FewBar.com – Make it good

If you came here between April 28 and about an hour ago, you got a “couldn’t connect to database” error. Oops! Seems my limited memory EC2 instance got a little overwhelmed by php processes and decided the db server, drizzled, should die to make more room for PHP. Ooops! Time to drop pm.max_children.

I don’t have any monitoring setup for the site, so I just now figured it out. Until I get proper monitoring, I’ve installed this fancy bit of duct-tape upstart magic:

start on stopping
task
script
env | mail -s "$JOB is stopping!" me@myemail.com
end script


What does this do? Well is emails me whenever upstart gives up respawning something, or I manually stop a service.

Its not monitoring. I need monitoring. But this is a nice little hack to prevent a regression while I figure that out.

Or, for short, the “2011 O’Reilly MySQL Users Conference & Expo”. Yes thats the short name of the conference that, thus far, has brought me nothing but good info, good times, and insight into one of the most interesting open source communities around.

MySQL has been at the core of a real revolution in the way data driven applications have exploded on the internet. Its so easy to just install it, fire up php’s mysql driver, and boom, you’re saving and retrieving data. The *use* of MySQL has always been incredibly simple.

The politics has, at times, been confusing. Continue reading

HTTP JSON AlsoSQL interface to Drizzle | Ramblings. – This is what I’m talking about when I say Drizzle will be for HTTP what Apache was for MySQL. Its hyper flexible and quite performant. Stewart is a quite gifted programmer, but look how easy it was to integrate a JSON library and libevent into the server on a whim.

As a sysadmin with LAMP shops, I always had to stop innovating around the MySQL part of it. Linux I could hack on, apache I could hack on, and PHP/Perl/Python were built to be hacked on. But MySQL was always difficult beyond a few clever UDF’s.

I’m waiting for somewhere to adopt Drizzle and really start running wild with the plugins. Should be interesting!

Ubuntu and Drizzle — Run Drizzle on your Narwhal: OReilly MySQL Conference & Expo 2011 – OReilly Conferences, April 11 – 14, 2011, Santa Clara, CA.

I gave a talk this week in Santa Clara at the MySQL Users Conference. I think it went pretty well and I got a lot of feedback from Ubuntu users about the positives of having Drizzle available in Universe.The slides are available at the link above.

Since we’re just about to 11.04 beta2, I figured its high time I start using Ubuntu Server for my personal blog.

What? Almost a year at Canonical and my blog wasn’t on Ubuntu server? Well, for over 5 years now, a personal friend has provided me with a free Xen virtual machine to run my blog on. I migrated it off of Debian then, which was sad for me, but back then I was so focused on working I didn’t have time or resources to be picky, so I said OK.

Fast forward to now, I’ve been working on Ubuntu Server and getting ribbed by my co-workers about that “crappy CentOS xen box” they’d see me logged into.

Well thats all over now. I decided to marry all the new tech I’ve been playing with lately into one glorious blog migration. Continue reading

So, this week, Drizzle released its beta, which is really exciting. But at the same time, I decided to ask the Ubuntu MOTU pull it out of Ubuntu 10.10 (a.k.a. maverick) entirely. The reasons, may not be entirely obvious.
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Drizzle7 Beta Released! now with MySQL migration! « LinuxJedis /dev/null.

Drizzle is a project that is near and dear to my heart.

To sum it up, Drizzle took all that was really good in MySQL, cut out all that was mediocre, and replaced some of it with really good stuff. The end product is, I think, something that is leaner, should be more stable, and definitely more flexible.

So go check out the beta! I guess I should use Andrew’s migration tool and see if I can migrate this blog to drizzle.

PBMS in Drizzle | Ramblings.

For those not familiar with PBMS it does two things: provide a place (not in the table) for BLOBs to be stored (locally on disk or even out to S3) and provide a HTTP interface to get and store BLOBs.

This means you can do really neat things such as have your BLOBs replicated, consistent and all those nice databasey things as well as easily access them in a scalable way (everybody knows how to cache HTTP).

This is awesome. How many times have you added a URL to your database table and then had to write API’s of some sort to go fetch that URL at read time, and write that URL somewhat atomically at write time?

Drizzle isn’t even “done” yet, and already the plugins are flying out of the community. The fact that this is a plugin, and won’t affect *anybody* who doesn’t want it, is why I’m confident Drizzle is moving in the right directly. I’m not sure why it has taken so long, but this feels like its doing for the RDBMS what apache has done for HTTP serving… make it flexible and extensible, and folks will find interesting ways to use it.

This past April I was riding in a late model, 2 door rental car with an interesting trio for sure. On my right sat Patrick Galbraith, maintainer of DBD::mysql and author of the Federated storage engine. Directly in front of me manning the steering wheel (for those of you keen on spatial description, you may have noted at this point that its most likely I was seated in the back, left seat of a car which is designed to be driven on the right side of the road. EOUF [end of useless fact]), David Axmark, co-founder of MySQL. Immediately to his right sat Brian Aker, of (most recently) Drizzle fame.
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Its always been a dream of mine. I’ve posted about parallel replication on Drizzle’s mailing list before. I think when faced with the problem of a big, highly concurrent master, and scaling out reads simply with lower cost slaves, this is going to be the only way to go.

So today I was really glad to see that somebody is trying out the idea. Seppo Jaakola from “Codership”, who I’ve never heard of before today, posted a link to an article on his blog about his experimentation with parallel replication slaves. The findings are pretty interesting.
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