non-tech on SWiK

Its a Good Time to be Involved with MySQL

Thu, 09 Oct 2008 18:13:26 -0700

In many parts of the world times are uncertain. I live in the United States and we are in the middle of a financial meltdown that many fear may be as bad as the Great Depression. Because the world’s economies are so linked it is causing severe distress in many other countries as well. I just read that two trillion dollars have been lost from nest eggs in the last 15 months here in the States.

I am not going to turn this into a rant about who is right, who is wrong, or what should be done about it to resolve the problem. This isn’t the place. I probably don’t even have the right answer. I have a different angle.

If you are involved with MySQL as a database administrator, or if you work directly with MySQL in some other aspect, you can probably breathe a little easier. Why is this? MySQL Server has grown in market penetration for a long time. It is now a significant section of the RDBMS pie. I predict that this market penetration will only continue to grow. As this economic downturn/recession/whatever continues, companies will look harder for ways to save money. What better way to do so than replace your proprietary RDBMS that can cost you significant amounts of money, with MySQL Server? For all intents, the same functionality is there, the speed and flexibility is certainly there, and there is a giant company behind MySQL now, providing “enterprise-ready” support.

The market is crying right now for MySQL database administrators. We don’t cost any more than Oracle or Microsoft DBAs, you know. Just a couple of years ago, very few companies hired MySQL DBAs. They hired developers who also did database administration, or a system administrators who also managed the MySQL server. Now, as the number of database servers increases and the amount of data grows they want real, honest-to-goodness database administrators. If you have production experience with MySQL server in any significant amount you will not have any problems finding a job. I don’t think this is going to change anytime soon. So, even if your company succumbs to the times, there are others out there who need your experience. Don’t be dismayed! (more…)

MySQL Reference Manual Search

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 09:59:34 -0700

Martin Brown’s blog shows a pretty good way of navigating the MySQL Reference Manual. It’s worth noting, however, that finding the different topics has been a lot easier since mysql.com started using a Google appliance for its search.

I use the documentation all the time and have been doing so for years (I won’t claim that I can remember +2000 pages worth of ever-changing content). A few years back, I stopped using the search box on dev.mysql.com because the result sets were enormous, with lots of unrelated references. My technique was to do a Google site search:

For replication use the expression: replication site:http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/index.html

The result set was smaller and I would find what I was looking for relatively easily, usually within the first page.

Since the documentation team implemented the Alphabetical Index, it has succeeded the Google search as my favorite way to get the information I needed. Things are easy to find and never more than a couple of URLs away.

(more…)

Log Buffer #116: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 10:13:46 -0700

Welcome to the 116^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

This was the week of Oracle Open World (OOW), Oracle’s gigantic annual get-together in San Francisco — always the heaviest week in Oracle blogs, so let’s start there.

For day-by-day coverage of OOW on the ground, I recommend Doug’s Oracle Blog: OOW Day 1, OOW Day 1.5, OOW Day 2, OOW Day 3.

Tom Kyte shared a podcast from OOW 2008, and interview with Oracle Magazine editor Tom Haunert, in which Tom, “ . . . stirs things up in this conversation about Oracle OpenWorld happenings, a new approach to publishing, and the trouble with triggers.”

Oracle teased everyone right at the beginning with word that CEO Larry Ellison’s keynote, carrying the title “Extreme Performance,” would introduce something big and new. And there was much speculation in the blogging world, some of it quite perspicacious. “Big and new” was soon going by the tantalizing nom-de-hype “X”. And before Larry’s keynote was even over (before he mothballed the black mock-turtleneck for another year), X was no longer unknown.

Writes Lucas Jellema on the AMIS Technology blog — The secret is out: Oracle launches The Database Machine - becoming a hardware vendor! “The big announcement that had loomed over the conference has been made. Oracle - in joint partnership with HP - introduces the worlds fastest hardware for running databases and especially data warehouses: the Exadata Storage Server.” Click through for Lucas’s précis of what it’s all about.

On blogs.oracle.com, Jack Flynn has some video excerpted from the keynote.

Lucas’s story has a picture of the thing itself, albeit a somewhat blurry one. Here’s a better image of one of the two new machines, the Exadata. Oooh, just look at it! Cor!

(more…)

Much Oracle Ado

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 09:24:57 -0700

If you track the database world outside of MySQL, you know that Oracle is having a conference this week. It’s called Oracle Open World. Drips with irony doesn’t it? But this post isn’t about Oracle being open or otherwise.

This post is about the announcement being made Wednesday. It seems Oracle has a surprise. A pretty well kept surprise. It’s such a big deal that Larry Ellison himself is making the announcement.

