This article accompanies the slides from a presentation on database sharding. Sharding is a technique used for horizontal scaling of databases we are using at Netlog. If you’re interested in high performance, scalability, MySQL, php, caching, partitioning, Sphinx, federation or Netlog, read on …

This presentation was given at the second day of FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels. FOSDEM is an annual conference on open source software with about 5000 hackers. I was invited by Kris Buytaert and Lenz Grimmer to give a talk in the MySQL Dev Room. The talk was based …

I’ve said before that Message Systems is the best place I’ve worked so far, and we’re looking for more people to join the team.

We’re looking for the following roles:

• Product Manager, Mobile Messaging
• QA Lead/QA Manager
• Professional Services Engineer
• Software Engineer
• Support/Maintenance Engineer
• …

I was invited to give a short introduction to Ruby on Rails at Tech Meetup in Edinburgh a couple of days ago. I’d been racking my brain for days on what to talk about — 15 minutes is too short for me to give a meaningful introduction to Rails — and eventually settled on telling a few stories.

The slides don’t make much sense on their own, so I’ve included the “script” of what I talked about too. I deviated quite a bit from the script as I got into it, so hopefully I should be able to provide audio (or, dread the thought, maybe even video) of the talk in due course.

Intro

I’m Graeme. I’m the Managing Director of Rubaidh Ltd, and have been developing Ruby on Rails applications professionally for 3 years now.

Telling Stories

To be honest, I didn’t know what my audience this evening was going to be like. I wasn’t sure if …

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team. 

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team. 

You can read my conversation with Lenz Grimmer or look at other interviews conducted by the MySQL community team. 

I've been involved with the Drizzle project since very soon after it began, working on it on nights and weekends.

That has just changed. As of today, I'm no longer a MySQL Professional Services consultant, instead I'm part of a new division of Sun

Much of my time is to be spent working on Drizzle, with a focus on plugin interfaces and making it work well in Extremely Large distributed environments.

I will be blogging heavily about what I am doing. How I sort that blogging out between my personal LiveJournal, my (mostly unused) Sun employee blog, and maybe some other blog system, remains TBD.

This is going to be fun.

one of the questionable habits i picked up in the run-up to the election is reading andrew sullivan’s blog at the atlantic. his thoughts about the recent interview with lame-duck president bush and how president bush seemed unable to take any responsibility for his own role for the failings of his presidency reminded me of monty’s thoughts on 5.1 being declared “generally available.”

was it really almost a year ago that i mentioned that my focus would be shifting from connector/odbc to libmysql? time certainly flies.

after what now seems much too long, i can say that we have carved out libmysql from the server source code, rebuilt its build system (using cmake), and are gearing up for an alpha release. the code is on launchpad, and it builds on all the platforms that the mysql server does. we have a build system set up that runs what scant tests we have on all of the platforms, and the big thing to work one before release is making more tests.

because this source is derived from the 6.0 server code, it has at least one big flaw that needs to get addressed — if you try to use utf-8, it uses the new 4-byte utf-8 supported in …

Ever wondered what your PHP application and MySQL actually do? An experimental mysqlnd branch will give you full access to the network communication stream. Using a custom PHP stream filter you can then intercept the communication ... but let's start at the beginning:

When talking about mysqlnd - the mysql native driver for PHP - we always mention the fact it's native in a way that we're, when possible, using PHP infrastructure. The most common example here is the memory management. By directly using PHP's memory we can avoid unnecessary copies of data from the MySQL Client Library's memory into PHP memory.

<?php
$mysqli = mysqli_connect("localhost", "root", "", "test");
$stream = mysqli_conn_to_stream($mysqli);
…