MySQL Meetup Last Night

It's a strange world. Last night, I attended my first Vancouver MySQL meetup. This morning, my google reader is filled with news that Sun is buying MySQL.

We met at the Milestone's on Robson. At the peak of the evening, there were 8 people out. I think the goal of the meetup was to talk about clustering, but we never got around to it. People were mostly introducing themselves, talking about their backgrounds and what they were working on. 

I suppose that's the problem when you do something like this at a restaurant. This was my second meetup, the first was the Ruby meetup on in December. I think that if you want to have a specific technical discussion you should start with a presentation in a meeting room, then move elsewhere for food. 

That being said, I was happy with how the meetup went, and plan to attend the February meeting. It's a good group with a wide range of experience.

LongJump DaaS

LongJump's Database as a Service was featured on TechCrunch today. It appears to be a competitor to SimpleDB:

LongJump’s DaaS provides a complete environment for hosting a database that’s highly secure and web-enabled while simultaneously cutting the costs and easing the hassles for entrepreneurs and developers who would otherwise have to purchase a database server, provision it, address data access and availability issues, manage backup and replication issues, and tackle security and data protection.

They mention that they use Java on MySQL, but it does not appear that they actually expose MySQL API's. According to their sales copy, it's only REST 

My quick scan of their product pages indicate that you need to sign up for LongJump to get access. They charge by the user account as opposed to usage. I don't know if it counts as utility computing then :)

I'll sign up for an account in the next couple of weeks, but on first glance this seems to be targeted at smaller businesses and databases.

MySQL EC2 Benchmarks

Morgan Tocker has some EC2 benchmarks for MySQL. The performance doesn't stack up all that well. He says EC2 tends to be inconsistent, which makes sense on a shared machine. 

It would be interesting to see a Xen VM in the mix for comparison. It may give clues as to how loaded up each Amazon Dom0 is.

I bet small instances perform better because the disks are on a raid (ie, more spindles). You need to manually raid the disks on large instances.

MySQL Workbench -- No Mac Till 2008

MySQL Workbench is set to fill a gap in my DBA needs. Unfortunately, no Mac support till 2008, from the download page:

Please note that at this point only the Windows Beta version is available. Linux and OS X releases will be available in 2008.

Boo-urns. I seem to remember a disproportionate number of Macs at the 2006 User Conference. I figured it would be higher on their priority list. Oh well, I suppose I'll just have to wait to buy my copy :(

OCFS2 Looks Interesting

There was a discussion on the CentOS mailing list the other day about Oracle Cluster File System 2. I went and checked it out. Well, I read some docs about it anyway.

It's released under the GPL and it's not really just for Oracle. It looks to be a share nothing type file system layer. Oracle uses it for RAC, I believe. Of course RedHat doesn't ship it -- it would eat into their GFS sales. Oracle does distribute RPM's for RedHat/CentOS though.

I've played around with DRDB for replication/fail over before. It works pretty well, but you definitely feel blind on your secondary machine since you don't have the shared partitions mounted. With MySQL starting to push DRDB for MySQL failover, I wonder if this would work better. You'd still want to use heartbeat to control where MySQL is running, but at least you'd be able to see everything on each node.

It also may be a decent alternative to replication if you're just using MyISAM. This may be good for scaling out data warehouses -- having only one master updating files and many slaves reading those files.

Another interesting use would be for apache document roots. It gets around having to sync each web server node's document root (if you take a share nothing approach), or using an NFS server (if you use NFS).

I haven't really looked into how well OCFS2 handles node additions (I'm guess you have to restart the cluster). Nor what happens when a node gets out of sync.

Sooner or later I'll install and test it out.