Some people, including some of my colleagues at Pythian, are speculating that this is going to be an announcement about a share-nothing clustering solution.

In the first quarter of 2007, I interviewed with a company in Atlanta, seeking my first full-time job as a MySQL database administrator. They were an online company building a social-networking website with a virtual world interface (kind of like Second Life, from what I understood). They were using an (at the time) fairly unstable version of MySQL 5.1 only because it offered clustering with the ability to store data on disk while keeping the indexes in memory. Previously, in version 5.0, everything had to be stored in-memory. Much has improved with MySQL clustering since that time.

While I don’t know for certain that Larry is going to announce in-memory clustering, I kind of hope that is what it’s all about, because it would demonstrate this: Oracle is walking a trail blazed by MySQL.

Log Buffer #115: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:10:59 -0700

Welcome to the 115^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

I must thank Paul for taking over at last minute for LB#114 last week, when, as he put it, “ . . . a killer combo of painkillers and the pain that the painkillers cant kill . . . ” reduced to me a less-than Log-Buffer-capable state. Or to be more precise, to a writhing, benighted gargoyle of misery. (Too colorful?)

Anyway, the good news is that I’m better. Not all better, mind you. Between the tooth thing and my spending all my working time on a special project, there was nothing left for poor old Log Buffer. So, I face the choice: throw it open to you, LB’s loyal readers for your contributions; or adopt Paul’s approach¹ from last week, and use the nifty AideRSS.

I’m going to bet on our readers. Let’s hear from you with your picks for best database blogs of the week gone by. I promise you a real, proper Log Buffer next week, from someone. If not me, well, Nick Westerlund still wants his go, and Ward Pond is back looking for a slot.

Until then, wish me luck with my angry tooth.

1. The truth is that I was briefly worried about having my job taken away by software. My concerns were allayed, at least partially, when I saw that the original software-built list of database blogs also included an item from “manscaping.com”, which I’m fairly sure had little or nothing to do with database administration.

No Official Word Yet on Monty and Sun?.

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 10:09:20 -0700

Smithy commented on my blog post about the rumor of Monty leaving Sun with a pointer to an article on ComputerWorld Finland that mentions:

Widenius told to Computerworld Finland on Friday that negotiations are still on.

Meanwhile, Matt Asay, who seems to think Monty actually has left Sun (even though all other reports have been clear to mention that this is unconfirmed), writes of a new investment Monty has made.

Last week I speculated about the impact of Monty leaving Sun. In the end, if he does stay, it’s wonderful for Sun. If he leaves, he will no doubt go on to continue to be wonderful for the database community at large, much like Jim Starkey.

But until Monty Says, nothing is official.

MySQL Camp, April 2009

Thu, 11 Sep 2008 11:08:27 -0700

Last week Giuseppe Maxia announced the Call for Papers for the 2009 MySQL Users Conference and Expo, and also announced that there would be an unconference, MySQL Camp, organized by me.

It’s true! Currently MySQL Camp is set to happen, though I am still working out details with Colin Charles and Giuseppe Maxia. We had originally talked about having MySQL Camp on Tuesday and Wednesday, but I would like to add Monday so that folks attending the conference who are not attending a tutorial have a choice on Monday. I am also looking into lunch options, since the conference venue does not have many options within walking distance.

There will be plenty of collaborative effort, of course, which will appear later on. If you have input, you can always e-mail me, or leave a comment here. Whether there is a topic you really want to see, or some logistical detail you always see that’s missed, I would like to hear about it.

(yes, I said I wanted you to give me your opinions!)

Sheeri?s Sordid Past

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:57:03 -0700

I confess — I have not always been an exclusive MySQL user. I have fooled around with other DBMSs. I was young, inexperienced, and I needed the money, I swear!

This comes about because I was doing some electronic de-crufting….From a file last modified on 10:50 am on 2005-06-30:

> more addcatalog.sh
#!/bin/sh

 db2 catalog tcpip node $1 remote $2 server 50000
 db2 terminate
 db2 catalog database sample as $2 at node $1
 db2 terminate

# [db2inst1@midgard db2inst1]$ db2sql92 -a db2inst3/password -d coworkername

And from the same time-frame there’s also:

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Monty Widenius, One of MySQL?s Founding Fathers, Leaves Sun/MySQL

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 23:57:03 -0700

ValleyWag reports that MySQL’s Monty Widenius is no longer “MySQL’s”. Some folks have known that Monty has not been happy in his current position; this leads me to believe the rumor is true (though of course an official announcement is the only confirmation).

