So, the whole world changed at dealnews when Yahoo! linked us. We realized that our current infrastructure was not scaling very well. We had to make a change.

The Problem

Even though we were using all sorts of cool techniques, the server architecture was really still just a bunch of web servers all serving the same content. In addition to that, our existing systems as the time used a pull method. When a request came in, memcache was checked, if the data was not there, it was fetched from our main MySQL server. So, when there is no data in the cache or when it expires, this was very bad. Like when Yahoo! hit us. Some cache item would expire and 60,000 users would hit a page and each page would try and create the cache item.

The Solution

I …

During JavaOne this year Rags and I did a hands on lab on DTrace. The topic was "Using DTrace on Java and other Web 2.0 Languages in Solaris". Due to some unforeseen reason the lab was scheduled from 8:45 PM to 10:45 PM (Yes PM) and that to on the day of the big party at JavaOne. So I was expecting to be speaking to an empty room but lo and behold we had close to 100 engineers ( a few pretty drunk) and most stayed until the finished the lab.It was pretty heartening and was worth all the efforts that went into …

As always, the digital world is evolving. Quickly. Yet, the way we store our data was envisioned decades(!) ago. To accommodate today's needs, wild solutions are tacked onto old systems. This practice is commonly known as hacking. While these solutions work great for a number of people, they share a fundamental flaw: They are hacks who pervert the original idea of the system's design and implementation.

CouchDb is designed to fulfil data storage requirements in modern times. It doesn't come with legacy to support and without hacks to make it work on current and future systems. If you are looking for ways to save, see, secure and share your data as in The four pillars of data management, CouchDb supports all of them:

• Save - Robust, ACID compliant storage engine.
• See - View engine to efficiently filter, format and organize …

Just a quick reminder for those of you located near Hamburg, Germany: on Monday, June 4th at 19:00 there will be our 7th MySQL Meetup. As usual, we will gather at the Chinese Restaurant "Ni Hao". This time, Sönke Ruempler will give a talk about the PHP-ORM-Framework "Propel". If you'd like to join, don't hesitate to RSVP via meetup.com or Xing.com right away! Thanks - see you there!

I released version 0.9.8 of my MySQL UDF code generator yesterday and i finally moved development over to my own php-baustelle.de family of sites.

Continue reading "New MySQL UDF generator release, project moved"

Dtrace is one of the coolest things in Solaris 10, adding great observability to applications. A Dtrace provider for PHP that adds probes to function entry and exit points has long been available. I finally got around to integrating this with the php in Cool Stack. 

Bryan Cantrill has some excellent examples of how to use dtrace to trace through your php code, down to the system libraries and kernel (if you want to go that far !) .

Instructions for installing the php dtrace extension

1. Download the shared library for the extension :

    dtrace.so.x86.bz2

…

The conference is now over and I am glad it is. It was an intense four days of information exchange and meeting interesting people. The feeling I now have is twofold: One end says: "Woohooo! That was great, got to do that again."; The other is: "But not anytime soon!". Thanks to Jay Pipes for putting a lot work into making this happen.

And special thanks, of course, to Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling who spent some serious coin to have J.R., Carlos and me attend. You rock!

I couldn't find an official announcement, but there will be a MySQL Conference in Tokyo later this year. Now, what talks could I submit for that? :-)

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.

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."