Checksum Arcanius

My first day at my first MySQL conference was a riotous success. I attended the “State of the Dolphin” keynote followed by talks given by Tim O’Reilly and Facebook’s own Mark Callaghan, who also won a MySQL Community Member of the Year Award during the opening talks. Congrats to Mark!

After the Keynotes, I synced up with other Facebookers at our expo hall booth, and then I went to Domas Mituzas’ talk on “High Concurrency MySQL”. The ballroom couldn’t hold all the people who wanted to watch — there was actually a line outside the door of people listening in on his talk! Although I wouldn’t suggest Domas give up his day job to write slides full-time, he had a great presentation overall that kept the audience interested and engaged.

Next, I attended a presentation on Sqoop by my two-time TA at the UW and now Cloudera co-founder and presenter extraordinaire, Aaron Kimball. Sqoop is a SQL-to-Hadoop translation layer that automates many of the steps of shuttling data from OLTP stores to HDFS for analytics. It is open source and Aaron is it’s primary developer. You can check out the code on github, or use it as part of Cloudera’s Hadoop Distribution.

After lunch, I went to a presentation by Lars Thalmann on new MySQL replication features in 5.1 and 5.5. Lead replication developer Mats Kindall was also there to answer questions. It’s good to see that MySQL is making progress on replication, but it is still woefully limited in a number of ways: not crashproof, single-threaded, and difficulty in replicating to non-MySQL data stores are all weak points of MySQL’s replication system today. These are all on the roadmap, but from the answers to my questions, I got the impression that these ideas are still mostly bullet points on a slide rather than almost-features in MySQL.

Make no mistake, these features are hard to add — I’ve dabbled around in the area myself — and it took Mark a concerted effort to port rpl_transaction_enabled from our 5.0 patch to Facebook’s 5.1 patch. Still, I hope MySQL takes the rpl_transaction_enabled patch and  into 5.1 or 5.5 officially, because in any large deployment, it is incredibly useful to not manually intervene when a slave crashes.

After the replication talk, I went back to the expo hall to talk with people, then I hacked on MySQL in the afternoon. Could there possibly be a better venue for this? Two (small) diffs later, and I was back into the expo hall socializing/recruiting for Facebook. The night ended well with a trip to In-and-Out.

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