So what does this mean for MySQL? Well, honestly, if a product falls apart because one out of 300 employees leaves, it was probably doomed anyway. There are plenty of capable employees left, and being owned by Sun means that there are many more resources they can tap as well.

What will the official company announcement be? My prediction is (more…)

OpenSQL Camp Has a New Home

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:56:01 -0700

Though the event is still happening in Charlottesville, VA Nov. 14-16th (Fri night through Sunday), the new web page for OpenSQL Camp is http://www.opensqlcamp.org. The content has been ported over to MediaWiki, and a captcha has been put in place that is activated on any page change that adds an external URL.

Whether you are into MySQL, PostgreSQL, Drizzle, or some other open source SQL database, go forth and register for OpenSQL Camp, without having to login! (Disclosure: if you do not create a login, your IP is tracked.)

Log Buffer #112: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 10:56:24 -0700

Welcome to the 112^th edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs.

First, thanks to last issue’s contributors–Joe Izenman, Dan Norris, and Jason Massie–for snatching victory from the jaws of defeat and making LB#111 a worthwhile read. That’s what it’s all about!

Oracle’s up first, starting with our old friend Doug Burns and his Time Matters series, in which he holds up to the light the concept of DB Time: “. . . [the] total time spent by user processes either actively working or actively waiting in a database call.” He continues, “There’s a lot more I could say about DB Time. Like all of the best performance concepts or methods (e.g. YAPP, Method-R) it can seem so obvious as to not be worth saying, but contains an enormous amount of common sense and technical rigour.”

Arup Nanda writes about the time he spent Diagnosing Library Cache Latch Contention. About half an hour, as it happened, but he’s a real pro, and his analysis just goes to show. To quote, Nuno Souto–who makes the best blog endorsements– “Damn useful stuff . . . bookmarked.”

Tanel Poder has another script for you to fall in love with, which makes its debut in flexible sampling of any V$ or X$ view with sample.sql. It is, writes Tanel, “ . . . a simple but powerful sqlplus script for ad-hoc sampling of any V$ view.”

Kenneth Downs, the Database Programmer, offers Advanced Algorithm: Sequencing Dependencies, a smart look at satisfying dependencies in databases. What does that mean? Well for example, Kenneth writes, “All popular Linux distributions have a package installation system in which each package lists its required dependencies. If you want to install a large number of packages in one shot, producing a tangled bunch of related dependencies, today’s algorithm can be used to work them all out.”

That’s the kind of task for which we humans use tools like mind maps. Jason Arneil shares his ASM Mind Map.

Laurent Schneider went off-road and came back something not on the map at all: the difference between rollbac and rollback.

(more…)

MySQL Community Version

Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:11:04 -0700

The MySQL Community version is different in theory from the Enterprise version in relation to the following points:

0) It’s free
1) It has community patches
2) It is released less often
3) It is tested less strictly

In reality, the first two differences are not applicable — the binaries and source code for Enterprise can be freely and legally downloaded at http://mirror.provenscaling.com/mysql/enterprise/. The process for adding community patches to the MySQL source code has not been changed sufficiently to be able to actually add community patches and encourage more community development.

I understand that MySQL (and now Sun) needs to make money. I also understand that development takes a lot of effort, and seeing an ROI is important. The Community/Enterprise split was designed to have tradeoffs on both sides. However, currently there is no benefit to running the Community version.

While I would love to magically make community contributions easy to put into a Community version of MySQL, logistically that’s not possible right now. I do have a solution that is possible right now, that takes very few additional resources, and is something I think will be acceptable to the MySQL community and to Sun — assuming the MySQL executives can admit that the Community version has not been working out.

I propose to make the Community release an older version of an Enterprise release. In this way, Enterprise users still get value in having bugs fixed and features added first, and Community users can choose to upgrade if they want the latest features. There is very little overhead in having Community releases, with no overhead in having to manage two trees/branches/whatever from both a code and build standpoint. Maintaining the promise of immediate security releases, 4 code releases per year and 2 binary releases per year becomes trivial.

The question is, of course, how far back the Community version should go. And should there be a delay (ie, release the January Enterprise version as the June Community version) or not?

I recommend that security releases be immediate (as they currently are) and for all other releases there should be a delay of at least 6 months, perhaps 1 year. Certainly that’s enough of an incentive to get customers to upgrade without having folks feel like the Community ersion is crippleware.

What do folks think of this as a solution to the Enterprise/Community split dilemma?

