Some of these may be conflicting, not applicable to everyone.

1) think horizontal — everything, not just the web servers. Micro optimizations are boring, as or other details
2) benchmarking techniques;. Not “how fast” but “how many”. test force, not speed.
3) bigger and faster vertical scaling is the enemy.
4) horizontal scaling = add another box
5) implementation, scale your system a few times, but scale your ARCHITECTUREa dozens or hundreds of time.
6) start from the beginning with architecture implementation.
7) don’t have “The server” for anything
8) stateless good, stateful bad
9) “shared nothing” good
10) don’t keep state within app server
11) caching good.
12) generate static pages periodically, works well for not millions of pages or changes.
13) cache full output in application
14) include cookies in the “cache key” so …

MySQL today introduced MySQL Forge a new online resource for all MySQL users and developers to communicate, collaborate and share MySQL code and applications. The company also announced new support for Ubuntu Linux. In a keynote address today at the MySQL Users Conference 2006, Mark Shuttleworth, the founder of the Ubuntu project, outlined the new partnership and technology collaboration between Ubuntu and MySQL.

I’ve finished my last of three sessions, finally getting through my hierarchies session. With the laptop failure, speaking just was not as enjoyable this year as in previous years when there were no such concerns to distract me from giving the audience a good session.

The Hierarchies session seemed well received, with the room packed and audience members up against the back wall. I do wish I had not been opposite the Second Life session, as I was quite interested in how they scale.

Materials

Managing Hierarchies

Sakila Sample Database - …

talk by Roland Mallmann

MaxDB is older than I am, in 1977 started at University of Berlin. Owned by SAP today. Today it’s open source under GPL, or commercial license from SAP or MySQL AB.

Why Max DB is so great:
Low cost of ownership
Few config parameters
no size estimates for indvidual db objects

no reorg — space management done automatically — space no longer needed is returned immediately to the db, data occupied vs. free (holes) ration is highest as possible. This is done by matching logical pages to physical on disk with the Converter, and I/O and space management.

Space management done automatically
No reorganization is needed (ie, OPTIMIZE TABLE)
Gaps are not allowed, therefore updates and deletes are in place, and sorts happen AFTER an insertion.
Space freed is immediately returned to DB
Done by Converter, matches …

A Wednesday afternoon presentation at the MySQL Conference was MySQL Migration Toolkit by Mike Zinner from MySQL AB.

In summary, the Migration Toolkit currently provides the following feature set.

• Wizard like interface
• Plug-in architecture
• Migration of Oracle/MS SQL Server/MS Access/Generic JDBC Data Sources. 2006 support for Sybase and DB2.
• Provides user support to expand to other databases
• Customisable the produced wizard scripts at any step
• Completely Scriptable (the wizard interface can produce command line replay scripts) -allows re-running, re-scheduling
• Binaries include an Eclipse Java Project to enable easy extension of the Migration Toolkit.

The product is built on the Generic Runtime …

I was told that teams had to have a physical instantiation of a mascot, so I said, “maybe I’ll knit something.” Well, I didn’t knit something, but I did hand-craft an origami butterfly for Team Prokrasti Nation’s mascot:

(click picture for larger image).

Oh, and I won a fun game from O’Reilly for submitting speaker evaluations.

As a member of the Boston MySQL meetup I recommended to Sheeri (group organizer) that we try to get Jim Starkey, the author of the MySQL Falcon storage engine (or more accrately the database that will become Falcon) and recent MySQL hire, to come speak at a future meetup. Why? He lives in New Hampshire, within reasonable drive from Boston. Wouldn't that be cool, to have Jim Starkey giving a MySQL meetup session in Boston?

I finally bumped into Jim this morning at the MySQL UC and had a chance to talk with him. The initial conversation was about the meetup, which he gracefully agreed to come to sometime this summer (July/August). Beyond that was a great conversation about where MySQL is now, where Falcon fits in, and some of Jim's ideas about a variety of things including DBAs, stored …

Formed a MySQL Quiz team
Met all the requirements for the MySQL Quiz
Took a Certification exam

everyone root for Team Prokrasti Nation!

Glad to have the backup presentation completed here at MySQL UC 2006. Was a decent gathering, not packed but enough to make the room feel full. Jay and I tried to take a minimalist approach on the session material in order to be able to keep a decent pace have a good chunk of time at the end for Q/A.

I got some positive feedback from the session from a few folks, a few that were very appreciative of the pace and extra time at the end for Q/A and comments.

Here are the slides in PDF format, probably no reason to put up the native presentation file.