Posts Tagged ‘interview’

Barry Abrahamson, talks about WordPress.com technicals

While at the MySQL Conference, I caught up with Barry Abrahamson, the systems wrangler/de-facto DBA behind WordPress.com (and all other Automattic properties). Watch the video.



You probably already know that WordPress itself is built on top of MySQL. And despite everything you might have heard about our (MySQL/Sun’s) new founders, WordPress is MySQL today, and for the foreseeable future. Anyway, I digress.

WordPress.com has about 70 million tables, and tens of thousands of blogs. Large amount of tables, serve for easy sharding – after all, its based on WordPress MU, which creates a table for each blog (read does it scale?).

WordPress.com has a few terabytes of data in MySQL, with over 350 instances. They’re all powered by Debian servers, with MySQL.com binaries.

Of interest to lots of folk, is WordPress stats (you get them with your own install, thanks to the Stats plugin). There is about 150GB of data for stats, that enter MySQL every month, and the data is queried multiple times a second. WordPress stats currently are based on a per day basis, but real soon now, you’ll see hourly stats. So you can even switch when your day ends, because chances are, you’re not based in GMT.

WordPress has about 90%+ reads, so the single master multiple slaves replication methodology works well for them. They’re moving to solid state drives, which is giving them more capacity to their current SAS solutions, since its all many tables, MyISAM, and it fits their workload model really well. Moving to SSDs is interesting – if you weren’t at the MySQL Conference, you should definitely catch the video from Andreas von Bechtolsheim, titled The Solid State Storage Revolution. Andy is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems.

Off camera, Barry also told me that they ran HP hardware, and he gave me the tale of how PollDaddy got a new heart – i.e. they moved from .NET/SQLServer to PHP/MySQL.

So, here, I can’t wait for hourly stats to come to WordPress. And I’m most interested in seeing what comes out from this (via Matt Mullenweg’s blog post):

There are some new developments in the WordPress world, namely that I think it would be possible to add support for databases other than MySQL without changing every $wpdb call or breaking any plugins or themes. It won’t be easy, but the coolest stuff seldom is.

Gen Kanai from Mozilla speaks about localisation in Firefox and more

At BarCampKL, I conducted a quick interview with Gen Kanai, the Director of Business Development, at Mozilla in Asia. He has vast experience, that ranges from starting the Japan office, to marketing, to helping open the Beijing office, and this year, its all about South East Asia.



Mozilla wants to know if there is a need for Firefox in Bahasa Malaysia? I asked Gen how hard it was to translate Firefox – there are over 60 localisations, and unofficially, there are over 100.

Bahasa Malaysia is about 40% complete, and the website needs localisation as well. While the system itself is not as simple as Ubuntu’s translation system, you don’t need to be a programmer, just know how to use source code management tools. You can use a simple text editor like Notepad, and move all the way to using Pootle.

Do you want Firefox and other Mozilla tools translated into Bahasa Malaysia? How will it help you (or someone else)?

MySQL Rocks: Wen Huang, in Makati City, Philippines

I’m at the Sun Tech Days in beautiful Philippines, and all I can say is the energy is tremendous. I’m hearing there are about 1,400 attendees, and this number might grow tomorrow.

Armed with a video camera, I decided to take a few video snapshots. My first victimguest on my yet to be named videocast is Wen Huang, Product Manager for NetBeans, at Sun Microsystems.

Wen Huang has been a MySQL user since 1999, and had a past life as a web developer in various web shops, some large, some small. One commonality he had at all his jobs though is that they always use MySQL.

He’s an action junkie, preferring to have the latest version of the MySQL database all the time, and can’t wait for MySQL 5.1 when it comes out. Do remember that there exists a NetBeans with Glassfish and MySQL bundle. I’ve also blogged about this before, don’t hesitate to read my review titled NetBeans 6.1 with GlassFish, MySQL bundle.

So there you have it. Go forth, and try the great bundle, as its an all-in-one install of an IDE, an application server, and a database server.


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