Why Drizzle? video

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 14:50:24 -0700

Brian Aker gives the “zinger” lightning talk about the newly announced “Drizzle”. This short (under 8 minutes) video captures Aker’s highlights of why he started the Drizzle project and how Drizzle is different from MySQL — both in what has been removed from MySQL and what features Drizzle can accomodate.

Play the video directly in your browser at http://technocation.org/node/576/play or download the 116 Mb file at http://technocation.org/node/576/download.

How Much Does a Damian Conway? (Keynote Video)

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:51:09 -0700

The last keynote of Tuesday evening at OSCon 2008 was entitled “Temporarily Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming in Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces…..Made Easy!”

Damian Conway is a speaker that should not be missed. He spends his time hacking perl to do fascinating and obscure feats of technology such as time travel. This video is just over an hour of rolling laughter that will entertain you into realizing what a genius Damian Conway is.

Now, most of my exposure is within the MySQL Community, so if folks could pass the links to the video along to other communities, that would be great.

(This video is at 1.0 Mb/sec. Watch the video online at http://technocation.org/node/571/play or download it at http://technocation.org/node/571/download. Please do not download the file if you are on the conference network, these links are not time sensitive.)

MySQL User Group in Malta

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 12:50:19 -0700

That’s right. MySQL now has a user group in Paradise.

I am always looking into connecting with other MySQL professionals, to share the laughs and tears, and to enjoy what we love working with every day, MySQL. I have always wanted to bring us all together, and I thought that this would have a good chance of doing so. Since I live in Malta, this made for the perfect location for it. If you live in Malta, or perhaps in Sicily or Tunisia, and want to take a trip, please do join us at our first meeting.

We will be having our first meeting in Mellieha, and please RSVP to me personally via email, westerlund (at) pythian.com if you want to attend. The date is set for Thursday, July 31^st at 6pm. We will discuss the current use of MySQL, its future, and whatever else comes into mind. I myself would love to hear usage stories for our first meeting, so we all get an understanding of how MySQL is used in Malta and environs.

I will make sure there are some refreshments to be had.

Let’s keep ourself educated and aware of how other people solve problems that we all sometimes encounter, as well as their interesting technical solutions. And let’s have some fun doing so!

?It?s Not Dead, It?s Just Resting!? a.k.a., MySQL, Ethics and Death

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 08:50:19 -0700

In http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/07/01/should-we-proclaim-mysql-community-edition-dead/, Peter Zaitsev wonders if MySQL’s community edition is dead.

The title of Peter’s inquiry is somewhat misleading, as the database itself works fine. He clarifies a bit with, “there suppose to be 2 yearly binary releases (which are overdue) and 4 predictable yearly source releases, which we have not seen either.” I thought it was clear that “2 per year” doesn’t mean “one every six months”. It’s been eight months, sure. And I don’t actually believe that MySQL is going to have one source release per month until November, to make up for the lack of source releases. However, it’s certainly possible, if not probable.

The fact remains, however, that if you’re just looking for stable, recent, binary MySQL Community release, you might not find it. MySQL offers two out of three — stable and binary Community releases. Not recent, but I think it’s okay to charge for the most up-to-date version. In my experience only about half of the production environments out there have switched to 5.0, and many are running 4.1 and 4.0 still.

At the low end, a license costs just under USD$600. The requirement to buy a license to get the most recent version is a mere inconvenience, not a business-stopper. It’s not like MySQL is forcing everyone to run on version 3.23 unless they pay $10,000 per license. Charging a modest amount for the most up-to-date version is not a bad thing.

It would be nice to have been aware of that ahead of time, but MySQL as a company has not been so great at organizing and having all its ducks in a row. In fact this is where I hope Sun can really help MySQL out, as it has a reputation (a deserved one, in my experience) of being more highly organized.

Have you heard of Hanlon’s razor? “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”

(more…)

What to do When Your Data Smiles At You?

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:59:00 -0700

I have *never* had this happen to me.

Maybe it’s because it’s MySQL 6.0.4, maybe it’s because it’s on Windows, or perhaps I am just up working too late.

I have seen mojibake before, but usually it is unintelligible. But this? After I post this I am backing away slowly from my computer.

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3
Server version: 6.0.4-alpha-community MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use test;
Database changed
mysql> create table bits (val bit);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

mysql> insert into bits (val) VALUES (1),(0),(1),(1),(0);
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.05 sec)
Records: 5  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from bits;
+------+
| val  |
+------+
| ?    |
|      |
| ?    |
| ?    |
|      |
+------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

Has your data ever smiled at you?

What to do When Your Data Smiles At You?..

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 20:59:17 -0700

I have *never* had this happen to me.

