I figured I would be in a completely different quadrant
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
PHP and MySQL Meetup – March 2009 – Why Drizzle?
Posted by art
on March 04, 2009
Washington is nicknamed “The Evergreen State” because it sounds better than “The Incessant Nagging Drizzle State”. -Dave Barry
According to Brian Akers the Seattle weather did indeed play a part in naming the anorexic web-optimized MySQL refactoring called Drizzle.
Brian was the main attraction at the combined PHP/MySQL meetup on March 2nd where he brought everyone up to speed on the history, current status, and future of the Drizzle project.
The History
Want to grab my attention? Start your deck out with a slide of an Amiga, I have been lusting after one since the 80’s! Apparently one of the reasons MySQL is so bloated is that it is full of code to allow it to run on every single platform which ever existed, including the Amiga. Brian told an amusing anecdote from his time with MySQL AB on how difficult it was to remove a platform from their build farm. It was reminiscent of the PC LOAD LETTER scene of Office Space involving two Swedes, an Alpha, a baseball bat, and a cellphone. You could almost imagine the scene: circuit boards shattering in the snow with some Slagsmålsklubben in the background. Besides the platform bloat there is UNIREG code from the dawn of time and support for basic features deemed unecessary: ACLs, MyISAM engine and new additions of stored procedures, views, triggers and query caches.
The Current
Drizzle has been designed as a micro-kernel system, similar to the design of Apache. API’s are available for the user to build in the options they desire – e.g. authentication, replication. Stored procedures will be written in “real languages”. The target platform they are designing for are the systems of the near future with 16-120 cores, 64 bits, with at least 2 GB of RAM. Drizzle uses Innodb for an ACID-compliant engine, uses UUIDs, and only has the UTF-8 charset. A C99 compiler is required and it should run on modern POSIX systems. The C++ code is being written in a true Object-Oriented manner, not C++ written in the style of C. The Drizzle team is making good use in using existing libraries as much as possible with the thought that the codewill be thoroughly vetted through widespread use – think libxml2, Proto Buffers, and STL.
Features include using PAM for authenication, hardening against SQL injection, rejection of bad data, less primitives – e.g. only one type of blob, no TINYINT. There is a multi-threaded scheduler which can accept multiple requests and return data asynchronously. Built-in sharding which can be utilized by vendors like F5.
The Future
The future may bring distributed hash joins, a REST API, and replication similar to the row replication of MySQL 5.1.
Participating
Brian emphasized that code drives decisions regarding Drizzle. The developers consider Drizzle development taking place in the Bazaar and not the Cathedral like MySQL. The current development team is made up of five Sun Microsystems employees and over 50 independent developers.
geekSessions 1.5: Cheaper, Better, Faster, Stronger
Posted by art
on February 27, 2009
Finding myself made redundant over the holidays I was glad to get an invite to geekSessions 1.5: Cheaper, Better, Faster, Stronger. A little free booze, finger food, and geek camaraderie was just the thing to lift my spirits.
The night’s topic hit a bit close to home – having recently become the victim of a company trying to operate in a Cheaper, Better, Faster, Stronger manner. geekSessions 1.5 was held at Mighty, just a quick ride across SOMA for me. Luigi was the only bike out front – quite a change from the recent boxee meetup at the Get Satisfaction offices in South Park (where the handful of t-shirts passed out was quite disappointing).
Just inside the door I met Ashley who had provided my invite, and entering right behind me was the CEO of a company that recently passed on bringing me aboard. I guess you have to get used to that in a city this small.
The meet and greet before the panel was highlighted by a discussion with another underemployed Sys Admin on the topic of keyboarding while nursing. Apparently it is not as difficult as you would think.
Finally the panellists were herded up onto the stage and were let loose one by one to run through their Keynote presentations. (n.b. – pranksters in the future might consider bringing their own Apple Remotes)
The panellists – in the order from the geekSessions site:
Justin Kan - justin.tv
Justin always seems a little low-key in person – though his eyes did twinkle a bit when he announced his recent return from Mardi Gras. The guys at justin.tv are always quite proud of the their baby Twice which they mainly use for rendering the dynamic bits of mostly static pages. Another point of pride was the in-housing of most hosting, just relying on a CDN to handle their huge spikes. Looking at justin.tv’s Quantcast stats you can see they are moving a lot of traffic – almost 8:1 Globally to U.S.
Daniel Lieberman - Bitpusher
Daniel is doing what my friends and I have mulling over as a great business – providing infrastructure support for startups. He was preaching directly to my choir of one. His major points were: Don’t over-engineer – get the most out of your tools for the least effort, reuse frameworks and rely on previous experience. I think he was spot on in his run-down of Open Source admin tools: Nagios, Munin for its ease of use over Cacti (though the zoom function of Cacti graphs is useful), Kickstart for system imaging, and Puppet and Capistrano for system configuration and deployment. I would love to work for these guys.
Gary Swart – oDesk
I had just recently ran across oDesk in my job search. As a former sales guy, Gary almost made the thought of shilling myself out as a temp sexy. It makes a lot of sense for startups to use as much outsourced talent as possible. And this tough economy will have many technologists like myself considering temporary employment a viable option. I, for one, will be holding out for something a little more permanent where there will be some sense of belonging. oDesk’s Alexa traffic details the bad news for local folks – they have more traffic going to Pakistan and India than the U.S.
Zachery Coelius – Triggit
Triggit was completely new to me. Zachery’s intense presentation inspired me to look them up on Crunchbase – ah, there product is some sort of WYSIWYG embedded advertising. The main thing we all took away from Zachery’s presentation was to be careful of wasting time trying to convince Venture Capitalists to give you money. Because those “Fancy Boys” don’t always get it. And you should not rule out poker as a means of self-funding while you’re starting up. Strangely enough Zachery and Richard reminded me of the stars of I Bet You – Antonio Esfandiari and Phil Laak.
Richard White – UserVoice
Richard definitely won the award for most manic presentation – though Zachery did come in a strong second. Richard’s presentation spoke to me about the dedication required to make a startup succeed. The montage of him glued to his laptop was quite humorous. UserVoice was new to me, but I quickly discovered they are a similar service to Get Satisfaction. According to Compete the two services were pretty close until mid-September when Get Satisfaction made a leap. Richard was another proponent of outsourcing everything. He seemed quite proud of having a 99designs.com contest to design their site. I recommend reading this MetaFilter thread on crowdsourcing.
Rod Boothby - Joyent
And finally, there was a last minute substitution for the night’s moderator. Rod Boothby, VP, Platform Evangelism of Joyent replaced Joyent’s Founder and CTO Jason Hoffman. Rod seemed right at home behind the mike. I really like the attitdue of the Joyent folks – I’ve been stalking Ben Rockwood for ages (some of the best blogging on System Administration, OpenSolaris, and storage I have come across). I really need to get my resume into them. There’s almost nothing more sexy than a Thumper.
After a little Q&A there was the typical mingling and pirahnafication of pizza. By the time I poked my head in the side room there was nothing but a pizza bone left. Having experienced my first geekSessions I would wholeheartedly recommend attending one in the future. The panel format works well, and you get some honest insight from other people in the trenches and a chance to trade war stories over drinks and nibbles.