Everything fails, Monitor Everything


From the recent MySQL Conference a number of things resonate strongly almost daily with me. These included:

  1. Guy Kawasaki – Don’t let the bozos grind you down.
    • Boy, the bozos have ground me down this week. I slept for 16 hrs today, the first day of solid rest in 3 weeks.
  2. Paul Tuckfield – YouTube and his various caching tip insights.
    • I’ve seen the promising results of Paul Tuckfield’s comment of pre-fetching for Replication written recently by Farhan.
  3. Ramus – SSL is not secure — This still really scares me.
    • How do I tell rather computer illiterate friends about running multiple browsers, clearing caches, never visiting SSL sites after other sites that are insecure etc.
  4. Everything fails, Monitor Everything – Google

What I’ve been working on most briefly lately, and really want to be far more prepared everywhere I go is Monitor Everything.

It’s so easy on site to just do a vmstat 1 in one session and a mysqladmin -r -i extended-status | grep -v ” | 0 “ in another, and you may observe a trend, make some notes, say 25% CPU, 3000 Selects, 4000 Insert/Updates per second etc, but the problem is, the next day you don’t have actual figures to compare. What was the table_lock_waits yesterday, they seem high today.

I also only found a problem on a site when I graphed the results. I’ll give you a specific example. The average CPU for the system was 55%, the target was 50%. When graphing the CPU, it was plainly obvious something was not right. I could see with extremely regularity (and count 12 in one hour) a huge CPU spike for a second or two. It was so regular in the graph it was not possible it was random. So, after further investigation and testing, a 5 minute job on this production server (and not on previous testing servers) took 25% CPU for a second or two, and a huge amount of Page Faults. Did it effect the overall impact of the performance of the system. I don’t know, but it was a significant anonomoly that required investigation.

So, quite simply, always monitor and record so you can later reference, even if you don’t process the raw figures at the time. The question is then, “What do I monitor”. Answer, monitor everything.

The problem is with most monitoring, e.g. vmstat and mysqladmin is the lack of a timestamp for easy comparison. It’s really, really annoying that you can add this to the line output. The simple solution is to segment your data into both manageable chunks and consistent chunks.

Manageable chucks can be as easy as creating log files hourly, ensuring the start exactly at the top of the hour. Use a YYYYMMDD.HHMMSS naming standard for all files and you can never go wrong.
Consistent chunks is to ensure you start all manageable monitor (e.g. hourly) at the exact same time, so you can compare.

You need to monitor at least the following:

  • vmstat
  • mysqladmin extended-status
  • mysqladmin processlist
  • mysqladmin variables
  • mysqladmin -r -i [n] extended-status | grep -v ” | 0 “

I haven’t found an appropriate network monitoring, but you should also at that.

The issue here is frequency. Here are some guidelines. vmstat every 5 seconds. extended-status and processlist every 30 seconds, variables every hour, and extended-status differences is difficult, but it saves a lot of number crunching later for quick analysis. I do it every second, but not all the time, you need to work out a trigger to enable, or to say run it for 30 seconds every 15-30 minutes.

So in one hour I could have:

  • 20070519.160000.os.vmstat.log
  • 20070519.160000.mysql.variables.log
  • 20070519.160000.mysql.status.log
  • 20070519.160000.mysql.processlist.log
  • 20070519.160500.mysql.status.increment.log, then 1610, 1620, 1630 etc

I have my own scripts for monitoring under development, and I’ve been revising slowly, particularly to be able to load data into a MySQL database so I can easily use SQL for analysis. One thing I actually do is parse files into CSV for easy loading.

There are two tools out there that I’m reviewing and you should look at. Mark Leith has written a Aggregated SHOW STATUS stat pack, and there is also tool called mysqlreport. These both go some what to ultimately what I want.

I haven’t used it yet, but I’ve seen and been very impressed with the simplicity of Munin for graphing. I really need to get some free time to get this operational.

So Monitor Everything and Graph Everything. Plenty of work to do here.

The MySQL Conference recap

I recently had the opportunity to return and speak at the Brisbane MySQL Users Group. I spent some time talking about MySQL User Conference 2007 Summary and Life as a Consultant. My summary of included:

  • Overview
  • Keynotes
  • Marten Mickos – MySQL
  • Guy Kawasaki
  • Michael Evans – OLPC
  • Rasmus Lerdorf – PHP
  • Paul Tuckfield – YouTube
  • Community Awards
  • Product Road Map
  • Google
  • Storage Engines
  • Dorsal Source
  • What’s Next

One question was posed to me. “What new did MySQL do this year?” being from the last User Conference. MySQL did seem to not make a great impact at the conference over the successes of the previous year. I had to think some time to come up with the following list.