Maybe it’s because it’s MySQL 6.0.4, maybe it’s because it’s on Windows, or perhaps I am just up working too late.

I have seen mojibake before, but usually it is unintelligible. But this? After I post this I am backing away slowly from my computer.

Welcome to the MySQL monitor.  Commands end with ; or \g.
Your MySQL connection id is 3
Server version: 6.0.4-alpha-community MySQL Community Server (GPL)

Type 'help;' or '\h' for help. Type '\c' to clear the buffer.

mysql> use test;
Database changed
mysql> create table bits (val bit);
Query OK, 0 rows affected (0.09 sec)

mysql> insert into bits (val) VALUES (1),(0),(1),(1),(0);
Query OK, 5 rows affected (0.05 sec)
Records: 5  Duplicates: 0  Warnings: 0

mysql> select * from bits;
+------+
| val  |
+------+
| ?    |
|      |
| ?    |
| ?    |
|      |
+------+
5 rows in set (0.00 sec)

mysql>

Has your data ever smiled at you?

Thanks!

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 09:00:19 -0700

I just wanted to thank everyone who participated in the survey that Mark Schoonover and I created. My endless thanks goes to Mark who did a lot of work on this.

The results will be coming out in the Summer issue of MySQL Magazine which will be online July the 15th. I am putting together the articles now and it looks like it’s going to be a great one!

The Guru is In: Usenix 2008, Boston

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:01:14 -0700

If you are attending Usenix 2008 at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Boston, you can meet me and ask your burning MySQL questions at my “The Guru is In” session. On Friday, June 27th, 2008 from 2 - 3:30 pm in Constitution B, I will be helping folks out by optimizing queries and schemas, teaching general principles of working with MySQL databases, and answering (to the best of my ability) any other question they may throw at me.

The event details are at:
http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix08/tech/#fri

Hope to see you there!

What Does GA (General Availability) Mean?

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:19:47 -0700

I have a question I wanted to throw out. The term “GA” gets batted around all the time as meaning, the production-ready version of MySQL server. However, googling for quite a bit, I can’t find a definition for GA (other than what I stated above, i.e. production-ready). What does this mean in terms of bugs? Features? Anything else I might be missing?

I believe it means that there are no known “critical” (whatever that means) bugs and there will definitely be no more features added. Can anyone point me to a good definition?

MySQL Server 5.1.25 (RC) Released

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 11:18:51 -0700

In case you haven’t heard, on Monday, MySQL released the next RC of 5.1.25. It is available to the community, so download it now and take it for a spin!

http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.1.html.

Billy Joel and Databases

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 14:02:37 -0700

So, we have all heard that Billy Joel played a concert at Oracle’s OpenWorld in 2007.

What follows is an actual IRC conversation among Don Seiler, Dave Edwards, and myself:

(4:02:46 PM) don: ha @ Billy Joel at OOW
(4:03:38 PM) dave: “We didn’t fire the startup…”
(4:07:53 PM) don: “we didn’t start the backup”?
(4:12:53 PM) dave: “Don’t go changin’ . . . your slave and master”
(4:20:19 PM) ***sheeri shoots Dave
(4:20:49 PM) sheeri: “I don’t want clever replication, we never could have come this far”
(4:24:05 PM) sheeri: “And the server sounds like an aero-plane, and replication chugs along as it must…and the inserts go on, replication corrupts, and I say “Man, now I’m workin’ all night!”

(4:24:29 PM) dave: “I said ‘ls -u’ . . . that’s for access”
[”I said I love you . . . that’s forever”]

(4:24:30 PM) don: UP-TIME GIRL
(4:34:09 PM) dave: “Say it’s not wrong, execution plan!”
(4:43:39 PM) sheeri: Where’s my execution plan, oh man?
[Sing us a song of a piano man]
(4:45:52 PM) sheeri: Go ahead with your schema, leave me alone!

Comment here with your own database-themed parody of a Billy Joel song. Perhaps if we get enough MySQL-themed entries, we can get him to come to the MySQL Conference in April.

That and maybe thousands of dollars………..

Open Source - The Foundation of Civilization

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 20:00:51 -0700

Almost 2 years ago, in How Open Do You Have To Be To Be Open Source? I wrote:

Google and Yahoo! are not rich because they have secrets. They are rich because they started with secrets, but I believe they could safely let their secrets out with very little loss of revenue.

Matt Asay’s recent post Google’s slow transformation into an open, transparent company made me dig up that post, which by many standards is old in terms of time, but it’s only now that some of this change is actually happening.

