stillhq.com : Mikal, a geek from Canberra living in Silicon Valley (no blather posts)

Managing MySQL the Slack Way: How Google Deploys New MySQL Servers

Thu, 26 Apr 2007 20:40:00 GMT

Thanks to everyone who came along to Grant and my talk this morning about slack and how we bootstrap MySQL servers. Here is the slide deck as promised.

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MySQL Users Conference

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 08:30:00 GMT

Well, they're definitely thinking about getting started. Like last year I caught the VTA down -- it's hard to beat a $1.75 trip without having to worry about traffic. Registraton wasn't as smooth this year as last, for example I didn't get my free book (there didn't seem to be any attempt to hand those out to speakers). Whatever.

I'm now waiting for the replication talk to start.

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Managing MySQL the Slack Way: How Google Deploys New MySQL Servers

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 11:47:00 GMT

I'll be presenting about Slack (the open sourced tool kit we use for deployment software configuration) at the MySQL user's conference in Santa Clara in late April. The talk will focus on the interesting aspects of Slack as it relates to MySQL and should be fun. A DBA mate of mine is gonna present with me, so it should be a barrel of laughs.

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Thoughts on the first day of the MySQL user's conference

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:45:00 GMT

So, I attended the first day of the MySQL user's conference yesterday, which was the tutorial day. Overall I was fairly impressed. Registration was easy, the actual rooms presentations are given in are comfortable, the PA system seemed to work after some initial problems in the morning tutorial I attended.

The conference center seems to be big on retirees hanging around, which I thought was weird. Each room comes with a little old lady, whose job appears to be to read a fiction novel at the door. I really have no idea what else they were achieving. They seemed to be having fun though. I did find it a bit odd that the only drinks provided by the catering staff during the day were acidic, and most of them caffinated. For example, we had choices between coffee, tea, soda water, coke, diet coke, pepsi and diet pepsi. Some fruit juice or even plain water would have been a nice change by the end of the day.

The food was good, unless you're a vegan like Stewart at which time the catering staff looked confused and had to go off and get him something special (which didn't look all that special to me when it came ten minutes later). If that happens again today, then I might try to talk him into just going to a restaurant for lunch with me.

The first tutorial I attended was about MySQL cluster, and to be honest I kinda lost interest at the point where I found out that the database currently has to store all of it's data in RAM. That basically renders it unusable for anyone with a large-ish database. The speaker did a good job in adverse circumstances such as the PA system initially not working, and trying to speak in a language which is not his native tongue in a room which was very wide. I do think that he needed to clamp down harder on the irrelevant, repetitive and self serving questions though. It seemed to me that there were a fair few people in the room who viewed the conference as their chance to get someone else to fix their problems at work. Whilst it's fair to go to a conference to ask advice on problems you're having, I do think that some research prior to attending (or even using the wireless during the conference) is a good idea, and that you shouldn't interrupt the flow of a talk to ask your tangential questions.

The second tutorial was by a Yahoo, and was on MySQL replication. It was excellent -- well prepared, relevant to what I am caring about at the moment, coherent, and flowed well. Jeremy and Eric did a great job (slides from the talk). I hung around at the end to try to offer them beer, but they were swamped by fans who didn't appear to want to leave. I'll have to chase them down today sometime to make the offer.

Overall, not a perfect start to the conference, but I thought the day was very useful. A good first day.

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Links from Rasmus' PHP talk

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 14:09:00 GMT

The talk, and the demo are both very cool.

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I won a radio shark and headphones!

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 10:38:00 GMT

All I had to do was fill in a speaker evaluation form from yesterday, and now I've won a radio shark and headphones. Nice.

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MySQL Workbench

Tue, 25 Apr 2006 09:11:00 GMT

Was just introduced in the keynote and looks kinda cool. It isn't packaged in Ubuntu yet, which is a shame...

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MySQL cluster stores in RAM!

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 09:03:00 GMT

Argh! MySQL cluster currently stores in RAM only. That means if I have 100 machines each with 4 gigabytes of RAM, then I can store 200 gigabytes of data! Hurrah! That's at least what I learnt in the tutorial, feel free to correct me if I am wrong.

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Conference Wireless not working yet?

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 08:28:00 GMT

So, there are two access points with the ESSID "MySQL-Hyatt" that I can see from my coffee drinking spot here in the foyer. iwlist tells me that they have encryption off, which matches what the conference handbook says should be the case. No DHCP leases are being offered though. I guess that means that the conference network hasn't been commissioned yet. Oh well.

Update: Oh, it works in the conference rooms, which have a different ESSID.

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Off to the MySQL tutorials

Mon, 24 Apr 2006 06:40:00 GMT

Up at 5:50am, dressed by 6:30am, and leaving the house by 7:10am to get on the VTA light rail by 7:30am. All because the tutorials start at 8:30am, and I want to catch the train instead of using up fuel...

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Registered for MySQL User Conference 2006

Sun, 23 Apr 2006 19:27:00 GMT

Well, I registered a while ago, but I picked up the conference satchel et cetera today. It's a canvas satchel much like LCA 2005, but with fewer goodies (and more paper). There is one cool thing -- I got to pick an O'Reilly book about MySQL to have in the bag. Interestingly, there is a SCAMP CD in the bag. That's Sco, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl. Hmmmm. Kinda in poor taste that one me thinks.

Everything else is cool. That is all.

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