And most recently:

  • Open Source Database Vendor Partners with LINBIT to Jointly Promote & Support DRBD for MySQL Enterprise Read More
  • IBM DB2 as a Certified Storage Engine for MySQL on System i Read More

It’s hard to say if these are big ticket items or not, but it is definitely disappointing that 5.1 GA is still MIA. We stay tuned.

I also managed a much better response then from my Conference Presentation opening Slide.


“How can you tell an Oracle DBA has touched your MySQL Installation?”

MYSQL_HOME=/home/oracle/products/mysql-version
mysqld_safe –user=oracle &

MySQL Cluster Certified

Jonathon Coombes recently blogged in MySQL Cluster Certified that he passed the MySQL Cluster DBA Certification as was the first Australian. Lucky for him I passed the exam after my presentation on the second day of the conference. I guess us Australian’s are leading the world!

As Jonathon said it was rather hard, certainly more difficult then the other DBA exams but nothing for an experienced Cluster DBA.

MySQL Conference – YouTube

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 rolled quickly into the second keynote Scaling MySQL at YouTube by Paul Tuckfield.

The introduction by Paul Tuckfield was; “What do I know about anything, I was just the DBA at PayPal, now I’m just the DBA at youTube. There are only 3 DBA’s at YouTube.”

This talk had a number of great performance points, with various caching situations. Very interesting.

Scaling MySQL at YouTube

Top Reasons for YouTube Scalability

The technology stack:

  • Python
  • Memcache
  • MySQL Replication

Caching outside the database is huge.

It a display of numbers of hits per day it was said “I can neither confirm or deny the interpretation will work here (using an Alexa graph)”. This is not the first time I’ve heard this standard “Google” response. They must get lessons by lawyers in what you can say.

Standardizing on DB boxes (but they crash almost daily)

  • 4x2ghz opteron core
  • 16G RAM
  • 12x10k scsi
  • LSI hardware raid 10
  • Replication played a big part in fixing
  • Get a reliable H/W supplier

Replication Lessons

  • You don’t worry about it when a replicas fail.
  • One thing that sucks, Innodb doesn’t recover very fast. It does that durability think, but it takes hours to finish recovering (was it going to finish)
  • How many backups can you restore. When you switch you a replica, are you sure it’s right?
  • Did you test recovery, did you test your backups.
  • replication was key to trying different H/W permutations to identify incompatible H/W (combinations of controllers/disks)
  • we got good at re-parenting/promoting replicas, really fast
  • we built up ways to clone databases as fast as possible
  • Excellent way to test tuning changes or fixes (powerful place to test things)
  • Keep “intentional lag”/Stemcell replicas – Stop SQL thread, keeps a server a few hours or a day behind. Say if you drop a table you have a online backup.
  • When upgrading, always mysqldump then reload, rather then upgrade database.
  • Don’t care about CPU’s. I want as much memory as possible, I want as many spindles as possible.
  • For YouTube 2-3 second lag is acceptable.

If you db fits in ram, great otherwise

  • Cache is king
  • Writes should be cached by raid controller (buffered really) not the OS
  • Only the db should cache reads (not raid, not Linux buffer cache)

Only DB should cache reads

  • Hit in db cache means lower caches went unused.
  • Miss in db cache can only miss in other caches since they’re smaller.
  • Caching reads is worse then useless. It’s serialized writes.
  • Avoiding serialization in reads reaps compounds benefits under high concurrency

An important lesson learned. Do no cache reads in F/S and Raid Controller.

Caching Lessons
Overcoming Mystery Serialization

  • Use O_DIRECT
  • vm.swappiness=1-5
  • if you’re >80% buys — your not doing I/O concurrently look at other figures e.g. 80% busy 8 I/O’s, next configuration 80%, only 4 I/O’s
  • Mirror in H/W strip in S/W

Scale Out

  • Writes are parallel to master, but serialized to replicas. We need true horizontal partitioning.
  • We want true independent masters
  • EMD – Even More Databases — Extreme Makeover Database
  • Slave transactions must serialize to preserve commit order (this is why replication is always way slower)
  • The oracle caching algorithm (that’s a small o) — predicting the future
  • Replication lags: one IO bound thread. You do know the future, commands are coming up serially.
  • Write a script to do reads, before updates coming up (because they are cache hits).
  • The diamond. For golive, play shards binlogs back to original master for fallback.

