans in the early afternoon. My week starts on Sunday evenings, and I try to go walking or sort my notes from the week on Friday afternoon when the work week for MySQL is tailing off.

Today I use Mail.app on an Apple 15in laptop to handle incoming email. I have filters that have been placed on servers using procmail to squelch the incoming email I get on both my personal and work email account. I …

At this years LinuxForum I was manning the MySQL booth together with Carsten Pedersen. We were kept quite busy with lots of people coming to tell about their use of the MySQL database for their particular project and ask about or discuss a particular issue of theirs. Which was fine, since the talks did not appeal a lot to me anyway.

One guy (I forgot who) had a small performance problem in his application. The application is a database of about 550,000 companies, storing name and various other bits of information about each company. What I would call a "small" database (since it is easily kept completely cached in ram), though not a trivial one.

This application has a facility to search for a company using any part of the company name:

    SELECT ... FROM company WHERE name LIKE …

Anyone who has used an automated unit testing framework such as Junit knows just how life-changing an automated test suite can be.   Once you've  experienced validating that recent changes have not broken old code, or discovering subtle bugs via junit that would otherwise have remained undetected , you naturally want to have this capability in all your programming environments.

Guisseppe Maxia has written a few stored procedure snippets to assist with automated unit testing of MySQL routines.  Unfortunately, the MySQL stored procedure language itself does not have the necessary abilities to fully implement the sort of unit testing we would like.  In particular, the inability for a stored procedure to capture the result sets generated by another stored procedure prevents a stored procedure from fully unit testing another. 

So I decided that …

I’ve had a bit of a windfall of books in the past 2 weeks. I purchased 2 books for the flights to/from the US, picked up an Amazon order on some Database Reference Material for some writings I’m doing, and quite a bounty at the MySQL Users Conference.

• “Screw It, Lets’ Do It - Lessons in Life” by Richard Branson
• “Losing My Virginity - The Autobiography” by Richard Branson
• “An Introduction to Database Systems - Eighth Edition” by C.J. Date
• “Database in Depth - Relational Theory for Practitioners” by C.J. Date
• “The Database Relational Model - A Retrospective Review and Analysis” by C. J. Date
• “MySQL in a Nutshell”
• “PHP in a Nutshell”
• “MySQL Clustering”
• “MySQL Stored Procedures”
• “MySQL Administrator’s Guide and Language Reference”

The MySQL management team is one of the best I've ever worked with.  It's an interesting blend of European style combined with Silicon Valley "get it done" pragmatism.  When we are discussing complex issues, we often ask questions that come from the works of Peter Drucker, perhaps the most prolific of management consultants.  Many of his best writings are surprisingly basic.  I don't mean that they are simple or dumbed down like "Who moved the cheese?" but they force a manager to focus on the fundamental questions like "What business are you in?" and "Who is the customer?"  A lot of dot bomb angst could have been saved by asking these questions.

In …

Let us recap for the audience on how to back up MySQL, or at least my favorite methods :)

1) Use Mysqldump
2) Shutdown the database or use an LVM snapshot method to back up the physical bits.
3) Use replication in combination with method 2.

And the winner for me goes to number three. So why is that?

Its cheap, and in a lot of cases I see, its very possible. This is the point where someone says, but I have 20 terabytes! I am sure you do, and in this case you can ignore the rest of what I am about to say.

One linux box with a bunch of disks with either one or multiple instances all acting as slaves is a cheap solution. From the point where you have a replication copy, you can make copies of the database off to tape or just create vectors (aka Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday... Friday one week ago) from the physical database. With this method you get live snapshots, but you end up …