Matt ponders,

It remains to be seen what, if anything, Google will actually open, but I trust its track record on living up to its word more than Microsoft’s, which also went through a flurry of “We’re now really open!” announcements lately that actually netted the industry…not much.

In interesting news, at last night’s Boston Sun/MySQL event (more on that in another post), the question was asked if the panel thought that Microsoft was really serious about open sourcing their software(s) and what that would mean for open source software.

I couldn’t wait to jump in with my answer — and even though I had to wait, I did eventually say what was on my mind.

If Microsoft opened all of their code tomorrow, how big of a *developer* community would they have? By that I mean, how many people would say “yeah, all right! I’m going to make this code better!” and how many would take a look at the internals and feel like they’d just been on a roller coaster?

Open source is the foundation of civilization. The title of this post mentions that, and now I will explain why.

(more…)

Twitter Should Get Back to Basics

Thu, 29 May 2008 15:15:55 -0700

Twitter has had many outages recently. On May 17th, 2008 http://blog.twitter.com/2007/05/devils-in-details.html was posted and says:

What went wrong? We checked in code to provide more accurate pagination, to better distribute and optimize our messaging system?basically we just kept tweaking when we should have called it a day. Details are great but getting too caught up in them is a mistake. I’ve been CEO of Twitter for two months now and this an awesome lesson learned. We’re seeing the bigger picture and Twitter is back. Please contact us if something isn’t working right (with Twitter that is).

(in other news, that post was made on May 17th and does not show up on http://blog.twitter.com, which it should, between the May 16th and May 19th posts. I found a reference in other posts and had to search the site to find that post).

A real “awesome lesson learned” is “do not tweak production without testing first.” In every job I have had I have first learned and then taught the concept of “test everything possible.” Which Twitter has not learned yet, because http://blog.twitter.com/2008/05/not-true.html, posted on Tuesday May 20th, states:

We caused a database to fail during a routine update early this afternoon.

As someone who has years of experience working with MySQL, and before that was a systems adminsitrator; as someone who was referred to as “the MySQL Queen” yesterday (by someone who wanted me to test their product, so yes, they were flattering me); I can assure you:

no matter how “routine” a change is, if you do it on production without testing it first, you are playing with fire, and 95% of the fires caused by not testing first are completely preventable.

I will repeat this, because repetition is important to learning concepts.

no matter how “routine” a change is, if you do it on production without testing it first, you are playing with fire, and 95% of the fires caused by not testing first are completely preventable.

With a proper testing environment, 19 out of 20 “whoops, didn’t expect THAT from a routine change!” issues are caught. And I can tell you that often “routine changes” cause unexpected results.

Now, I was online during an outage, and http://twitter.com/home was showing their “site isn’t working” page for at least 3 hours between 2 and 5 am EDT yesterday (Tuesday, May 20th, 2008).

So…..there is no read-only copy around that Twitter could use? Maybe I cannot tweet, but I should at least be able to read what was done before!

Of course, since last week Twitter has done the opposite — often I can see the most recent 20 or so posts, but not anything prior. Now, I understand that it is hard to get all the histories for the people I follow. But it only needs to be done once, and could then be cached — “Posts from who Sheeri follows on 5/20″. It would not be difficult, and I would be OK with the functionality changing such that “once you follow a new person, their tweets prior to when you followed them do not show up in the history.”

Alternatively, you could go the snarky way and say: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/05/20/twitter-something-is-technically-wrong/ states:
What would be great is if Twitter just moved their blog to another platform so that it doesn?t fail when users need it most.

I am not a huge user of rails. But I will say that given the content of the public announcements, the platform is not the problem. It is the code release process that is the problem. Maybe there’s “agile development” happening, paired programming and code reviews. But there is not adequate testing.

Twitter — if you truly need scaling help, please ask for help — I know Pythian would be happy to help. However, if it really is as it seems — that basic good practice is not being followed — I would like to remind you that backups are really important too, just on the off chance that backups are not happening.

The Architecture Layer

Tue, 13 May 2008 09:14:59 -0700

Contemporary software engineering models include many loosely-defined layers. Database developers might help with other layers, but for the most part a database administrator’s domain is the persistence layer.

Presentation

Application

Business Logic

Persistence (also called Storage)

The Daily WTF has an article on The Mythical Business Layer makes the case for not separating the business layer and the application layer:

A good system (as in, one that’s maintainable by other people) has no choice but to duplicate, triplicate, or even-more-licate business logic. If Account_Number is a seven-digit required field, it should be declared as CHAR(7) NOT NULL in the database and have some client-side code to validate it was entered as seven digits. If the system allows data entry in other places by other means, that means more duplication of the Account_Number logic is required.

