Colin Charles Agenda

At the MySQL Conference, I had the chance to interview Rohit Nadhani, founder of Webyog, the folk that make SQLyog and MONyog. Watch the video, for more.

Generally based out of Bangalore (I visited them when I was last there), Webyog just started an office in Santa Clara, and are expanding. They boast 15,000 paid customers so far, with some big name customers: Google, Yahoo!, executive office to the US president, and more.

SQLyog is termed as an upgrade from phpMyAdmin. There is a GPL community edition, with some “power tools” that is part of the Enterprise Edition. It is very Win32 based, but easy enough to run on other OSes via WINE or some sort of virtualisation tool.

MONyog is an agentless monitoring tool. It competes directly with Enterprise Monitor from MySQL, and there is no Community edition.

All Webyog licenses are perpetual (not subscription), with updates for a year. There are also unlimited licenses (server/user).

The motto: Low priced software, but sell thousands of copies.

The MySQL DevZone has an interview from 2006, that Jay conducted with Rohit. Go forth and read it.

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.

I caught up with Marc Delisle (we have a relatively old interview with him on the MySQL DevZone) recently, and got him to give us an introduction to phpMyAdmin, the several books he’s written, and how the project gets new features from the Google Summer of Code. What’s really impressive? They continue winning awards (Marc won one from MySQL in 2009 as well!), and have a user base of nearly 18.5 million (this is downloads — not just users, considering how common it is in shared hosting environments). Watch the video for more.

I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a Web Application Gallery, that brings in dependencies that you need, to use popular open source software packages.
• Drupal for example, is a featured application, for the PHP on IIS stack. If the software allows, it brings in SQL Server Express Edition; otherwise, it even brings in MySQL!

I had the pleasure of having a quick video interview with Chuck Hagenbuch and Leigh Heyman, both from Blue State Digital, and people that helped run the my.barackobama.com campaign. They’re giving the closing keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 alongside three engineers from Google, and its going to be great.

If you missed the embed, here’s the video. Don’t forget to see them, at their closing keynote titled Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama’s Online Presidential Campaign.

While Zack covered the storage engine and appliances sessions pretty well, I feel he’s missed out on a few important new engines (or engine related talks):

• DDEngine will be represented, speaking about Automated data versioning with a storage engine
• Long time MySQL Community Member Beat Vontobel, will be presenting on the SeqEngine, in Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine
• Kazuho Oku, from Cybozu Labs in Japan, will be talking about Q4M, a queuing engine for MySQL. Mixi.jp uses it for their Twitter like service, so I’d advice you to go take a gander at Using Q4M: A Message Queue storage engine
• While we all know PrimeBase for giving us PBXT (and Paul will give a talk about the PBXT engine), lets not forget that they also have a BLOB streaming engine available. Go see Barry Leslie, talk about BLOB Streaming: Efficient Reliable BLOB handling for all storage engines
• Another engine out of Japan, the SPIDER storage engine – go see the talk titled SPIDE Storage Engine: Database Sharding by Storage Engine

Lots of storage engine talks, no? Well, there are even related tutorials, so if storage engines catch your fancy, check out the storage engine talks in the schedule.

A few other picks: Monty talking about Maria will definitely be a crowd puller, as well as Kevin Lewis talking about the Falcon storage engine. You might also find that the architecture of ScaleDB interesting. And don’t forget the myriad of talks that are InnoDB related. Read: People are Talkin’ … about InnoDB, Talk,Talk, Talk: Innobase Speaks, and … and Who Could Forget Mark Callaghan?.