Join the SF MySQL Meetup for our April meetup where Bret Taylor from FriendFeed talks about how they store their data in a "schema-less" system on top of MySQL. FriendFeed stores over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.

As the database has grown, they have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. They did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as FriendFeed grew, scaling their existing features to accommodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

In particular, making schema changes or adding indexes to a database with more than 10 – 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. After some deliberation, FriendFeed decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This talk attempts to describe the high-level details of the system.

Bret Tayler is one of the founders of FriendFeed.com. Before starting FriendFeed, he was a Group Product Manager at Google, responsible for Google’s developer products. Before that, he launched Google Maps and Google Local, and before that he worked on Google’s crawling and indexing infrastructure.

• Overview
  • What is the Yahoo! Open Stack?
    • Developer Tools – YUI, Tutorials
    • YOS SDK for PHP
  • Data APIs – YQL, BOSS …
  • Social APIs – Profiles, Connections, Updates, …
  • Application Platform
    • OpenSocial Support
• How does it all work?
  • Development Workflow
• Building an open application with PHP and YOS
• Common Problems & Solutions
  • CAJA
  • OpenSocial

So if you’re in the SF area on Monday Feb 2nd, 2009, stop by the CBSi building and listen in.

Tungsten Replicator is a new open source project for database replication. It offers MySQL to Oracle replication, robust handling of master failures, extremely flexible topologies, and an extensible architecture that allows you to add your own replication features if you don’t find them there already. I’ll describe why MySQL needs more replication, show the product architecture, describe some of the problems it solves, and demonstrate the replicator in action. Finally, we’ll play “stump the chump” where you can present your replication problem and I’ll describe how our replicator handles it. Whether you have a tricky replication problem or are just curious about the subject, please join us. This is a very technical presentation that should be of interest to all true MySQL fans.

More information on Tungsten Replicator: http://www.continuent.com/community/tungsten-replicator

Peter Zaitsev will be giving his excellent presentation “Scaling MySQL powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication” to the upcoming SF MySQL 6:00pm on November 3rd @ the CBS Interactive (formerly CNET Networks) building in SOMA San Francisco (235 2nd St).

RSVP here: http://mysql.meetup.com/30/calendar/8912109/

Description from the 2008 Velocity conference:
When your application grows beyond capacity of a single MySQL server there are few ways to scale, with most typical being Replication and Sharding.

In this presentation you will learn how, depending on your application performance scalability and high availability goals, you can choose what proper scaling strategy will be good for you.

We also will speak about scalability limitations of replication of Replication and Sharding, implementation complexities, and aspects of operation.

Peter Zaitsev’s bio:
MySQL Performance Blog

Peter helped many companies ranging from one man startups to Fortune 500 companies with their Performance and Scaling problems on various stages starting from architecture design and down to queries and schema optimization.

Over cause of the years Peter has spoken on many International conferences focused on MySQL, Open Source, Databases or High Performance Web applications.

Before co-founding Percona Peter worked for MySQL AB as head of High Performance Group being involved in Support, Consulting, Development and working with vendors helping to optimize their software or hardware to perform well with MySQL.

Peter also was involved in number of Web Startups in the roles ranging from CTO to Consultant and has a lot of experience in MySQL and Web Applications Operations, Deployment, Quality Assurance and Development.
Please join us!

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP/MySQL Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room.

Look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP here: http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/

The blurb from ZendCon08:
Terry Chay, the original PHP Terrorist, is well known for his criticism and ridicule of the Ruby on Rails framework. He criticizes, mocks, and f-bombs his enemies into surrender. In this discussion, Terry will share his ideas and thoughts on making frameworks better.

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room. Please RSVP if you are attending so that I can prepare enough snacks and beverages.

Look forward to seeing you there!

This event can be found at:
http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39294579201
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1195581/

Beyond the normal perverted male thoughts I can image a million and one practical applications for this. Not to mention then billion and one ways to exploit it. I think the Hollywood movie industry would be the first adapters of this technology in the public sector (CIA/NSA/DHS/etc. in government of course). You could theoretically wrap a camera or person in this gear and not have to worry about keeping them out of the shot. I wonder though if it would be less “see-through” for HD cameras due to the higher pixels resolution/counts.

I’m going to have to set a reminder for myself to pick up a copy of Nature or Science for the details of this thing. I don’t remember who said it but I’ve always agreed with the saying “Magic is just science we don’t understand yet.” This type of research and technology continue to blur the line between science people will understand and what others will call “magic.” I’m all for that. We could all use a little more magic in our lives.

I already have next month’s talk/speaker lined up.  Aaron Newton from Iminta.com (formerly CNET) will be giving us a preview of his Mootools talk titled “Mootools: An Overview” that he has planned for the upcoming AJAX Experience conference.  Aaron has a Mootools book coming out that’s available now via pre-order on Amazon.

Title: PHP::$unicode->i18n()

Description:
PHP 6 brings fully functional and mature Unicode support to the Web world. This talk will cover all the layers of the PHP (bread)/Unicode (butter)/i18n (jam) sandwich. Come and find out how to work with locales, use collation to compare and sort strings, and format numbers, currencies, and dates for any country in the world. Bring your appetite because the toasty goodness is waiting.

When: Thursday, July 10th, 2008 at 7pm
Where: CNET Networks: 235 2nd St, San Francisco, CA  94518

You can RSVP on the SF PHP Meetup’s site or just show up.  I always like it when people RSVP so that I know how much food to buy.  But it isn’t a prereq or anything.

EDIT: I just saw that Terry mentioned PB&J and I like the idea.  So PB&J it is; plus the usual chips, sodas, candy, etc. of course. 

I posted them up on Flickr so my family can see them. It is pretty amazing how detailed the photos are of the face. Of course he had to be difficult and keep his foot in his face the whole time. This one is probably my favorite.

I think the “Dad” hormones are kicking in. I cannot wait for the next 6 weeks to pass and for him to pop out.