I really thought I was done writing about MySQL for a while, but I attended a Sun/MySQL event in London today and have some shocking news to impart. It seems we’ve got MySQL all wrong.
At the event, MySQL co-founder David Axmark talked through some of the history of the MySQL project and company, confirming what has previously been reported about the origins of the database’s name.
It was, he confirmed, named after co-founder Monty Widenius’s daughter, My. …
[Read more]Joe Stump, Lead Architect, Digg. Slides should make its way at Joe’s website soon enough.
Mainly works on the backend, makes sure its scalable, can all the Digg buttons be served, et al.
Application layer is loosely coupled from your data. Whole point of SOA? You can put a service in front of the DB, and move between DB’s if required.
They do use MySQL, but its pretty vanilla.
Old habits die hard
- Data requests are sequential (I need foo, bar, bleh,
ecky)
- Data requests are blocking (When you need foo, nothing else is
happening)
- Tightly coupled (mysql_query, and if you’re using DB
abstraction layer even, you’re still using SQL… you then can’t
use CouchDB for instance)
- Scaling is not abstracted (a lot of caching are in the front
end code. Its a problem when you start scaling your teams out).
They …
Baron Schwartz gave a most interesting talk about EXPLAIN. You will definitely want to read his slides (filled with detail), when they make their way online. These notes are very sparse, just bits that I didn’t see in the slides, that Baron mentioned verbally. Plenty of good questions, and plenty of interaction.
EXPLAIN only works for SELECT queries.
How does MySQL execute queries? Optimisation happens even as the query is being executed. As the query is being optimised, some execution happens as well. Execution Plan is a data structure, not bytecode.
When EXPLAIN’s output is generated, MySQL actually executes the query. It just set’s DESCRIBE on it, rather than executing it. Everything is a JOIN to MySQL (union, SELECT 1 [simplest base case join], etc…).
key_len - to know if your table is indexed well.
rows: estimated number of rows to read, but not the number of rows in the result set. In 5.1 …
[Read more]Download the PDF: http://www.mysqlfulltextsearch.com/full_text.pdf
Default search by relevance, default sort is by relevance
Boolean search is also popular. cats AND dogs. No default sorting, so you need to order the results yourself
Phrase search
MySQL Full Text Index, only available with MyISAM, and it supports natural language and Boolean search. ft_min_word_len - 4 characters per word by default is indexed. Frequency based ranking, doesn’t count distance between words
SELECT * FROM articles WHERE MATCH (title,body) AGAINST (’database’ IN NATURAL LANGUAGE MODE);
For Boolean, you use AGAINST (’cat AND dog’ IN BOOLEAN MODE).
n-gram fulltext plugin for CJK languages are available as plugins
DRBD and MySQL FullText search? DRBD requires InnoDB, when there is a failover, DRBD needs to …
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Ahead in the Cloud - The power of Infrastructure as a
Service
CTO Amazon.com, Dr. Werner Vogels
Pretty much everyone in the audience uses Amazon!
Announced: Persistent Storage for Amazon EC2.
Hitting one page, might actually go to 250 different services, before the page is generated for you. Shows the use of a tool (Amazon internal), that graphs it.
SaaS: Develop -> Test -> Operate
Hardware costs? Software costs? Maintenance? Load balancing? Scaling? Utilisation? Idle machines? Bandwidth management? Server hosting? Storage management? High availability? All this is the differentiated heavy lifting that Amazon bases their services on.
SaaS comes at a very big cost that you have to address.
70/30 switch: 30% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated value creation; 70% of time, energy and dollars on differentiated heavy lifting.
At Amazon, we …
[Read more]I wish I had better notes, but I was enthralled by Jonathan Schwartz’s (CEO, President, Sun Microsystems) keynote. It was truly, very amazing an influential. He’s a great speaker, and very motivated (and I think he’s motivated a lot of the audience).
What is Sun’s Agenda?
Similar values, cultures, and similar dysfunction’s like any
family.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center - 500 teraflop “open” super-comptuing facility.
“Computational science is the third mode of discovery, complementing physical experimentation and theory” — Daniel Atkins III, Director, Office of Cyberinfrastruture, National Science Foundation
The industry has valid, legitimate scientific purpose.
Improving society as a result of that understanding. What does it take to fuel developing economies? Or to make new scientific discoveries?
In Africa, a bank is giving mobile phones, to allow folk to …
[Read more]Live blogging from Marten Mickos’ (SVP Database Group) keynote at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2008.
Why did Sun acquire us?
The culture and the vision. Biggest match with Sun. “Network is
the computer” and “Best Online Database”. Great affinity.
Its a 1 billion dollar vote for the LAMP stack.
Integrating better with OpenOffice.org, run better with Glassfish, and so on. Now, performance and scaling is number one, to make databases run faster. It will take time, but it will be very positive.
This conference itself is just as big as LinuxWorld was seven years ago.
An amazing photo of burning the IPO Prospectus - a bonfire in Santa Cruz. Getting rid of the past!
Scale exponentially, but keep the cost growth at a linear scale. World is flat - build your software in Russia, China, etc. and deploy elsewhere even. Fail fast? Remember to scale fast.
If the whole world is …
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2008 MySQL Application of the Year
Social Network - MySQL powered with over 70 million active
users (Facebook)
Mobile operator - Highly available LAMP platform at the
heart of SMS, mobile and CRM applications (Virgin Mobile
France)
eCommerce site - Built caching tier using MySQL for 4
billion transactions per day (eBay)
2008 MySQL Partner of the Year
Open source backup solution (Zmanda)
Expanding support for open source (Microsoft)
Leading reseller (Computercenter)
2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year
Code Contributor (Baron Schwartz)
Quality Contributor (Diego Medina)
Community Advocate (Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (again!))
…
[Read more]In-between Marten’s keynote, Rich Green, EVP Software, Sun Microsystems, comes up on stage, and here’s my live-blog.
He talked about the famous dinner last year, for buying MySQL. Autonomy reigns supreme in MySQL. MySQL continue at their same course and speed. The plan is the plan, until there is a new plan - and there is no new plan.
Sun has a heterogeneous platform. Many partners, including Dell, IBM, Intel, and so on. Lots of open source in terms of software. The cultures, discourse, intellectual arguments, its an excellent mash up, this Sun and MySQL. Don’t Panic! There is no change for what has been an incredibly successful thing.
Sun’s Continued MySQL Commitment:
I first decided to try how things were in Windows Vista land, the moment I was told during a talk of mine that MySQL refused to install on Vista. I gave it a twirl (after disabling User Account Control - UAC) and found that I got a rather quaint error message from the MySQL Server Instance Config Wizard (MySQLInstanceConfig.exe) [this after it failed to start once the installer was complete]:
The application has failed to start because its side-by-side configuration is incorrect. Please see the application event log for more details.
I hopped over to the event log (Event Viewer), and the error displayed was:
Activation context generation failed for “C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin\MySQLInstanceConfig.exe”.Error in manifest or policy file “C:\Program Files\MySQL\MySQL Server 5.0\bin\MySQLInstanceConfig.exe” on line 6. The value “asAdministrator” of attribute “level” in element …
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