It almost goes without saying that business logic changes frequently and in unpredictable ways. The solution to this problem is not a cleverly coded business layer. Unfortunately, it?s much more boring than that. Accommodating change can only be accomplished through careful analysis and thorough testing.

I will call this merged business/application layer the “functional layer.”

The serious scaling requirements posed by most applications these days call for partitioning, clustering, sharding or some other term for “dividing up the data so it does not become the bottleneck”. Enter the “architecture layer”.

“Wait a minute,” I hear you asking. “Isn’t that just the persistence layer?”

Yes and no. To me, there’s a difference between the storage and the architecture of said storage. The database schema for storing a user profile is a persistence layer issue. Figuring out which database instance to go to is an architecture layer issue.

This is an important distinction for me. Many folks are coding the architecture layer directly into the functional layer. A “save_profile()” API function might call an ORM to deal with the persistence, or it will have MySQL (or other database) connection handling and queries. However, the database will grow, and at some point you will find yourself wanting to split the data [more].

This type of information, like the presentation layer, needs to be separate. Why should the application care whether save_profile(’Sheeri’,'hair color’,'blonde’) accesses database1 or database2? More importantly, why should there be major code changes to the functional layer if the architecture changes? Just like no functionality has changed when you change your website color from blue to red, there is no functionality change when you go from splitting data between 2 database servers to splitting among 3, or 10.

For me, the persistence layer is about how the data is stored. Which, explicitly and for the record, I also believe should be separate from the functional layer — if you store hair color and eye color in one table or 2, the functionality of the application has not changed; all that’s needed is a change in how that data is stored and retrieved.

The architecture layer is all about where the data is stored. Early forms of the architecture layer are configuration files, though most would not call that a “layer”. Database administrators should be able to change the architecture of the database system without requiring mucking about in the application’s functional code.

Thoughts?

2008 MySQL Conference Videos, Notes, Slides and Photos!

Thu, 01 May 2008 07:11:36 -0700

All of the videos from the 2008 MySQL Conference have been processed and uploaded. Links to the videos, slides, notes, photos for each presentation are all on the mega-conference page at:
http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008Notes

This represents many hours of my own toil, but it also reflects plenty of people who have blogged, edited the wiki pages and speakers who wrote and gave tutorials and presentations. I am proud of everyone’s efforts to offer so many learning resources for free….

Enjoy! EDIT: I forgot to thank Jay, the folks at O’Reilly and all the speakers for giving me explicit permission to video and freely offer their presentations.

If you know of any video, audio, notes, slides, photos, etc that are not linked, please link them at the wiki page. If you can’t or won’t, please comment here and I will update the wiki for you.

Please note that there’s still some work to be done for a volunteer — Currently there is no one page where you can get all the videos, notes and slides for a presentation. The Forge Wiki page linked above is very close — it is missing many presentations and their corresponding slides.

O’Reilly has all of the slides speakers submitted at http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2008/public/schedule/presentations/. If someone or a few folks work on linking the slides on the O’Reilly site to the presentations on the Forge Wiki page at http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2008Notes, then the Forge Wiki page will be comprehensive and folks can go to one page to get any and all information about a presentation at the conference.

MySQL Community Member of the Year Award Musings

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 20:23:48 -0700

(If you want $100, you will have to read the entire blog post. Sorry for the tease, but I did not want folks to miss out on the opportunity to win!)

By now it is no surprise that I won one of the three 2008 MySQL Community Member of the Year awards. And folks may know that I won the same award last year.

One interesting fact you may not know: during the 2006 MySQL Awards Ceremony, where Giuseppe Maxia, Roland Bouman, Markus Popp and Rasmus Lerdorf won community awards, I thought to myself,

Next year I want to be on that stage, collecting that award.

Well, I did that and then some! (note that the image below is both of the awards, side by side, with no photoshopping).

But this post is not about me. This blog post is about you. More specifically, I am going to detail in this blog post the secrets to my success. This year, I thought to myself, “how can I make it so I am not on this stage receiving this award next year?”

So here is my challenge to you. I will open source my methods, and in return I will give $100 to each 2009 MySQL Community Member of the Year (in whatever form they want, whether it’s US cash, a $100 Amazon.com gift certificate, a donation to an organization, whatever).

April 2006 - March 2007

154 blog posts

3 User Group/conference presentations

Organized 12 User Group meetings

Produced 2 Videos

Produced 11 Podcasts (started Nov. 2006)

1 Grant

Google Summer of Code mentor– full disclosure, the $500 mentor incentive went directly to MySQL and helped pay for the new MySQL Forge servers, so my only payment was a T-shirt.

