First day’s over — *phew*
I got to meet a lot of nice people, some of which I haven’t seen in years (Heya Lukas and Damien S. :-) and it was great. There was a lot to talk about during the breaks and at dinner so it practically didn’t get boring for a solid 12 hours today. I expect 14 to 16 of that tomorrow, maybe more.
The first tutorial I went to was Jeremy’s and Eric’s MySQL Scaling and High Availability. There are already two decent summaries up, so I won’t repeat what written there. I just want to emphasize that Jeremy did a very good job of identifying the several stages of applications written on the LAMP stack. That you start with a simple, single-server setup and which walls you’re going to hit with that in what order and what you can do about it. I certainly could relate to that and I witnessed some projects going exactly those roads. Also HiveDB is project you should evaluate when you’re looking into scaling out MySQL.
After Lunch (hmm lunch), Brian Aker did a really deep-down technical tutorial about how to write your own storage engine plugins for MySQL. What struck me there is that they basically abstract all SQLish things away from the actual storage engine. On that level you only deal with very basic data storage and retrieval operations. Guess what I start playing with next :-) (A signed postcard from me if you guess correctly in the comments :-).
We split some time after that for a Mexican dinner nearby where I got introduced to another slew of nice people. See you tomorrow!
It seems appropriate to say thanks again to Proven Scaling who made this happen. Cheers! :-)
P.S. I’ve put a few pictures up at Flickr. They’re mostly crap (the pictures, not the person(s) or things pictured :-), but you get the idea.