I have already explained about Express.js tutorial and creating simple app with it. As promised in that post i thought to come up with another Express.js tutorial with MySQL. But again, explaining just the concept about library is not enough and this is not even why codeforgeek exits. So i thought to come up with […]

“We made it a point to hire really smart, visionary people and then let them do their work.
I wanted to delegate and let people be in charge of things. My own decision-making process was to decide who got to decide. To make decisions, you have to first outline the problem, and if you hire really great people, they’re going to know more about the problem they’re dealing with than you ever will.”–Scott McNealy

I have interviewed Scott McNealy. Scott is a Silicon Valley pioneer, most famous for co-founding Sun Microsystems in 1982. We talked about Innovation, AI, Big Data, Redis, Curriki and Wayin.

RVZ

Q1. You co-Founded Sun Microsystems in 1982, and served as CEO and Chairman of the Board for 22 years. What are the main lessons learned in all these years?

Scott …

“To be competitive with non-open-source cloud deployment options, open source databases need to invest in “ease-of-use.” There is no tolerance for complexity in many development teams as we move to “ops-less” deployment models.” –Peter Zaitsev

I have interviewed Peter Zaitsev, Co-Founder and CEO of Percona.
In this interview, Peter talks about the Open Source Databases market; the Cloud; the scalability challenges at Facebook; compares MySQL, MariaDB, and MongoDB; and presents Percona’s contribution to the MySQL and MongoDB ecosystems.

RVZ

Q1. What are the main technical challenges in obtaining application scaling?

Peter Zaitsev: When it comes to scaling, there are different types. There is a Facebook/Google/Alibaba/Amazon scale: these …

The “DBMS” part of MySQL is fine – storage engines (especially with new kids on the block), replication, etc, but it really sucks at executing SQL.

I won’t even get into complex SQL that has complex data dependencies, will start with very basic tasks.

SELECT * FROM table WHERE indexed = "A" LIMIT 1

If multiple indexes can satisfy the query, MySQL will hit each of them at least twice – looking up first “A” and last “A” records. It will do that while planning the SQL execution. Once it comes up with a plan, it will go and hit the index it picked again, this time once. So, if you have two candidate indexes, you will have 5 index accesses at 4 positions.

How would a direct cursor access work? Single index hit. Want to simulate that in SQL? You can add a ‘FORCE INDEX’ hint, then only one …

We’ve been learning for many years how to run Linux for databases, but over time we realized that many of our lessons learned apply to many other server workloads. Generally, server process will have to interact with network clients, access memory, do some storage operations and do some processing work – all under supervision of the kernel.

Unfortunately, from what I learned, there’re various problems in pretty much every area of server operation. By keeping the operational knowledge in narrow camps we did not help others. Finding out about these problems requires quite intimate understanding of how things work and slightly more than beginner kernel knowledge.

Many different choices could be made by doing empiric tests, sometimes with outcomes that guide or misguide direction for many years. In our work we try to understand the reasons behind differences that we observe in random poking at a problem.

In order …

If you remove a file, file system generally just marks in its metadata that previously occupied blocks can now be used for other files – that operation is usually cheap, unless the file has millions of segments (that is such a rare case, only seen in experimental InnoDB features that Oracle thought was a good idea).

This changes a bit with SSDs – if you update underlying device metadata, it can have smarter compaction / grooming / garbage collection underneath. Linux file systems have ‘discard’ option that one should use on top of SSDs – that will extend the life time of their storage quite a bit by TRIM’ing underlying blocks.

Now, each type of storage device will react differently to that, some of them support large TRIM commands, some of them will support high rate of them, some of them won’t, etc – so one has to take that into account when removing files in production environments.

Currently Linux block …

The problem with Twitter is that we talk about something and before you know it, people forget. (e.g. does WebScaleSQL have an async client library?) How many blog posts are there about Percona Live Santa Clara 2015? This time (2016), I’m going to endeavour to write more than to just tweet – I want to remember this stuff, and search archives (and also note the changes that happen in this ecosystem). And maybe you do too as well. So look forward to more blogs from Percona Live Data Performance Conference 2016. In the meantime, here’s tweets in chronological order from my Twitter search.

• crowd filling up the keynote room for #perconalive
• beginning shortly, we’ll see @peterzaitsev at #perconalive doing his keynote
• #perconalive has over 1,200 attendees – oracle has 20 folk, with 22 folk from facebook
…

Facebook, with 1.49 billion monthly active users,  is one of the world’s top MySQL users. Simon Martin, a production engineer on Facebook’s MySQL Infrastructure team, has been working with MySQL for most of his career, starting from 2 servers built out of spare parts and moving through to one of the largest deployments in the world.

Simon will be sharing some of the challenges Facebook has tackled as it rolled out semi-synchronous replication across the company’s different services at Percona Live Amsterdam on Sept. 22. His talk is aptly titled, “The highs and lows of semi-synchronous replication.” I sat down, virtually, with Simon the other day. Our conversation is below, but first, as a special reward to my readers, save €20 on your Percona Live registration by entering promo code …

Percona Live is moving from London to Amsterdam this year and the event is also expanding to three full days. Percona Live Europe 2015, September 21-23, will be at the Mövenpick Hotel Amsterdam City Centre. The call for speakers and Super Saver registration are now open. Hurry though because the deadline for submitting a speaking proposal is June 21st and Super Saver registration ends July 5th!

This year’s conference will feature one day of tutorials and two days of keynote talks and breakout …

On Tuesday  Steaphan Greene  announced that all currently-pushed changes have now been rebased onto the newly-released upstream MySQL-5.6.24.

The new branch at this point is available on github.

Our .deb and .rpm builds are available in the PSCE repo as well as being browsable here http://repo.psce.com/download/webscalesql/

Instructions for using the repo are available for Debian …