MySQL Conference – Get Behind Dorsal Source


In a community session yesterday at MySQL Conference 2007, I first heard about Dorsal Source. A collaboration between Solid DB and Proven Scaling that allows for community people to upload patches to MySQL, get it compiled across multiple platforms, and have a downloadable distribution available on H/W individual contributors will never have access to.

That’s a great idea. I also hope we get the opportunity to get compiling of patches into multiple versions, as well to get builds of a lot of patches together. Personally, I’m running 3 versions just to diagnose one problem. 5.0.36 with a custom binary change, 5.0.37 so I have SHOW PROFILE, and 5.0.33 so I have microslow patch.

With new patches becoming available from the community, I hope I can see builds that combine all known patches that Dorsal Source may have.

I think this is going to be a great project.

MySQL Conference – PHP on Hormones

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 started early again at 8:20 am with PHP on Hormones by the father of PHP Ramus Lerdorf.

A very funny man, one of the best insightful talks of the conference (rather scary actually). Here are some opening comments.

  • In his own words as Keynote speaker. “I’m here because I’m old”.
  • Php 1 from 1994 started after seeing Mozilla in 1993. Because it was just me using it, I could change the language any time.
  • In 2005 the code looks like this (in comparison on 1995) — I’m not sure if this is worth 10 years of development
  • I wrote PHP to avoid programming
  • It’s changed to be more OO because people expect that. Universities teach this.
  • Hey, I was fixing bugs in my sleep. Iwould wake up, and in my mail box there would be bug fixes to bugs I didn’t even know I had.

Why do people contribute?

  • Self-interest
  • self expression
  • hormones
  • Improve the world

The slide included a great Chemical equation of “The Neuropeptide oxytocin” — Nature’s trust hormone

People need to attract other people, it makes you feel good, it comes out when you interact with people.

It’s not what people think about you, but rather what they think about themselves.

  • PHP was my baby, giving up control, just because I started it, doesn’t mean I have a bigger say in it.
  • Systems that harness network effects and get better the more people use them in a way that caters to their own self-interest. — Web 2.0
  • Once you build a framework your done, the users build the site, they drive the content.
  • The same people that work on open source projects, are the same people that use websites.
    • Self-interest
    • self expression
    • hormones
    • Improve the world

1. Performance
It your sites falls apart your done.

  • Benchmark
    • http_load
    • Callgrind inside valgrind
    • XDebug

valgrind –tool=callgrind

  • Excellent tool to see where time is spent in the code. You have to run a profiler.
  • Example of using Drupal. It turns out 50% of time was spent in the them, it had 47 SQL queries, 46 Selects.
  • Went from 4 per second to 80 per second, without any code changes. Some performance options, and some caching.
  • Guaranteed you can double the speed of your website by using a profiler.

2. Security
Critical problem areas.

  • 404 pages
  • Search page
  • PHP_SELF
  • $_GET, $_POST, $_COOKIE
  • $_SERVER
  • Lots of stupidity in IE (e.g. Always send a charset)

The web is broken you can all go home now.

People are venerable because people run older versions of browsers, and their data is not secure, and you can’t secure their data.

What can happen??
9 out of 10 of you have cross-site scripting hole on your site

Remote Greasemonkey
Profile Hacks
JS Trojans

Added a PHP logo to the MySQL User Website, it’s really the PHP website
IBM webpage, on article about security.

Tool to find holes, banks, insurance companies, CIA, even Yahoo where I work.

You know if they have been to bankofamerica.com, you can tell if they are a customer, you can tell if they are logged, you can then see their cookie credentials.

You don’t know if any sites have these problems.

JS trojan, iframe that captures
reconfigures your wireless router, moves it outside your DMZ, then uses traditional techniques to attack your machine (that you thought was secure inside a firewall)

You should never ever click on a link. It sort of defeats the purpose of the web.

Never use the same browser instance to do personal stuff and browsing.

So what are we doing about this?
There isn’t much we (PHP) can do to secure sites developed.
Built a filter extension in 5.2, back in 5.1.

http://php.net/filter *** YOU MUST IMPLEMENT THIS
filter.default=special_chars

3. APIs are Cool!

Two lines to grap the Atom feed from flickr of photos just uploaded.
That’s all I have to add to my code.

The really make you want to use the servers. It’s so easy.

