Colin Charles Agenda

We were at the University of California, Berkeley, yesterday. Dups picked me up from the Hyatt, and we headed out there (despite the traffic jams caused by the major winds the night before — 50+mph winds!). Lunch was in Berkeley, and we met up with our Sun counterpart who deals with University Relations.

At about 3.50pm, we were told that our talk which was scheduled from 5-6pm, was actually meant to be at 4-5pm. Oops. I immediately sent a text message to Farhan, and he told me he was a few minutes away.

While the attendees all sat down and ate the pizza, we put on a little show for them, and then started at about 4.10pm. Farhan walked in a little later, and by 4.30pm, it was Q&A time.

Lots of interesting questions: why did Sun acquire you, how do you make money, is it true that MySQL cannot scale (surprised this question was asked after the presentation showing all the big ticket sites using it), is BigTable better, what new features can there possibly be to add, and more.

After that, Volker Oboda (from PrimeBase, the folk that bring you PBXT, and more – a picture of Volker and Dups talking earlier), Dups and I headed to grab a beer at the university pub, before heading back. All in all, good fun. A few photos are here.

So, the minor snag of it being an hour earlier, was taken by us in good stride. Today, Dups will visit San Jose State University, while Farhan and I will visit Stanford University. I had wished that the attendance was greater than the 20-25 or so that we had, but oh well. The slide deck is one prepared by Dups, that is pretty standard, that even Sheeri and Giuseppe are using.

I heard about TwitterJobSearch on net@night, and decided to give it a twirl. I typed “mysql” and found 3,092 results in 30 seconds. You can then filter by job title, salary, skill set, job type, and more, as well as sort it by relevance or date.

Useful? Quite possibly. Would be more useful, if you could filter out Twitter users (like @itcareer, for example). Search that is semantic, instead of just word based. So “mysql in san francisco” will return relevant results for you.

If you’re looking for a job anytime soon, note that there will also be a Job Fair at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, happening April 20-23 2009, are you registered yet? Its a great place to network, and you shouldn’t miss it.

I was a little worried last week with regards to our Google Summer of Code status, but I’m glad to see that MySQL has been accepted, for a third year running, for the Google Summer of Code 2009.

Mentors & students alike, check out the ideas page. You as a student can even submit ideas, and we’ll look for a mentor for you, naturally.

Things we’re looking for:

• Simple bug fixes
• Improvements in documentation of code
• Test suite improvements
• New features, but simple enough to implement in timeframe
• Pet projects
• Extending tools, creating new tools that support MySQL
• Wider ecosystem that is MySQL – this means I’m looking at you, Drizzle, even

Again, if you have any queries, drop me a line via email, as I’m the Program Administrator again :)

After checking with the relevant parties, MySQL has just submitted an application for the Google Summer of Code 2009. We’ve successfully participated in SoC during 2007, and 2008, and we’re hoping to get another shot at SoC, for our third year running.

What is Summer of Code? It means different things to many different people. If you’re a student, it means you get to hack on MySQL and the related products, and churn out code, that over eleven million people use, while you sit on the beach in your bathers! And when successful, you get a nice wad of cash even!

If you’re a mentor, it means having someone to help you write features, you’ve been wanting — someone to spend a good fourty-hours per week, hacking on the feature you most want (and its do-able within 12 weeks or so). As usual, mentors, we have an ideas page up. Mentors, go forth and fill it up.

Students, should also feel free to discuss their ideas, either on the wiki, or via the mailing list. You don’t need to apply yet (in fact, you can’t till we get accepted into the program to begin with!).

Remember, this is the year to Make MySQL Contributor Friendly (MMCF). Check the interview with Masood Mortazavi for more. So much potential for server contributions abound.

If you have any other queries, please don’t hesitate to drop me a comment, or an email at colin@mysql.com. Now, on toward happy hacking!

A lot of people are into the whole cloud computing scenario these days. However, no one has talked about offering DBA-like services in the cloud, all automated, so that startups don’t have to get their own DBAs.

Enter FathomDB. They are poised to offer databases as a service (maybe they’ll charge per database – so you can in theory run both WordPress and Mediawiki, if you prefix wp_ and mw_ in your table creation, for example). They are using MySQL. They’ve also taken the worry of running a database out – they will backup, they will setup (so you don’t have to issue GRANT commands :P), and they will also monitor your databases for you.

But what really takes the cake? The fact that they will also offer performance advisors. This totally reminds me of the MySQL Enterprise Monitor (aka Merlin), offered in the cloud, with advisors.

No word if they’re actually running Merlin, or what kind of MySQL builds they’re running. They have a FAQ that I suggest you read, pricing has not been released, but I think this stuff is totally cool and has a future. I mean, you can run your database using their services and EC2, and if you need to do load balancing (Proxy, anyone?), or replication, they’ll set it up for you.

Its going to be real useful for startups, that are already embracing the cloud and going the EC2 way. This is just yet another service, they’ll probably pay for. Because scaling your database, sometimes, isn’t the easiest thing to do.

Can’t wait for a beta invite. If I get one, I’ll give it a twirl and tell you how it went.

Note: This is a Y Combinator company, I first read about this in TechCrunch, and apparently, there was some mention of this during their cloud event last week, where Lew Tucker, Sun’s VP and CTO of Sun’s cloud computing initiative was at. I however don’t know anymore than what I’ve seen online, and lack any other insider knowledge.

A couple interesting things coming out of startup land.

For one, Posterous has a little writeup on Building and Scaling a Startup on Rails: 12 Things We Learned the Hard Way. Good things to take away include using Sphinx/Solr for search, but the real important takeaway for the MySQL crowd is Storage engine matters, and you should probably use InnoDB. If you’re writing an application, know your storage engines. There are also bits to tell you how to use query_viewer and New Relic to help you fix database bottlenecks, use memcached later, and more. Its a great read.

Next up, there’s How FriendFeed uses MySQL to store schema-less data. I hope Bret from FriendFeed writes more on their infrastructure over time. Its interesting to see that they thought of going the CouchDB route, but never saw it as “proven” technology (in comparison to MySQL).