My first tutorial today at MySQL Conference 2007 is Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling.

Basic Tenets

While not discussed, the premise is to Cache Everything. MemCache is a key component to any scalable system.

Lifetime of a scalable system

Using the analogy from a newborn child Jeremy stepped us through the categories Newborn, Toddler, Teenager, Late teens to 20s, Adult.

In Late teens to 20s, is where most systems die a slow death, he termed “the awkward stage”. This is where scalability is critical, and a meltdown for example can ruin you. Downtime is also just not acceptable for your user community.

When your Adult you need to perfect the …

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

I meant to post this earlier, but starting today I am on a pretty lengthy tour of the USA. First stop is San Francisco, but only for this weekend. On Monday I will move to San Jose to join up the MySQL User Conference for 3 days. Then its back to San Francisco until May 1st to chat with the fine folks at the local Optaros office. At this point I will fly to Austin, location of yet another Optaros office. Then on the evening of May 4th I will fly to Tampa to spend a few quality days at my parents house in Palmetto. On May 14th its time to visit the main Optaros HQ in Boston. But after only 2 days I am already flying to Chicago to php|tek. On May 18th I am flying back to Zurich. However immediately on arrival on the 19th I am hoping back in a plane to Berlin to celebrate …

I’ve been playing more with the SHOW PROFILE command available as part of MySQL Community 5.0.37. Thanks to the author Jeremy Cole. This command can provide some interesting insight into the workings of MySQL. It does however like most new releases of software enable users to make suggestions for new features and functionality. Here is my wish list. Some I figure are practical, some are wish list, but if you never ask you never know.

1. The Unit of measure for duration is Second. It would be great if it could be tuned for display, say millisecond. If you look at my first Example, all figures are effectively represented in milli-second or even micro-second granularity. …

In the spirit of humor, here are 2 ways I know I am a MySQL geek. These are actually things I do….

You Know You’re a MySQL Geek When….
1. You cannot type the word “myself” without typing “mysql” first, deleting 2 characters and finishing out the word.
2. You type “show processlist” at the commandline when you really mean “ps -ef”

Anyone have anything they can add to the list?

I've been following with interest Charles Lee's post over at the TSS about "Hibernate - A MySQL Enabler?". MySQL has always been well-supported by Hibernate, so it's good to see yet another project find that the two together can be a powerful pair (and keep vendor lock-in at bay).

The key issue that Hyperic ran into is that MySQL doesn't have sequences, but instead has identity-like columns. It seems that many folks with legacy data models run into the same issue.

Maybe it was serendipity that Steve Ebersole and the Hibernate team have delivered SequenceStyleGenerators in Hibernate 3.2.3 (and with even a bit earlier delivery, maybe Hyperic wouldn't have had to roll their own implementation).

I went and took a look at …

I've been following with interest Charles Lee's post over at the TSS about "Hibernate - A MySQL Enabler?". MySQL has always been well-supported by Hibernate, so it's good to see yet another project find that the two together can be a powerful pair (and keep vendor lock-in at bay).

The key issue that Hyperic ran into is that MySQL doesn't have sequences, but instead has identity-like columns. It seems that many folks with legacy data models run into the same issue.

Maybe it was serendipity that Steve Ebersole and the Hibernate team have delivered SequenceStyleGenerators in Hibernate 3.2.3 (and with even a bit earlier delivery, maybe Hyperic wouldn't have had to roll their own implementation).

I went and took a look at …

I've been following with interest Charles Lee's post over at the TSS about "Hibernate - A MySQL Enabler?". MySQL has always been well-supported by Hibernate, so it's good to see yet another project find that the two together can be a powerful pair (and keep vendor lock-in at bay).

The key issue that Hyperic ran into is that MySQL doesn't have sequences, but instead has identity-like columns. It seems that many folks with legacy data models run into the same issue.

Maybe it was serendipity that Steve Ebersole and the Hibernate team have delivered SequenceStyleGenerators in Hibernate 3.2.3 (and with even a bit earlier delivery, maybe Hyperic wouldn't have had to roll their own implementation).

I went and took a look at …

So a few things happened in the last few weeks or will be happening that I find worth sharing. First up Pagenello, the biggest Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Europe, was blast. Plenty of sun while playing 10 beach Frisbee matches in 4 days with some quality time chilling in Rimini before and after the tournament.

Yesterday I also held a slightly updated version of my "Explaining Explain" talk (now called "Finding Order in Execution") at the webtuesday usergroup meeting here in Zurich. As always you can find a pdf with the slides in the slides section of my blog.

Speaking of speaking I will be giving a talk on PHP6 at MySQL User …

Today while waiting at the airport, I took a look at the news stand, and right there on the cover of Fast Company were two words Google, and Wikipedia. Given Wikipedia is a poster boy of MySQL it was an immediate purchase just to see what was being said.

So the title of the cover was Google’s worse nightmare - Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales has his sights set on the search business.

Now, often I use Wikipedia to search for things directly rather then using Google. I’ve found it usually to be more accurate, particular on topics I know it will contain. References to search users being disappointed, Google and Yahoo tied with a 2.3 of 5 in user satisfaction hits about home for me as week, and that’s exactly the ideas …