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I love my new job!
I just have to chime in about how happy I am with my new job. I now work for Blue Gecko, as of August 30th. My role is a Senior Database and Systems Administrator. Blue Gecko is based out of Seattle though I'll be working out of my home in New Hampshire, albeit with my frequent travels to Seattle for family reasons, this will work out quite well.Already in the last week, I've engaged in several tasks, all of which have been very interesting problems to solve. Not only that, but I've spoken with several existing and potential customers and never realized I really enjoy consulting with and acquiring customers-- hearing what problems they need to solve and being able to ascertain quickly how to solve those problems, making the customer look forward to engaging with us.Who is Blue Gecko?Based out of Seattle, their website states (http://www.bluegecko.net/) "We don't eat, sleep, or go on vacation. We live for three things:* Smooth, uninterrupted database operation for your company* Proactive monitoring for potential problems* Rapid, expert response with no restrictions or delays"We are a remote DBA (Database Administrative) service. We provide a service that would require an organization to have to hire a bunch of DBAs and even sysadmins. We provide this for Oracle, MySQL, and recently PostgreSQL and SQL Server. Just from my first week here, there are some top-notch people that I'm already enjoying working with.Some of the tasks I've worked on:* Restoring data that a developer accidentally truncated from tables using InnoDB Tools (http://code.google.com/p/innodb-tools/). I hadn't done this before, and it was fantastic to be able to restore that data in such a dire situation* Optimizing a query and ultimately how the data is stored in a table for a query that used a file sort that would be extremely slow unless you forced use of the index that the order by was using. The teaser was that EXPLAIN would show a full-table scan if the force index was used. This was a good exercise in understanding the buffer pool as well as how InnoDB works with indexes.* Crawling through a schema with a bunch of tables and finding many optimizations* Discussing deployment of The Sphinx Search Engine for a client who needs search functionality* Various Perl questions from one of my Co-workers. I was able to send the code that I wrote for my book to help them solve a problem. I felt great being able to help someone so soon after starting a new jobThe thing that has really dawned on me is that I prefer working on components within the LAMP stack, especially MySQL, with an eye on where NoSQL fits in as well. I just wanted to write about my realization that I've had over the last several days!
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SBR and innodb_autoinc_lock_mode
The 5.1 manual states:Therefore, if you are using statement-based replication, you must either avoid INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE or use innodb_autoinc_lock_mode = 0And earlier in the same page is the description of innodb_autoinc_lock_mode=0This lock mode is provided only for backward compatibility and performance testing. There is little reason to use this lock mode unless you use “mixed-mode inserts” and care about the important difference in semantics described later.I don't think these statements agree. I am confused even more because upgrading a master-slave pair of servers to 5.1 with innodb_autoinc_lock_mode=1 and statement-based replication fixed a logical corruption problem that occurs when the wrong value was written to the binlog for SET INSERT_ID=... as part of a transaction that does INSERT ... ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE.There are a few details on that at bug 50413.
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Open source in the clouds and in the debates
We continue to see more evidence of the themes we discuss in our latest CAOS special report, Seeding the Clouds, which examines the open source software used in cloud computing, the vendors backing open source, the cloud providers using it and the impact on the industry.
First, as usual, we are seeing consistencies between our own research — which indicates open source is a huge part of today’s cloud computing offerings from major providers like Amazon, Google, Rackspace, Terremark and VMware — and that of code analysis and management vendor Black Duck. In its analysis of code that runs the cloud, Black Duck also found a preponderance of open source pieces, in many cases the same projects we profile in our report.
Indeed, open source software is an important part of the infrastructure, data and application layers of today’s cloud computing stacks with significant use of Linux, open source hypervisors KVM and Xen, open source data technologies such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, Hadoop, NoSQL and memcached and open source languages such as Java, PHP, Python and Ruby on Rails.
There will be plenty of users and customers content to use non-open source options that serve as the defacto standards, but we do see a move to higher-level, production and mission critical use, which represents continued commercial opportunity for open source and other vendors.
One of the more subtle effects of all this open source in the cloud, as covered in Seeding the Clouds, is the impact on discussions, debates and downright fights in the market. There is much scrutiny on claims of being open, technical aspects of open and what ‘open cloud’ means. A prime example is the Twisticuffs that have gone on between Simon Crosby of XenSource and Citrix, discussing OpenCloud and the response from Open Cloud Initiative co-founder Sam Johnston, who claims this is misuse of the open label.
We already saw open source playing a role in the discussions and debates about open clouds, open APIs and open data, and this latest confrontation is evidence that role continues to be significant. We still wonder though about the question of open enough as we contemplate openness in the clouds.
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Submit your presentations for Collaborate 2011!
There are approximately 3 weeks left to submit your MySQL DBA-related presentations to Collaborate 2011, held in Orlando, FL April 10-14. Experience has shown that the best presentations are submitted well in advance of the deadline, so now is a great time to submit while you have plenty of time to create a good abstract.
Information and the link to submit abstracts are at http://collaborate11.ioug.org/. I posted a cheat sheet on how to fill out the Call for Presentations for MySQLers a while ago, and as always feel free to ask me any questions.
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Digg’s main competitor (Reddit) runs Cassandra but their VP of Engineering was fired for the decision to switch.
Apparently, Digg performed a big migration from MySQL to Cassandra and a big migration to their new Digg v4 architecture and now their VP of Engineering has been shown the door:
Ever since Digg launched its new site design, it’s been plagued with all kinds of trouble, not least of which is that it keeps going down. The problems with the new architecture are so bad that VP of Engineering John Quinn is now gone, we’ve confirmed with sources close to Digg.
In a Diggnation video today, CEO Kevin Rose explained some of the technical issues the site is dealing with and why it can’t simply roll back to the previous architecture. The new version of Digg, v4, is based on a distributed database called Cassandra, which replaced the MySQL database the site ran on before. Cassandra is very advanced—it is supposed to be faster and scale better—but perhaps it is still too experimental. Or maybe it’s just the way Digg implemented it (Twitter uses Cassandra, although not for its main data store, as does Facebook in places, but it obviously is not as battle-tested as it needs to be). Every engineer at Digg is currently just trying to keep the site up and running.
Some of this is political. Perhaps Mr. Quinn was excused for other reasons above and beyond this switch.
Perhaps he should have had buy in from other members of the team. Had Rose personally signed off on this migration it would have been tough to fire their VP of Engineering.
The technical aspects on this type of migration are VERY difficult. Not just because you’re moving from one DB to another but a lot of the polish, fit, and finish of your existing system tend to be taken for granted over time.
Newer databases don’t have this type of polish and you end up having to duplicate a lot of infrastructure that’s already present on the previous generation.
MySQL is definitely no panacea. You’re going to have pain either way. At least with some of the modern DBs you’re partially headed in the right direction.
One trend I’ve seen is for people to use the LAMP stack to serve websites but then to use Hadoop + Hive as part of their ETL setup so they can run reports and transform production data.
There is no solid bigtable implementation just yet. I wish there was but it doesn’t seem like we have one just yet.
Cassandra isn’t that bad of course. Reddit, Digg’s main competitor – is running Cassandra.
Seems like a strange thing to fire someone over. If you’re main competitor is running the same database the decision to switch certainly couldn’t have been too bad.
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