API drives passion, drive people to use your site.
You can add a lot of cool things to your sites.

What to do

  • Avoid Participation Gimmicks
  • Get their Oxytocin flowing
  • Solve One Problem
  • Clean and Intuitive UI
  • API’s
  • Make it work

A full copy of the slides can be found at http://talks.php.net/show/mysql07key

MySQL Conference – Google

MySQL: The Real Grid Database

Introduction

  • Can’t work on performance problems until we solve the availability
  • We want MySQL to fix our problems first.

The problem

  • Deploy a DBMS for a workload with
    • too many queries
    • to many transactions
    • to much data

A well known solution

  • deploy a grid database
  • -use many replicas to scale read performance
    -shard your data over many master to scale write performance
    -sharding is easy, resharding is hard

  • availability and manageability trump performance
  • – make it easy to run many severs
    – unbretable aggregate perfomance

  • we describe problems that matter to us.
  • The grid database approach

    • Deploy a large number of small servers
    • use highly redundant commodity components
    • added capacity has a low incremental cost
    • not much capacity lost when a server fails
    • support many servers with a few DBAs

    Managability
    Make it easy to do the tasks that must be done. Reduce, Reduce.
    Make all tasks scriptable
    Why does it mater, support hundreds of servers, spend time solving more interesting problems. You generally have lots of problems to solve.

    Underutilize your severs
    Require less maintenance
    Requre less tuning
    tolerate load spikes better
    tolerate bad query plans better

    In a Perfect World
    Short running queries
    uses kill mistake and runaway queries
    accounts new use to many connections
    query plans are good
    new apps increase database workload by a small amount
    only appropiate date is stored in the database

    Reality

    • Long running transactions, create replication delays everywhere
    • servers with round robin DNS aliases make queries hard to find
    • applications create more connections where the database is slow
    • some storage engines use sampling to get query plan statistics
    • new applications create new database performance problems
    • applications use the database as long as rows are never deleted
    • many long running queries on replicas

    Solutions

    • Improve your ability to respond because prevention is impossible
    • Need tools to make monitoring easier
    • determine what is happening across servers
    • detemine what happened in the past

    Mantra

    • Monitor everything you can, and archive as long as possible. (vmstat 5 secs, iostat, mysql error logs)
    • You will need these to reconstruct failures
    • save as much as possible
    • script as much as possible

    Monitoring Matters

    • Display what is happening
    • -which table, account or statemsns caused most of the load
      -many fast queries can be as much a problem as one slow query

    • Record what happending
    • –archivce show status counters somweere
      – query data from the archive
      — visualise data from the archivce

    • record queries that have been run
    • — archive show processlist output (do every 30 seconds)
      — support queries on this archive

    • All of this much scale to an environment with many servers

    Monitoring Tools

    • Display counters and rate change for counters
    • aggregate values over many servers
    • visualize and rang results
    • display results over time

    Google mpgrep tools

    New Commands
    We changed mysql, three new commands
    SHOW USER _STATISTICS
    SHOW TABLE STATISTICS
    SHOW INDEX STATISTICS

    Per Account Activity
    USER_STATISTICS
    seconds executing commands
    number of rows fetched and changed
    total connections
    number of select/updates/other/commits/rollback/binlog bytes written.

    TABLE STATISTICS
    number of rows fetched/changed

    INDEX STATISTICS
    display number of rows fetched per index
    helps find indexes that are never used

    available in code.google.com in 4.0, porting to 5.0

    MySQL High Availability

    • Great options
      • Cluster
      • Replication
      • Middelware — e.g. continum
      • DRBD
    • We need some features right now
    • we are committed to innodb and mysql replication
    • *a lot of appplicaton code works on this
      *our tools and processed support this

    • We favor commodity hardware

    There are all great features but we are much more limited in what we can use.
    Management want to know we don’t loose transactions, not loose some transactions.

    Desired HA Functionality

    • Zero transaction loss on failures of a master
    • minimal downtime on failures of a master
    • reasonable cost in performance and dollars
    • fast and automatic failover to local or remove server
    • no changes to our programming model
      • does it support MVCC
      • does it support long running transactions (5 mins – populate temp table then use to update another table, changing rows), 5 mins on master, causes 5 mins on slave, causes code to failover from slaves to master

    • replication and reporting are concurrent on a slave

    MVCC must have update concurrent with query.

