Posts Tagged ‘mysqlce2009’

Interview with Rohit Nadhani, founder of Webyog

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.

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.

Video: Interview with Marc Delisle, of the phpMyAdmin project

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.



Video: Interview with Microsoft’s PHP Evangelist

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!

Video: Interview with some of the folk behind my.barackobama.com

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.

Conversations at the MySQL Conference

Today, for me is day 1 of the MySQL Confernece & Expo 2009. It seems to be going pretty well – and its only 2.45pm.

If you follow Planet MySQL, or happen to just have random conversations with people, the main buzz for the day is “Oracle buying Sun”. But let me not bore you with that. I just want to log some of my interesting conversations.

Over lunch I had a good discussion with users of MySQL, and one potential user of MySQL (his company uses Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, and are now looking at MySQL). We talked about quite a number of things:

  • The documentation (which I, and the rest of the MySQL users use) seems to not be complete for an Oracle person. Why? It seems we’re missing out on things like the models. We lack enough theory. People would like to “see” (visually) what the InnoDB buffer pool does, not just read about it. In fact, it also seems like we might need to be clearer with the use of commands. And for the first time, I have found out that if you’re coming from an Oracle background, you might find the comments at the end of the manual, to be kind of confusing — also, some believe the comments are irrelevant and misguide you. Wow! I mean, this is open source, we’d like the manual to also be kind of open source… ;)
  • There seems to be a misconception amongst potential users that MySQL is only great for the Web. It fails in everything enterprise related. I know, if you’re reading this, you’re thinking this is just insane – but think again – if you’re reading this, I’m preaching to the choir. MySQL is Enterprise ready, but I think the message needs to reach out to the greater community. Heck, if you’re showing up to the conference, kudos, we’ve reached you, but its just a drop in the ocean.
  • Backups. “Why is it that you have to pay for ibbackup? This stuff is supposed to be free.” Well, the open source advocates still need to reach out further. The argument that once you start paying for MySQL Enterprise, and once you start paying for hot backups, you start realising that the database is costing you more than you need. I brought up the point that even if you use Linux, you do pay for subscriptions — but the argument back was that you can at least figure out how to do it for free. True, but its similar in MySQL land — you’ve got mylvmbackup, you could setup a replication slave and use that for backups, there are third party tools like Zmanda’s backup one, and if you wait for MySQL 6, there will also be online backup. Anyway, this isn’t about backups – its about paying for open source software.
  • I know that a big network in Russia, with over 22 million users, use MySQL 4.1. The DBA goes forth and basically tells their developers not to use a lot of features, and they’ve managed to skirt around it, with no problem.
  • Libraries use MySQL.

For many, this is their first MySQL Conference. For some, they’ve been coming on-and-off since 2005.

Tutorial quality? If you follow Twitter, you’ll know that some people enjoy their tutorials, while some don’t. Most don’t want to be in a tutorial, in where the speaker talks about everything on the slide deck — because that’s something you can do yourself by sitting at home. People want a mix of war stories. I think this alone is pretty good advice for speakers. But always remember, you can’t always please everyone.

Cloudera’s tutorial in the afternoon was most amazing — you had to watch a bunch of videos, get a VM ready, and a lot more preparation. They went to, in quite some depth about the Facebook architecture (Amy Lin, from Facebook was surprised how much they knew — I suggested that, most of the information is mostly public anyway). This didn’t seem like a tutorial to attend if you were new to Hadoop, and if you’d not completed the prep, you might have been left out.

Sheeri and Patrick spent a lot of time in the shell, and inside MySQL. But I learned quite a bit about metadata.

I wish I took down more notes, but there’s some level of running around that I was required to do.

Follow @MySQLConf on Twitter. The Twitter serach for mysqlconf is also good for the “streaming river of information”.

Did I already mention people talking about Oracle buying Sun? Everyone is wondering about the future of MySQL and more. Its all just speculation people. Wait and see. That’s the most informed approach. I can respect that analysts have opinions, but it doesn’t mean anything. I like Marten’s candid response, though. Marten knows how to get a message across.

Power. Power is being rolled out in all rooms, there should be power plugs in every three rows. But that seemed to be an issue. The Internet mostly works, things are “fixed”, so you should be able to suck mail via IMAP, and connect elsewhere via SSH.

Oh, I met up with Chuck Hagenbuch and Leigh Heyman, who are giving the closing keynote from the Obama team. The Googler’s are a little busy, and will be around on Thursday, and the closing keynote titled “Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama’s Online Presidential Campaign” is going to rock.

Whom else did I meet? What other interesting conversations did I have? I hope I remember to script them down. After all, conferences are made with conversations. And conversations are social networking 1.0. Have them.

/me is about to run for a conference call right about now, and its only mid-day. So many more great conversations await :-) Career fair, booze at the bar, what more can I ask for?
(ok, I can ask for everything to just run smoothly over the next few days. And I hope everyone has a ball of a time!)


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