"The two metrics that are most important to me are first customer satisfaction and second growth." - Don McAskill

Today, I noticed Don is featured on Sun's customer success stories page:


Don McAskill is the CEO and Chief Geek of Smugmug, a photo and now hi-def video (using H.264) sharing site with a successful business model behind it.

I initially met Don last year at the MySQL Conference when my then boss told me that he is interested in meeting him. That was my introduction to Smugmug. I was impressed by SmugMug's presentation of photos and the care they took to make your photos and galleries look awesome.

This year, as a member of Smugmug, me and my wife got to interact with Don on a personal level.

We had several suggestions related to how our …

Here is number 5 in my series of six podcasts from last week's MySQL conference and expo.

Just after lunch on Tuesday, I was able to corner Brian Aker, former CTO of MySQL, introduce myself and ask him if he was up for a podcast.  Without any convincing or arm twisting he happily agreed. :)

My interview with Brian (9:18)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)

Brian's lenses adapt to match the art around him. 

Some of the …

Keynotes

The keynote was kick started by Marten Mickos.  If you've never met Marten, he is, on a personal note, one of the greatest CEOs I've ever met.  The keynotes were especially interesting for me because it was the first time I've had the opportunity to listen to Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems.  Jonathan seems like a great guy who gives the impression he "gets it".

The last keynote was by Werner Vogels of Amazon.  His talk covered Amazon's growth and the new services they offer including EC2.  He announced that EC2 now supports persistent storage, which is a huge improvement, but doesn't quite solve all of the problems.

Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit

I've never been big into testing, but I'm trying to change that.  …

Plenty of people have been excited by the prospect of Amazon EC2 and the ability to scale out your databases as load increases from your original configuration. I noticed Morgan Tocker and Carl Mercier are going to be presenting on this topic at the upcoming MySQL ConferenceHowever almost immediately people are worried about the lack of persistent of data across instance terminations.In a sense

Plenty of people have been excited by the prospect of Amazon EC2 and the ability to scale out your databases as load increases from your original configuration. I noticed Morgan Tocker and Carl Mercier are going to be presenting on … Continue reading →

Overview:Peter Zaitsev's recent article about Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL spurred my interest in doing something similar on EC2.I have covered running sysbench against MySQL on EC2 however not specifically used sysbench to test IO. Rather I had used bonnie++ and iozone to do that.I don't have a lot of respect for the EC2 small instance. Whilst it was reasonable in the middle of

Overview:

Peter Zaitsev’s recent article about Evaluating IO subsystem performance for MySQL spurred my interest in doing something similar on EC2.

I have covered running sysbench against MySQL on EC2 however not specifically used sysbench to test IO. Rather I had used bonnie++ and iozone to do that.

I don’t have a lot of respect for the EC2 small instance. Whilst it was reasonable in the middle of 2006 when Amazon EC2 was launched, you can (even in Australia) pick up Dual and Quad Core CPUs with enough memory for 32 …

I saw a post by Baron mentioning that his tool maatkit is best for handling situations where a master-master replication setup has got out of sync.

If you think Baron was blowing his own trumpet he has good reason to. I have used his mk-archiver tool as part of the Maatkit to make the problem of archiving and purging data much easier. This was much easier than rolling my own solution.

Anyhow. I

I'm getting in early, I had just started building my benchmarks for my talk on Amazon EC2 at the MySQL Conference and Expo next year when I discovered exactly why they say you need to run a test more than once; results can be completely unpredictable. Take for example the Sequential I/O performance on EC2, versus my home machine:



The first 3 tests were a 36G Seagate Raptor 10k RPM, a 160G Seagate SATA2 7200RPM, and a 320G Seagate IDE 7200RPM disk, running in the same machine I had at home. The last three were Amazon EC2 images. A few observations from these results:

• The char write test seems to max out my CPU (not on graph - see raw data), so that probably explains why it's consistent across all disks.
• My home machine is almost dead on consistent, whereas Amazon EC2 looks more like a roller-coaster
• The …

In a decade, on-demand virtualized utility computing will be an invisible utility, part of the vital infrastructure of the technological economy.

People will mostly have forgotten what an enormous pain in the ass provisioning computation was today. Today, we don't truly feel that pain, because it seems "normal", everyone has to suffer it together.

The situation right now is, if you have a delivery van, you have to make your own gasoline. And you have to hire and pay for your own mechanics. Seems stupid, doesn't it? It's amazing that there are any delivery vans at all …

Think of the internet itself, what it did to telecoms.

Twenty-five years ago, if you wanted a high speed data connection to a computer in San Francisco, it was a pain. You'd have to come up with a pile of money, and wait a couple of months, at best. Hardware would be dedicated and provisioned, and then finally you would have your connection. To …