    Failures happen everywhere
    OS – kernal oom or panic (older 2.4 32 bit systems)
    mysqld – caused also by code we added
    disk, misdirected write, corrupt write (love innodb checksums)
    file system – inconsisted after unplanned hardware reboot (use ext2)
    server – bad RAM
    lan, switch – lose
    Rack – reboot
    Data center – power loss, overheading, lightning, fire
    People – things get killed or rebooted by mistake ( a typo can take out the wrong server, when names differ by a character or a digit)

    ext2 and 4.0 are great, there are the same generation.
    Trying not to use RAID, not battery backed raid etc, we try work around with software solutions. We do use RAID 0, but we also try software solution.
    When we have the right HA solution, we won’t need RAID.

    Mark. “Yes, Google programmers have bugs. Not me personally, it was my predecessor.”

    HA Features we want in MySQL
    Synchronous replication as an option
    a product that watches a master and initiates a failover
    archives of the master binlogs stored elsewhere
    state stored in the filesytstem t obe consistent after a crash
    . innodb and mysql dictionaries can get out of sync
    .replicatoin state on a slave can get out of sync

    We could not wait
    Features we added to MySQL 4.0.26
    We can do things a lot faster
    . we have more developers lying around
    . Our needs as specific, not a general product solution

    Transactional replications for slaves
    semi-synchronous replication
    mirrored binlogs
    fast and automated failover

    Transactional Replication
    Replication state on a slave is stored in files
    slave sql thread commits to storage engines and then updates a file
    a crash between the two can make replication state inconsistent
    transactional replication
    MySQL can solve this in the future by storing replication state in tables

    Semi-synchronous replication
    Block return from commit on a master until at least one slave has acknowledged receipt of
    slave io thread acknowledges receipt after buffering the changes
    modified mysql replication protocol to support acknowledgments
    conifuration options
    where to the master uses it
    where a slave used it
    how long the maser waits for an acknowledgement

    can run a server with some semi-sync replication slaves and some regulare replication salves
    this can be worked with any storage engines that supports commit, but we only use innodb

    * This is how we guarantee to management for Zero Transaction Loss.

    Latency single stream 1ms, multi-stream 10ms. This is acceptable for us.

    The MySQL Replication Protocol

    • The current replication protocol is efficient
    • a slaves makes one request

    Replication Acknowledgment

      Slaves register as semi-sync or async at connect time
      prepend flag bytes to all replication events sent to semi-sync clients
      the master sends the flag bytes to request acknowledged for replication events that represent the end of the transaction
      the slave use the existing connection for acknowledgments

    Mirrored Binlogs
    mysql does not provide a way to maintain a copy of a master’s binlog on a replica. By copy we me a file of same name and equivalent byte for byte.
    Hierarachial replication works much better where a slave can disconnect from one replication proxy and reconnect to another with adjusting binlog offsets.
    Hot backups taken before a failover and difficult to use after a failover

    Mirrored Binlog Implementions
    Slave IO threads write their own relay log and a copy of the bin log
    all events but the rotate log event are written

    After failover, start a new binlog on new master

    Fast Failover

    Slaves use a hostname, rather then an IP
    You can’t enable the binlog dynamically (in 4.0)
    Added new SQL STATEMENTS that does
    disconnect users with SUPER privilege
    disable new connections
    enable the bin log
    enable connections from all users

    Automatic failover
    Something must decided that a master has failed
    Something must choose the new master

    Q: What keeps up from moving to 5.0?
    A: Queries don’t parse (Joins)

    Data sets, 8GB servers, 50-100GB’s

    MySQL Roadmap

    Here are some notes from the MySQL Server Roadmap session at the MySQL Conference 2007.

    MySQL: Past and Future

    • 2001: 3:23
    • 2003: 4.0 UNION query Cache Embedded
    • 2004: 41. Subqueries
    • 2005: 5.0 Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views
    • Now: 5.1.17 Partitioning, Events, Row-based replication
    • 2007?: 6.0 Falcon, Performance, Conflict detection
    • 2008?: 6.1 Online Backup, FK Constraints

    2007 Timeline

    • Q1: 5.1 Beta, 5.1 Telco Production Ready, Monitoring Service 1.1, MySQL 6.0 Alpha, Community GA
    • Q2: MySQL 6.0 Beta, New Connectors GA
    • Q3: 5.1 RC, 6.0 Beta, MS 2.0, Enterprise Dashboard beta
    • Q4: 5.1 GA, 6.0 Beta

    Where are we today?

