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- Don't Bet on Moore Saving Your AssJanuary 7
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Over on the 37signals blog, DHH writes Mr. Moore gets to punt on sharding. His argument is basically that if you continually delay fixing your data storage and retrieval layer, Moore's Law will be there to save our ass--over and over again.
Bzzzt. Wrong answer.
Depending on future improvements to fix your own bad planning is a risky way to build an on-line service--especially one you expect to grow and charge money for.
It's easy to forget history in this industry (as Paul pointed out in the comments on that post). There was a point a few years ago when people still believed the clock speed of CPUs would be doubling roughly every 18 months for half the cost. Putting aside that Moore's Law is really about transistor density and not raw speed, we all ended up taking a funny little detour anyway.
Until recently, the sweet spot (in terms of cost and power use) was probably a dual CPU, dual core server with 16 or 32GB of RAM. But soon that'll be dual quads with 32 or 64GB of RAM. And then it'll be quad eight core CPUs with 128GB or whatever.
But notice that nowadays we're not all running 6.4GHz CPUs in our servers. Instead we're running multi-core CPUs at slower clock speeds. Those two are definitely not equivalent.
A funny thing ha
- Twitter as a Dynamic DNS ServiceDecember 30 2008
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I occasionally wish to know the IP address of my home Cable Modem or DSL connection but don't really care if it's available in DNS or not. It occurred to me that if I could programmatically detect the IP change, I'd be able to notify myself via Twitter.
At first, I wanted a simple web service that'd tell me my IP address--something like WhatIsMyIP.com but an API suitable for simple scripting.
Not finding anything, I created this massive PHP script instead and hosted it on my server:
That made it easy to write a simple bash shell script that can be run from cron every few minutes. It uses curl to hit that script and compares the result with the previous result (stored in ~/.last_ip). If they differ it updates the file and tells twitter, again using curl.
Of course, I had to create that new twitter account and then follow it in my main account. But, hey, that wasn't so hard. Now I have a Web 2.0ish social dynamic DNS thingy that uses Twitter.
Aren't I cool and buzzword compliant?!
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- Talk Announcement: MySQL and Search at CraigslistDecember 19 2008
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I recently learned that my talk has been accepted for the 2009 MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, California. It is currently scheduled for Tuesday the 21st and titled MySQL and Search at Craigslist.
Here's the abstract (which I've promised to expand upon soon):
Millions of people search for things every day on craigslist: tickets, cars, garage sales, jobs, events, and so on.
This talk will look at the recent evolution of database and search architecture at Craigslist, including performance, caching, partitioning, and other tweaks. We'll pay special attention to the unique challenges of doing this for a large data set that has an especially high churn rate (new posts, edits, and deletes).
And we strive to do this using as little hardware and power as possible.
If you're coming to the conference, drop by and harass me. :-)
If you're not sure check out the full schedule--there's a lot of good stuff packed into the conference already and a lot of talks are still not even posted.
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- The New MySQL LandscapeDecember 8 2008
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Interesting things are afoot in the MySQL world. You see, it used to be that the MySQL world consisted of about 20-40 employees of MySQL AB (this funny distributed Swedish company that built and supported the open source MySQL database server), a tiny handful of MySQL mailing lists, and large databases were counted in gigabytes not terabytes. A Pentium III was still a decent server. Replication was a new feature!
Hey, anyone remember the Gemini storage engine? :-)
How times have changed...
Nowadays MySQL is sort of a universe onto itself. There are multiple storage engines (though MyISAM and InnoDB are still the popular ones), version 5.1 is out (finally), and the whole company made it over 400 employees before it was gobbled up by Sun Microsystems (a smart move, IMHO, though history will judge that) a while back.
If I had to guess 5 years or so ago what would be interesting to me today about MySQL, I'd have been really, really wrong. The future rarely turns out like we think. Just ask Hillary Clinton.
Here's a little of what's rattling around in the MySQL part of my little brain these days...
Outside Support, Patches, and Forks
The
- My Dumb Cat VideoDecember 5 2008
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It's Friday and this is the Internet, so I present to you Cats Eating Chicken, or "My Dumb Cat Video" (embedded below too).
The background is that we had a bit of leftover grilled chicken the other night and decided to bust it up and feed it to the cats. Amusingly, they all got together to partake of the feast, but a couple of them got curious about the camera too.
Both Timmy (white and grey) and Thunder (mostly grey) give the camera a sniff or two. My boys (Barnes and Noble) remained single-mindedly devoted to devouring the meat.
Anyway, we found it rather amusing.
Have a good weekend...
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