It was a nice enough flight from Ottawa to Chicago to San Jose, if a little long. Security (or the baggage handlers) completely trashed our boxes of information folders, but I think we managed to salvage some… so if you’re looking for information on Pythian, come see us early.
The weather here is just like Ottawa. It’s probably just the few weeks of the year when it’s like that, but it does feel nice.
I have had my usual two-dozen cups of coffee, so I am ready to dive in to the first day of conferencing.
The first tutorial is on Scaling and High Availability Architectures. The room is packed beyond capacity, which should give you an idea of the interest in this topic.
Jeremy and Eric are doing a great job. I have gone over the handout material they have given out, and it’s very detailed, covering pretty much everything related to this, from a single shared hosting server to a bunch of standalone database servers, to data partitioning and replication.
Perhaps its a testament to the wide variety of clients we see at Pythian at different stages of the game, or perhaps to the fact that there’s just so much one can do a with a database engine, that I haven’t seen anything new or earth-shattering yet, though it’s all good solid information for someone looking to scale their database.
I’m still looking for that perfect solution where I can scale a database just like I can scale webservers behind a load balancer. If there is a DBA heaven, that’s what it would be. But until then we have to do it all manually, all the way from newborn to adult mature systems, as Jeremy put it so elegantly.
I’ll be attending the tutorial on Wikipedia internals next, and I will write about that too. There’s a huge amount of data on Wikipedia, so I’m guessing data partitioning is already in place, as is a lot of replication and caching. But thats for later!
–Raj.
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