    • We are by fare the most populate open source database
    • The Enterprise world is moving online and MySQL is well-positioned for that trend, But:
      • Transactional scalability
      • Manageability
      • Specific online features

    MySQL Server Vision – The Future

    • Always Online — 24×7, Online backup,online analytics, online schema changes
    • Dynamic Scale-out — online partitioning, add node, replication aides,
    • Reliable — fault-tolerant, easy disagnosis, stable memory, ultimately self-healing
    • High-performance — Interactive web, real-time response, apps, 10,000-100,000 clients
    • Ease of use — Portable, Best for development, multiple connectors, easy tuning
    • Modularity and Ubiquity — Storage engines, plug ins

    How can you help?

    • Bug finding and fixing — Community Quality Contributor
    • Feature/patch contribution
    • But, to expedite your patch

    The goal: “Be the Best Online Database for Modern Applications”

    MySQL Conference – For Oracle DBAs and Developers


    I have just completed my presentation at the MySQL Conference 2007 on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

    Not mentioned in my slides, but referenced during the presentation was what I consider the most important page to document from the MySQL Manual — 5.2.1. Option and Variable Reference

    You can download a PDF copy of my presentation here.

    MySQL Conference – Building a Vertical Search Engine in a Day

    Moving into the user sessions on the first day at MySQL Conference 2007, I attended Building a Vertical Search Engine in a Day.

    Some of my notes for reference.

    Web Crawling 101

    • Injection List – What is it seed URL’s you are starting from
    • Fetching the pages
    • Parsing the content – words and links
    • Updating the crawl DB
    • Whitelist
    • Blacklist
    • Convergence — avoiding the honey pots
    • Index
    • Map-reduce — split a large problem into little pieces, process in parallel, then combine results

    Focused content == vertical crawl

    • 20 Billion Pages out there, a lot of junk
    • Bread-first would take years and cost millions of lives

    OPIC + Term Vectors = Depth-first

    • OPIC is “On-line Page Importance Calculation”. Fixing OPIC Scoring Paper
    • Pure OPIC means “Fetch well-linked pages first”
    • We modify it to “fetch pages about MySQL first”

    Nutch & Hadoop are the technologies that run on a 4 server cluster. Sample starting with www.mysql.com in 23 loops, 150k pages fetched, 2M URL’s found .

    Serving up the results

    MySQL Conference – RedHat Keynote – One Laptop Per Child

    Our third keynote at MySQL Conference 2007 was titled Building the Ultimate Database Container with RHEL, MySQL, and Virtualization by Michael Evans.

    The presentation was on Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child. His initial Quote was “Thinking Past Platforms: The Next Challenge for Linux”, By Doc Sears, 2007-04-16 http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000210

    OLPC

    • A Non profit idea from Nicholas Negroponte.
    • Aim is to build & distribute inexpensive laptop systems to primary & secondary school students worldwide.
    • Sell to young children in developing countries.

    In summary at presentation to Red Hat — “Non-profit, run by a professor, we make hardware and sell to governments.”

    The overall dynamics have attracted a lot of interesting people in the world.

    The ability and goal is to make the device together, bringing all H/W and S/W people together.

    The people that get behind this project have the ethos — “I’m willing to jump into this to change the world.”

    This is the first time for a new opportunity in the last 10 years.

    The sugar user interface is a completely new experience.

    When the UI designer was presenting to a room of head executives. “What ever advice you got, keep it to yourself, your not the target market.”

    One key point — No backward compatibility needs.

    More information at www.laptop.org. Wikipedia Reference. Some videos at You Tube Inside One Laptop per Child: Episode one and Slightly better demo of the OLPC User Interface.

    MySQL Conference – The next keynote with Guy Kawasaki

    Without missing a beat at MySQL Conference 2007, we moved from Marten’s keynote to The Art of Innovation by Guy Kawasaki.

    Extremely fun and entertaining. His 10 points.

    1. Make Meaning

    • “To change the world”
    • To a VC, do not say “you want to make money”, that is understood. You will attract the wrong team.

    2. Make Mantra

    • Not a Mission statement (50-60 words long), but 2 or 3 words.
      • Wendy’s – “Healthy fast food”
      • Mike – “Authentic Athletic Performance”
      • FedEx – “Peace of Mind”
      • eBay – “Democratize commerce”
    • Create a mantra — Why do you exist?

    If you get stuck try the Dilbert mission statement generator.

