By tim

Brian Aker of MySQL sent me a few email comments about this whole "war stories" thread, which I reproduce here. Highlight -- he says: "Reading through the comments you got on your blog entry, these users are hitting on the same design patterns. There are very common design patterns for how to scale a database, and few sites really turn out to be all that original. Everyone arrives at certain truths, flat files with multiple dimensions don't scale, you will need to partition your data in some manner, and in the end caching is a requirement."

I agree about the common design patterns, but I didn't hear that flat files don't scale. What I heard is that some very big sites are saying that traditional databases don't scale, and that the evolution isn't from flat files to SQL databases, but from flat files to sophisticated custom file systems. Brian acknowledges that SQL vendors haven't solved the problem, but doesn't …

One of the best presentations from the MySQL Users Conference last week was by Mitch Kapor.  Mitch is the author of Lotus 1-2-3, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, supporter of open source software.

I saw Mitch give an earlier version of his presentation earlier this year at OSBC and it was even better the second time around.  I think the context of the MySQL Users Conference is even more appropriate. And heck, Wikipedia uses MySQL on the backend, so what could be more appropriate?

His discussion was about why people think …

All -

I’ve been playing with the CSV engine in MySQL 5.1 and have recorded some thoughts in a new article out on our dev zone. Check it out if you’ve wondered why we added the engine to MySQL and what it’s good for.

Oh, and one bug that I forgot to include in my paper, but that should be fixed in the next beta release, is that the CSV engine is not enabled on the MS Windows platform.

–Robin

By tim

Interesting back-channel email conversation with Phil Torrone: "i talked to hb from imdb. here's what i told him i'd to do with an imdb api / access to some of the data...

1. Fastr-like game for movies. If you've ever played Fastr, you're addicted - it pulls in Flickr photos and you guess what they were tagged with - you compete with others, and it's way too much fun. For IMDB, I'd do the same, you get photos of actors, directors, stills from movies, etc. You can guess a variety of things, it's timed, you can have teams, etc - you could do ads on and between rounds, a quick "buy the DVDs/etc you saw here". This could also make a good mobile game for phones.

2. IMDB …

Seems there is some interest in running MySQL as a backend for (classic) ASP based sites, at least looking at recent posts on DevShed forums.
As questions are quite similar and I've not found a good ASP+MySQL tutorial on the web I'm posting a short example here
Here is my snippet:

1. dim adoConn
2. dim adoRS
3. set adoConn = Server.CreateObject ( "ADODB.Connection" )
4. set adoRS = Server.CreateObject ( "ADODB.Recordset" )
5. adoConn.CursorLocation = 3
6. 'adUseClient
7. adoConn.Open "DRIVER={MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver};SERVER=localhost;DATABASE=users;UID=root;PWD=; OPTION=16427"
8. adoRS.ActiveConnection = adoConn
9. if adoConn.errors.count = 0 then
10. adoRS.Open "Select ...", adoConn
11. .....
12. adoRS.Close
13. else
14. response.write ( "ERROR: Couldn't connect to database" …

Great snippet on Dynamic SQL in stored procedures from MySQLForge!!!

So, before hopping on my plane from Seattle to Chicago on Tuesday, I met with one of the C# compiler developers at Microsoft (thanks to CJ for arranging!) and this was indeed a very interesting chat.

You may know that 40% of the MySQL userbase uses the Windows platform in one form or another. What you may not know if you don't use Microsoft stuff, is that Microsoft is actually surprisingly open about many things; you can get inside info about what they're working on, documentation on nearly everything, and so on. Basically, one of the few things not open is their sourcecode ;-). I'll grant you that's a key aspect in many cases, but still... consider that Google uses open source and releases some too (see code.google.com) but is otherwise a very closed company. Just to give a crude comparison how the world is not just black&white.
Anyway, talking to this developer was just one programmer talking with another (he used to work …

The second thing on my list coming away from the MySQL Users Conference (first was a question about limits in mysqldump) was to do a writeup on how to use Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to take quick snapshots of your database. Many folks are using this as an alternative to the tools provided with MySQL. It's a good choice for a backup when you need to backup in order to restore the entire database from files.

Taneli has already done a write-up of the steps to complete this process, I want to add in a few things:

LVM not a True Online Backup

LVM doesn't do a true online backup, although it gets close. The actual LVM snapshot command is fast, but to get a good copy of your …