Pythian Group

This is the 182nd edition of Log Buffer, the weekly review of database blogs. Make sure to read the whole edition so you do not miss where to submit your SQL limerick!

This week started out with me posting about International Women’s Day, and has me personally attending Confoo (Montreal) which is an excellent conference I hope to return to next year. I learned a lot from confoo, especially the blending nosql and sql session I attended.

This week was also the Hotsos Symposium. Doug’s Oracle Blog has a series of posts about Hotsos. If all this talk about conferences has gotten you excited, Joshua Drake notes that 14 days and the hotel is almost full for postgresql conference east which is March 25th-28th in Philadelphia. And the Oracle database insider notes that the Oracle OpenWorld call for papers is now open.

According to Susan Visser this week (ending tomorrow) is also read an e-book week. So if you have not already done so, read an e-book! She links a coupon for an e-book in the post.
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subtitle: Monetizing Social Media

Why is social media and social networking essential to you and your business? (because it will drive sales, but there’s very few analytics for ROI on social networking and social media)

Relying on advertising is no longer working for print newspapers and television. So why do we think it will work on internet media?
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I don’t want to post the link to this (perhaps, it was left public unintentional?) but here is what I stumbled upon recently. This is a log of production maintenance of IT systems in Perth, Western Australia (as far as I could say):

Good idea but shouldn’t companies keep this sort of information private?

If a MySQL DBA from Pythian goes to Oracle Open World, it would be a shame not to send an Oracle bloke, so there I am — presenting a 90-minute session on the first day of the OOW 08 entitled Under the Hood of Oracle Clusterware.

I gave it during RAC Attack in Chicago and I’m pretty satisfied with how it went, so there should be no significant changes to the presentation. The session is in “User Group Forum,” thanks to RAC SIG and Dan Norris.

When the session was first added to the agenda it was misspelled as “Under the Good of Oracle Clusterware.” That’s hilarious and I thought I should have left it as is. Too late now — it’s been fixed.

I’m pretty sure that many of you will be at the OOW as well, so I’ll be glad to meet you in person. I’m getting back on Twitter slowly, so it might be a good way to track me down in SF. No guarantee I’ll keep it up to the minute if it takes too much effort, but I’ll try.

So, Paul’s blog post pointing to Todd’s blog post got me thinking.

The main point Paul summarized was that duplicating data was a great way to scale, and used Todd’s reference to Flickr and how in their partition-by-user scheme, they put a comment in the commenter’s shard as well as in the commentee’s shard.

In my recent post about Twitter, I wrote:

Now, I understand that it is hard to get all the histories for the people I follow. But it only needs to be done once, and could then be cached — “Posts from who Sheeri follows on 5/20″. It would not be difficult, and I would be OK with the functionality changing such that “once you follow a new person, their tweets prior to when you followed them do not show up in the history.”

So using this thinking, every time someone I follow (say, @paulandstorm) makes a comment, it not only writes to their shard, but to mine. Now, that may not work given that the system also has to send messages at the same time, and that there can be numerous followers — dozens, hundreds, thousands.

The Flickr model works because it involves 2 writes to get the faster caching later, and there are more reads than writes. Twitter is more write-heavy, and likely has more writes than reads, considering that many folks do not visit an historical website to see their history.

This particular idea may not work for Twitter. But I’ve picked on Twitter enough….

I thought about livejournal. I’ve been a livejournal member since 2001 — after 2 months of writing my own journaling system with comments, I got wind that a system already existed, so started to use that.

Now, I can go and pick specific entries from specific days, or I can read my “friends list”. I specify my friends and livejournal dynamically populates pages of my friends list, with the amount of entries per page that I specify.

Livejournal could also use the idea presented above, as well as the concept of semi-dynamic data. Instead of dynamically generating the last, let’s say 20, entries of my “friends list”, livejournal could be making my friends list as it gets written to. A friend makes a post and it gets added to my shard, whether or not I read it. Once the count gets up to 20, a new cache page is generated.

Now, livejournal already has great caching, and has indeed had the growing pains Twitter is seeing. And for either livejournal or twitter to take advantage of these concepts, they would likely require a rewrite from the ground up. So it’s not that I am suggesting this. I just think it’s a great idea, and if you are working on a project, think of where it might be useful to apply…..again, it may not be applicable in all situations. Like Twitter, livejournals may have many “friends” so doing 100 or 1,000 writes every time a post is made may not actually be feasible.