    3. Jump to the next curve

    • Not 50% or 100% better, but “Do things 10x better”

    4. Roll the DICEE

    • “Create great stuff”
      • Deep: Fanning (Reef) Sandal that open beer bottles
      • Intelligent: BF-104 Flashlight (Panasonic) (takes 3 sizes of batteries)
      • Complete: Lexus
      • Elegant: Nano (Apple)
      • Emotive: Harley Davidson (They generate strong emotions)

    5. Don’t worry, be crappy

    Get it out there.

    6. Polarize people

    People love it or hate it.

    7. Let a hundred flowers blossom

    • People that are not your target market are using it.
    • Take the money, ask the people why you are buying, ask what you can do better.

    8. Churn baby, churn.

    Ok to ship stuff with crappy stuff in it, but important to continually revised and improve.

    9. Niche thyself
    With a nice graph.

    • Vertical — Ability to provide unique product or service
    • Horizontal –Value to customer
    • bottom right — Price
    • top left — Stupid
    • bottom left — Dotcom
    • top right — X You need to be High and to the right.
    • Fandango — It’s either Fandango, or Clubbin.
    • Breitling Emergency – watch
    • Smart car – park perpendicular
    • LG Kimchi refrigerator

    You need to be like the President of the United States – You need to high and to the right. Got a great laugh from the crowd.

    10. Follow the 10/20/30 rule

    Innovative, you need to pitch for what you want.

    • The optimum number of slides in 10 slides.
    • Given the slides in 20 minutes.
    • Use 30 point font

    11. Don’t let the bozos grind you down

    A bonus to our friends in the community.

    • “I think there is world market for five computers”
    • “This telephone has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.” –Western Union 1876
    • “There is no reason why anyone would want a computer in their home.” — Digital Equipment Corp 1977
    • “It’s too far to drive, and I don’t see how it can be a business.” – Guy Kawasaki – Bozo (The company was Yahoo)

    Guy commenting on his lost opportunity with Yahoo — “It only covers the first billion, it’s the second billion that pisses me off.”

    Read more about Guy at his website Guy Kawasaki.

    The Art of Innovation. If you a copy of slides, send an email to [email protected]

    MySQL Conference – Opening Keynote with Marton Mickos

    It’s an early start this morning at 8:20am at MySQL Conference 2007 with CEO Mårten Mickos keynote talk Welcome and State of MySQL AB.

    Here are some of the key points that impressed on me.


    “The Participatory & Disruptive spirit of the Dolphin.”.

    Open Source disrupts inefficient models and produces new wealth.

    Architecture of Participation.

    • GPL and FOSS licenses
    • Google
    • del.ico.us

    MySQL Architecture of Participation
    You have the forge, the planet, community contributer program and many more.

    Production of Amateurs

    • You Tube
    • Second Life
    • Wikipedia

    Some really great Quotes:

    “Fail often to succeed soon.” IDEO company slogan

    “Noah’s Ark was built by amateurs, but the Titanic by professionals.”

    Innovation Happens Here

    MySQL Monitoring & Advisory Service

    In his presentation of MySQL Network Enterprise Dashboard, If you were quick you would have noticed the MySQL Version 6.0.0-alpha-pb518.log

    Leading Applications

    • Open Source ISVs
    • Web
    • Web 2.0
    • On-Demand
    • Hosting
    • Telco & VOIP
    • Security
    • Enterptise 2.0
    • Hub & Spoke

    We want to be known as The Online Database.

    Drawn to the Lamp

    • Microsoft
    • Oracle
    • IBM
    • Sun
    • HP
    • Dell
    • Unisys

    They all have an Open Source strategy, the develop open source products, they use and partner with MySQL.

    He also mentioned MySQL Enterprise Connection Alliance – MECA.

    Global Distributed Organization

    • 70% work from home
    • 100 major locations in nearly 30 different countries.
    • There is a great focus on culture – global culture.

    Disruptive Businesses

    • A smarter way to produce the goods
    • A smarter way to distribute them
    • Serve the underserved
    • Keep it simple
    • Innovate with technology to give customers more convenience
    • Make money
    • Gartner: 66% of enterprises are deploying MySQL or planning to
    • 750,000 newsletter subscribers
    • MySQL installed in over 11 million installations

    Going Forward

    • Scalability
    • Availability
    • Manageability
    MySQL – The best online database in the world.

    MySQL Conference – Rewarding the Community

    At MySQL Conference 2007, CEO Mårten Mickos in his opening keynote Welcome and State of MySQL AB rewarded the community. Those that contributed to “The best database in the world”.