April 2007 - March 2008

94 blog posts

4 User Group/conference presentations (+1 lightning talk)

Organized 11 User Group meetings

Produced 6 Videos plus all the videos from the mysql user conference (available at http://technocation.org/content/2007-mysql-user-conference-and-expo-presentations-and-videos

Produced 14 Podcasts

2 Grants

Besides the above, other ideas for community involvement are:

Forum/list involvement

Volunteering for the Documentation team

Helping to organize user-based conferences

I have only listed non-technical ways to win the award, and only what I could think of. The sky is the limit!

Video: Who is the Dick on My Site Keynote

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 18:24:14 -0700

I have already blogged about this keynote at http://www.pythian.com/blogs/948/liveblogging-who-is-the-dick-on-my-site.

If you are interested in actually seeing the video, the 286 Mb .wmv file can be downloaded at http://technocation.org/videos/original/mysqlconf2008/2008_04_17_panelDick.wmv and played through your browser by clicking the “play” link at http://tinyurl.com/55c5ps. This is not to be missed!

A Challenge to MySQL Employees

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 15:17:39 -0700

Keith Murphy wrote about the open/closed source debacle and the first comment on that post was:

Monty makes all this money from the Sun acquisition, and pretends to be a free software advocate. How much did he make? How much is he giving back to the MySQL community?

Now, Keith rightfully met this with “grow up”. However, I want to point out that many people in the MySQL employee pool benefited from the sale, not just Monty. I also want to point out that Monty devoted years of his life to developing MySQL long before it was ever profitable.

According to Sun’s press release, “Sun will pay approximately $800 million in cash in exchange for all MySQL stock and assume approximately $200 million in options. The transaction is expected to close in late Q3 or early Q4 of Sun’s fiscal 2008….. The deal is expected to be accretive to FY10 operating income on a GAAP basis.”

Now, there’s financial mumbo-jumbo in there, but basically what that means is in all likelihood, Monty actually has not received any real money yet. And with 20% of the sale being in options (not stock, just options, which means that there is the option to buy stock, so there’s nothing free there), that’s even less cold hard cash floating around.

But I present a challenge to MySQL employees who have derived tangible benefits from the sale to Sun: what percentage have you put back into the MySQL community, and how?

(and thinking outside the box is OK — time is money, so I am OK with you directly translating the number of hours you’ve worked on community projects into $$ given your approximate hourly salary).

For instance, Brian Aker’s list of software is impressive, and of the 28 projects explicitly listed (see “Project list” on the right-hand side, and I’d bet there’s more in the actual repository) I’d guess fewer than 5 were done on time paid for by anyone (much less MySQL/Sun).

I know that Giuseppe Maxia’s mysql sandbox is a project he works on during non-MySQL/Sun time.

But I’d love to see comments on what folks are doing, even without percentages of money and such, because I am willing to wager that most of the folks who work for MySQL give plenty back to the community on non-company time. My theory is based on the fact that most MySQLers that I’ve met do not see working at MySQL as “their job”, they see it as “I get paid to do what I love doing, and would do anyway.”

non-tech on SWiK

Its a Good Time to be Involved with MySQL

MySQL Reference Manual Search

Log Buffer #116: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

Much Oracle Ado

Log Buffer #115: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

No Official Word Yet on Monty and Sun?.

MySQL Camp, April 2009

Sheeri?s Sordid Past

Monty Widenius, One of MySQL?s Founding Fathers, Leaves Sun/MySQL

OpenSQL Camp Has a New Home

Log Buffer #112: A Carnival of the Vanities for DBAs

MySQL Community Version

Why Drizzle? video

How Much Does a Damian Conway? (Keynote Video)

MySQL User Group in Malta

?It?s Not Dead, It?s Just Resting!? a.k.a., MySQL, Ethics and Death

What to do When Your Data Smiles At You?

What to do When Your Data Smiles At You?..

Thanks!

The Guru is In: Usenix 2008, Boston

What Does GA (General Availability) Mean?

MySQL Server 5.1.25 (RC) Released

Billy Joel and Databases

Open Source - The Foundation of Civilization

Twitter Should Get Back to Basics

The Architecture Layer

2008 MySQL Conference Videos, Notes, Slides and Photos!

MySQL Community Member of the Year Award Musings

Video: Who is the Dick on My Site Keynote

A Challenge to MySQL Employees

Its a Good Time to be Involved with MySQL