Alex forwarded me a link to an awesome scaling presentation by Cuong Do from YouTube about their architecture for scaling. He describes problems with massive scale-out, moving static content serving from Apache to lighttpd, how they use Python (including ways they speed it up) for the main application, certain custom C extensions for encryption, and their long road to MySQL partitioning.

A very interesting part of the presentation is Cuong's discussion of their difficulties dealing with thumbnail images for the videos. Each video has 4 thumbnails attached to it. The went through a whole series of issues in trying to scale the thumbnail serving, including hitting the ext3 files per directory limit one fateful day...

The section on scaling MySQL is a must see for anyone working on a Web 2.0 platform that can possibly see an enormous increase …

What is Freedom?

The concept of free software is very old - even older than the idea about software itself, because this is not a technology -this is a view of life, human, simple, and natural. Because this is the idea and feeling of freedom. This unimpaired freedom with which we are born and which we carry with us in the course of our lives. This is the same freedom, which leads our feelings of humanity and justice.

The Internet is a child of this freedom. The free software is its manifestation. Regardless of its statute as an innermost human right,
freedom is constantly under the attack of politicians, organizations, companies or separate persons while they try to adapt it to their
morals and views. However, limited freedom is no freedom at all! The best way to protect this freedom is to share it with others. To make them remember that they carry this freedom within and that they can and have the …

Could not resist the title after reading what Matt wrote. Sexy and exciting, indeed. Most of the crew here have their heads buried with the upcoming releases of Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager (ZRM) for MySQL. We are continuing to enhance the Management console for Network backup. And with the next release of ZRM for MySQL, backup of MySQL database will never be the same. Dmitri already wrote about how easy it will be to manage MySQL backups from Iphone. Additionally we are fixing stuff in the Management console for ease of use. You can see, touch and feel them at LinuxWorld. …

A few of us from Solid are up in Portland at OSCON. We’ll be showing off a new prototype of our high availability (HA) option for solidDB for MySQL. The HA option allows solidDB for MySQL to act in a hot-standby configuration where there is a primary and secondary server. The data in the primary is automatically synchronously replicated to the secondary. In the case that the primary fails, our HA Manager automatically performs a failover and the secondary server becomes the new primary. The secondary is also always available for read-only requests.

We’ll also be talking about DorsalSource, a community-focused Web site whose goal is to provide developers with easy access to builds of MySQL and related products. Come by booth 820 on Wednesday or Thursday if you want to hear more, …

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A few weeks ago, I had a chance to speak with Scott Swigart about MySQL, open source, development and community challenges, and other stuff. He sent me a link to the published interview, available on HowSoftwareIsBuilt.com. It was very interesting reading the comments of some of the other interviewees, like Stormy Peters, from OpenLogic, and Patrick Hogan, from NASA.

A few weeks back, I posted a couple of blog entries on my recent trip to China. We have seen huge MySQL download numbers from Brazil, Russia, India, China (or "BRIC") with very significant growth in the last few years in China. I tried reading a book by Robert Buderi called "Guanxi (The Art of Relationships) - Microsoft, China and Bill Gates's Plan to Win the Road Ahead" on the development of Microsoft's research lab in China. However, the title should have been a warning to me. As much as I wanted to dive into this book it was just... READ MORE

Matt asks (almost as an aside to a post on a related topic): My question: why not just buy Red Hat? Before Red Hat buys MySQL, and gives those database numbers a run for their money? Then, Larry Dingnan writes: A Credit Suisse analyst thinks BEA Systems is likely to go on the auction block in the next three to six months. And the potential buyer is two likely suspects: Private equity firms or Oracle, which indicated it has no plans to slow down its acquisition pace. I'll play Nostradamus and predict that Oracle will not buy Red Hat. Oracle... READ MORE

I wanted to write a quick shout-out to congratulate the PostgreSQL development team, the folks at Sun who work with Josh Berkus, and the folks at EnterpriseDB, all of whom contributed to the excellent benchmark results for this quarter's SPECjAppServer2004 benchmark suite. I'm looking forward to seeing Josh at OSCON in a couple weeks and meeting a few more of the PostgreSQL developers than I did last year.

I know that the PostgreSQL developer team has spent a considerable amount of time and effort improving performance bottlenecks and streamlining code for the PostgreSQL 8.2 release, and the benchmarks show the results of that hard work. It's great to see the pressure put on Oracle and the "big guys" from …

We've recently hired our first CIO at MySQL, and it's interesting to consider how the role of the CIO is different from what it used to be. MySQL has some particular challenges from an information management perspective because we have so many employees working from home around the world. Otherwise, I think the role of CIO at our company is not that different from most other young companies. But what's really changed is the nature of IT in the past six or seven years. Back in 1999 and 2000, a lot of IT effort was spent in scaling up. CEOs... READ MORE