    2007 MySQL Applications of the Year
    #1 in Online Video
    #1 in 3G Mobile Entertainment
    #1 in Creative Software

    And the Winners- YouTube, Amp’d mobile, and Adobe

    2007 MySQL Partners of the Year
    #1 reseller of MySQL Enterprise to govt
    #1 in MySQL Enterprise integration
    #1 in Open Source

    And the Winners – Carasoft, HP, and RedHat

    2007 Community Members of the Year
    Quality Contributor
    Community Code Contributor
    Community Advocate

    And the Winners

    Martin Freibe
    Paul McCullagh
    Sheeri Kritzer

    MYSQL Conference – Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures Tutorial

    My first tutorial today at MySQL Conference 2007 is Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling.

    Basic Tenets

    While not discussed, the premise is to Cache Everything. MemCache is a key component to any scalable system.

    Lifetime of a scalable system

    Using the analogy from a newborn child Jeremy stepped us through the categories Newborn, Toddler, Teenager, Late teens to 20s, Adult.

    In Late teens to 20s, is where most systems die a slow death, he termed “the awkward stage”. This is where scalability is critical, and a meltdown for example can ruin you. Downtime is also just not acceptable for your user community.

    When your Adult you need to perfect the ability to deploy incremental changes to your application seamlessly.

    As the system grows, optimizations changes that may have worked are now affecting your system. It’s important to revisit during each stage.

    Partitioning

    Most applications mainly implement a horizontal partitioning model. Different components of your systemcan be scaled by a “partition key”. The different models include fixed “Hash key” partitioning, Dynamic “directory” partitioning, Partition by “group” and partition by “user”.

    The Dynamic “directory” is a lot harder to implement, but is ultimately more scalable.

    One of Partitioning Difficulties, is inter-partition interactions. Ultimately the solution is duplicating meta-data or duplicating data. Overall reporting is also more difficult. What if we want average for users per location, if we partition by users. Most systems user driven and partition by user. A newer strategy is to partition by group.

    For implementing a Fixed Hash Key partitioning.

    • Divide data into B buckets
    • Divide the B buckets over M machines

    You define 1024 physical buckets (can then the easily dividable) 0-1023 (user_id % 1024). Coded then by range to physical machines, 0-255, 256-511, 512-767, 768-1023. The plus side is very easy to implement, you can always derive where something is. The biggest problems is scalability, e.g. going from 4 machines to 5. You also don’t have any fine grained control over buckets.

    For Dynamic Directory partitioning you maintain a database of mappings to partitions. A user can be easily moved at a later date in a much finer grain. MySQL Cluster is designed for this type of application. It is not necessary however, a well configured Innodb Hardware solution with memcache can easily provide the same functionality. The only writes are new users, or update partition keys, with a lot of reads.

    HiveDB

    This open source product implements a “standard” partition-by-key MySQL system written in Java.
    Many organizations have a somewhat similar built system, but this is an example of something that’s been open sourced.

    More information at www.hivedb.org.

    The Hive API language should be the only code that should be re-written to be application development language (e.g. PHP,Ruby) when needed.

    High Availability

    The obvious goals.

    • Avoid downtime due to failures.
    • No single point of failure.
    • Extremely fast failover.
    • No dependency of DNS changes.
    • No Dependency on code changes.
    • Painless and seamless failover.
    • Fail-back must be just as painless.

    The overall objective is speed.

    Understanding MySQL Replication is important to understanding HA options.

    MySQL Replication is Master-Slave One Way asynchronous replication.

    • Slave requests binary logs from last position.
    • Master sends binary logs up to current time.
    • Master keeps sending binary logs in real-time.

    Dual Master provides an easy configuration to fail over, it doesn’t provide benefits in throughput. Can help solve online schema changes without downtime. Assuming existing queries will perform both pre and post schema. (set-sql-bin-log=0 for the session is the tip). There are a number of caveats.

    Ultimately for High Availability you have a trade off, data loss (minuet) to scalability.

    CU@UC07


    I’ll be speaking at the upcoming 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo (Why they dropped the word User, who knows), this time with Guy Harrison (Author of many books including MySQL Stored Procedures). We will be talking on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

    Anyway, good friend Paul McCullagh, creator of PBXT will be also speaking on PrimeBase XT: Design and Implementation of a Transactional Storage Engine. He coined to me in an email “CU at the UC”. I’ve done a further level of refactoring, and added marketing. You can buy the shirt online here. (More colors including black and products coming, if you want it now, please ask).