In this blog, I would like to mark myself as a power-user of MMM.  For more then 3 years now I'm engineering high-traffic websites and none of them was a small project. In the beginning I worked behind the livejasmin.com project (warning: NSFW!) which is an Alexa top100 site and now I'm working at ustream.tv which is in the top500 (so far). In this area, your greatest enemy is downtime. Thousands of users want to see your dynamic content by executing thousand of queries against your MySQL servers and what they don't have is the patience and they don't even tolerate critical security-upgrades. In both sites I mentioned above there is no point in time during the day at which less then 10k visitors are hitting the sites.  Now one question comes up: How can you do an upgrade on your MySQL servers or how can you alter a larger table?
So you have a new feature and that means another index on a table or you just want to upgrade your …

At a customer I have had the opportunity to work with some really state of the art equipment.

The customer is in the online gaming industry and we are building a platform based on MySQL Cluster where we are consolidating a number of applications. Workload is mainly inserts, updates, pk reads, and index scans (quite frequent), and a few joins. The cluster handles the transient data (current working set), and is replicating to a long term data store (following this approach), and we are also feeding other back-end support systems from this.

The cluster (>8 computers) is interconnected with Dolphin DX adapters. Computers are SUNs Nehalem …

On my non-MySQL blog, I just wrote a blog post called “Photo Manager: How do you keep track of your pictures?“. I’m looking for Open Source Software that helps me keep track of my 100,000+ digital pictures. I wrote specs on dreamt-up software called “Robfat” (for rename, order, backup, find, archive, tag) as I want to remove excess fat from my HDs (and CD/DVD cabinets).

And then I thought this may have a MySQL dimension:

What if we had an “EXIF Storage Engine”? What if we could update EXIF tags directly from the MySQL command line, with UPDATE statements, and SELECT picture file names based on tags and other file …

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of meeting with Per-Ola Sjöswärd, executive IT strategist at the Swedish National Police. That organisation is already way ahead of most of us when it comes to Open Source adoption. But they have higher ambitions still.

The Rikspolisstyrelsen logotype is on many Sun slides, as an example of an “Enterprise 2.0″ type MySQL customer. Besides sounding cool, the ”Enterprise 2.0″ name is supposed to portray what all the organisations in that group have in common: They’re generic enterprises in any industry, and they use the same internal IT architecture as Web 2.0 companies use externally.

The Swedish Police, to be specific, doesn’t use just Web apps internally. But still, we’re talking about a 70% share. The other 30% are based on the Java Swing architecture, so it’s still …

MySQL 5.1 is here! It’s announced! And it’s time for the overall winner, Position 1 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

1. Greg Haase (Lotame Solutions Inc., Elkridge, Maryland, USA): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler to Prune Archive Tables. See Greg’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Greg! I absolutely hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL …

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is coming, and for downloading, it’s already available, as I hope you have noticed from Giuseppe’s blog. We continue our preparations, this time by announcing Position 2 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

2. Guy Adams (Parallel Ltd., Milton Keynes, United Kingdom): Using Partitioning to Manage Satellite Networks. See Guy’s DevZone article.

Thanks and congratulations, Guy! I hope you too are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a …

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is getting closer by the minute! So it’s time for Position 3 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

3. Corrado Pandiani (Football Club Internazionale Milano Spa, Milan, Italy): Using Partitioning and Event Scheduler for online logging & real-time stats. See Corrado’s DevZone article, and his blog.

Thanks and congratulations, Corrado! I hope you are in a position to take advantage of your free MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 Pass, including a dinner with MySQL co-founder …

The GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 is close, so close that we’re seeding the mirrors (I hope you noted Giuseppe’s blog entry)! So it’s time for Position 4 in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

4. Volker Oboda (TeamDrive Systems GmbH, Hamburg, Germany): Using the Pluggable API for TeamDrive. See Volker’s DevZone article, and the Wikipedia article on TeamDrive.

Thanks and congratulations, Volker! Your MySQL Community Contributor T-shirt is underway.

Links:

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With the GA announcement of MySQL 5.1 coming up, we have picked the winners in the MySQL 5.1 Use Case Competition.

To keep you in suspense, let me first announce those on positions 5 to 10:

5. Fourat Zouari (TriTUX.com, Tunis, Tunisia): Using Partitioning for Data Warehousing. See Fourat’s DevZone article, and his blog entry from May 2008.

6. Ryan Thiessen (Big Fish Games, Seattle, …

Within minutes after Finland was just about to win 3:2 over Germany in the football world championship qualifications (but it ended 3:3), I got a bit of consolation for myself, my dual-citizenship son cheering for Finland, and my fellow countrymen using MySQL:

We have the next MySQL 5.1 Use Case article live, and it’s about FC Inter Milan. No Finns playing there (but stars such as Ibrahimovic, Materazzi, Luis Figo, and Adriano). And, from a MySQL perspective, the interesting point is that FC Inter Milan is using both MySQL 5.1 Partitioning and the Event Scheduler in an innovative way.

Thanks Corrado Pandiani for the story — let’s hope your good Use Case inspires others! …