Colin Charles Agenda

Good news, MySQL 5.1.26-rc has been released. From the release notes: “MySQL 5.1.26-rc is slated to be the last release candidate before we declare MySQL 5.1 as “production ready” (GA).”

If I were you, I’d start testing it out in environments that you’re planning to run MySQL in, or upgrade to 5.1 in. Feedback and testing to iron out issues, is important, so if you find a bug that affects you, report it!

In other news, on the Sun Developer Network (SDN) site, there’s a couple of resources such as the Python Developer Center and the Ruby Developer Center. At MySQL, we’ve got the DevZone, focusing on languages such as Ruby and Python, with MySQL use. However, the resources can definitely be improved upon, and maybe there should be more synergy with SDN, if its getting more eyeballs than the DevZone. Thoughts on how to improve resources for developers? Please leave a comment

If you’ve not read Beyond LAMP, don’t hesitate to take a look-see. I learnt that there are a whole bucket-load of Web/App Servers out there.

In addition to having the Malaysia University Days, there’s something brewing in Singapore too.

First up, there is the Singapore MySQL Meetup Group, having a meeting in July, at a new location (Sun Solutions Centre, Central Mall). Confirm your attendance for a meetup at 7pm on Monday, July 14 2008.

And the other reason to be in Singapore, is the Sun Developer Days 2008 Singapore, happening on Tuesday, July 15, 2008. This is an all-day long event, held at the Hilton Hotel – register now! The agenda is packed, and there is a big web focus: profile applications using the NetBeans IDE, MySQL, and using DTrace on Web applications (from JavaScript to the database).

So there, two events next week, in Singapore: MySQL Meetup and Sun Developer Days. See you there.

Here’s a packed schedule. There will be a Sun crew visiting these universities between 16-17 July 2008. Will you be there? Where you’ll meet the rock stars:

• Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 9am – noon: Multimedia University, Cyberjaya
• Wednesday, 16 July 2008, 2pm – 5pm: Universiti Teknologi MARA, Shah Alam
• Thursday, 17 July 2008, 9am – noon: Management & Science University, Shah Alam
• Thursday, 17 July 2008, 2pm – 5pm: INTI, Subang

And what exactly will we be talking about? Besides the keynote, and tech demos, there will be focus on NetBeans (a fabulous IDE), an introduction to OpenSolaris, JavaFX, and of course, MySQL.

We all have 30 minute session slots, and the focus is rather developer centric, so I’m wondering what is best to cover in 30 minutes (what one can probably talk about in 5 days even)? Condensed talk on storage engines, index types, etc. ?

My fear is that I’ll largely be talking to a crowd that has seen and used a database, and its called Access. MySQL will be new to them. Not having a “front-end” per se, ala Access, might be scary. Then again, hooking up OpenOffice.org Base and Workbench might be the way to go for a glitzy presentation…

I caught Facebook – Needle in a Haystack: Efficient Storage of Billions of Photos on Flowgram. First up, I’m not a big fan of Flowgrams – the format is sensible, slide and voice, is excellent, but the delivery in a web browser isn’t optimal… make downloadable videos!

The talk however, was excellent. Do watch it, and learn a bit more about Facebook’s infrastructure. Anyway, some notes I took from the talk:

• “We’re one of the largest MySQL installations in the world”
• Use memcache – “We have memcache because databases aren’t fast” (later on in the questions)
• Separate team focusing on APE (Apache, PHP and Extensions that they work on)
• 6.5 billion total images, 4-5 sizes stored for each, so 30 billion files, of about 540TB total… During peak? 475,000 images served per second, and growing by 100 million uploads per week
• Images are usually pulled from a Content Delivery Network (CDN), so it reduces the request rate on their servers
• They use NetApp Storage, but basically their upload servers speak NFS to write to NetApp.
• Cachr (evhttp based) and File Handle Cache use memcache as a backing store… FHC is based on lighttpd!
• Makes use of a “haystack” – user-level abstraction, storing a separate index file that has more efficient metadata (to reduce disk seeks – 1 disk seek or less for any workload). Pretty deep in the discussion of the haystack server architecture, also evhttp-based
• MySQL use? Very few transactions, very few joins
• Video is a very different beast, and the design is a little different

If you’re into information about photo storage sites, don’t hesitate to also read my previous notes on Flickr.

The next release of Mac OS X, Snow Leopard, will have ZFS enabled by default. There’s a good article for the masses, at ZDNet on ZFS on Snow Leopard – do read it.

We all know running any form of server using HFS+ tends to be a bit of a joke. So, Snow Leopard Server will be where ZFS makes its debut. It won’t be long before regular users will want it in their Mac Pro’s and so on…

OS X as a deployment platform for production MySQL servers? This is not far off, I’m sure.

Red Hat releases Spacewalk. It is described as: “the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived“. Congratulations to all whom have worked on it, especially my friends who tired endlessly over it in the past.

Red Hat, is sticking true to its promise, of open sourcing everything they make. Best of all, they recognise Fedora (they always did, since say, Fedora Core 2 or 3), CentOS (a direct “competitor”/rebuild of RHEL), and Scientific Linux (I know of a certain university’s sysadmin who will be blessing Spacewalk, as her life will now be a lot easier).

There have been a few blogs about it… Matt Asay asks about a community (Red Hat traditionally wasn’t good at this, but with Fedora, I believe they’ve learned, and I’m happy to say I think, I helped in the education process). No one however, focused on the technical aspects around Spacewalk/RHN.

Case in point: Oracle is at the heart of it. RHN was designed almost seven years ago, and I’ve heard amazing stories from Gafton, Greg, and Peter. How Gafton found hidden “secrets” inside Oracle to boost performance, and a whole bunch of interesting things, best to talk about over a beer (the irony? When I first met these folk, I couldn’t even legally drink a beer in the US…)

Read the Developer Documentation, note that they use Perl, Python and Java in the current code base (but only Perl and Java is the way forward). There’s a DB Schema available… and I wonder when someone will port this to MySQL?

The Spacewalk FAQ mentions the lack of resources in the past to add an open source database, but would want to do so soon. There’s even help on getting Oracle XE running. The glimmer that there is to be an open source database behind Spacewalk, is what tells me that the MySQL community, that benefit from such a tool (so you’re a DBA and a sysadmin at a fairly largeish installation), should port this to run on MySQL.

What else can we take away from Spacewalk? The excellent positioning. A community project from which the RHN product is derived. This is similar to what Fedora is positioned as: Another striking difference of Fedora is our goal to empower others to pursue their vision of what a free operating system should be like. Fedora now forms the basis for derivative distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux , the One Laptop Per Child XO and Creative Commons’ Live Content DVDs.

Distinctive naming. Helps create a lack of confusion (at the price of an ubiquitous name? Sure, you just have two ubiquitous names now). MySQL Enterprise vs. MySQL Community. They’re both MySQL (don’t even get started on the odd/even numbering scheme…). I dream the day, when we have MySQL Enterprise and Sakila (formerly known as MySQL Community).