YouTube on MySQL
Paul Tuckfield of YouTube has just joined the keynote lineup at the MySQL User Conference, which will be held April 23-26 at the Santa Clara Convention Center. Paul will be talking about Scaling MySQL at YouTube. Every web 2.0 company is ultimately a database company. Some roll their own, a few, a very few, use proprietary commercial databases. Most are running on MySQL. Given the rapid scaling that YouTube has enjoyed, I'm sure Paul will have a lot of useful advice for other up-and-coming sites. Paul's keynote is part of a general focus on scalability at the conference -- there's an entire track on performance tuning and benchmarks, and another on Replication and Scale Out.
Looking at the program for the conference, you can see just how much MySQL is not just a key element in the web developer's toolkit, though, but a kind of cross-platform glue, and a common element across all types of sites. There are tracks on MySQL and Java, and MySQL and Windows/.Net as well as the more expected MySQL and PHP.
Speaking of PHP, it's going to be really interesting to count the butts in the seats at the PHP sessions vs. those at the Ruby sessions. While PHP is still the dominant web scripting language, Ruby (and particularly the Ruby on Rails framework) have taken over among new startups, according to our research. (More on that soon.) As a result, the conference team has added an entire MySQL and Ruby track.
And if we're looking at horse races, you have to look at the strides MySQL is making towards becoming an enterprise player. MySQL isn't Oracle yet, but with MySQL Cluster and High Availability, it's becoming much more of an enterprise-class database, following along the textbook path of Clayton Christenson's disruptive technologies model, in which a new product first takes hold with fewer features in a new market undervalued by incumbents, but gets better faster than the incumbents, and eventually takes over their market as well.
Disclosure: I am on the board of MySQL, and O'Reilly partners with MySQL AB to produce the MySQL User Conference.
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Comments: 5
[04.09.07 12:29 PM]
We've done some work with MySQL in the UK, and the momentum looks like it's building very fast (that is, use turning from "free" commumity editions to "better pay for some support").
We did have some profiling of folks downloading MySQL from their website done (they saw the raw data, we only heard the results), and the end use is spread thin over virtually every SIC code in the book and every size of company. Virtually every large company appears to have "under the radar" skunkworks using it - even if this fact isn't known to the CIO's until they come to deploy the resulting projects. Most will raise their hands to having Linux in their data centers these days, but few actually mandated it at the outset.
The visible bumps where adoption seems strongest are in ISVs, SIs and in telcos. But it's started appearing in several other places too.
I don't think Oracle are that affected by it yet - their next challenge is more likely to be the code that EnterpriseDB have put on top of PostgreSQL - but MySQL seems to be getting traction with new applications. EnterpriseDB appears to be very much aimed at Oracle's core database business, but using open source databases underneath to deliver 80% cost savings overall - albeit that's not where MySQL tends to play.
I've heard someone tell me that new deployments of MySQL lap the worldwide installed base of Oracle on Linux every four hours or so. If that's true, that's quite a plague of locusts for Oracle to contend with in the future.
Ian W.
[04.11.07 07:14 AM]
Tim.
Heinous crime! You misspelled Clayton's surname. It's "Christensen" with an "e" and not an "o".
http://www.claytonchristensen.com/
Cheers
Clive
[04.16.07 07:02 PM]
MySQL has a long way to go before becoming oracle.
MySQL is just way way easier to develop on , due to very very low barrier to entry (as pointed out by the guy trying to install 10g)
Coming from the other angle, I can get oracle to tear thru 500Mbytes/sec of data on the exact same hardware that MySQL/innodb cannot do more than about 80M/sec. oracle parallelizes things in many many ways and has none of filesystem imposed barriers to realy high thruput io.
But few people ever need to build a big DW or datamining platform like that anyway. That's the real reason oracle, like the mainframe before it, will be marginalized.
That and the fact that on the high end, both systems need expertise but since mysql needs no expetise on the low end, darwinism takes over.
[12.31.07 03:30 AM]
With the world going GAGA over Mysql i found my sql lacking a nice UI. Oracle also sucks back in UI . Microsoft's SQL Server is way better than Oracle or MySql in terms of Useability and Maintainance.
Did any of MySql Users above Use SQL Server and how do you rate it ?
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Tim O'Brien [04.09.07 11:26 AM]
It might not "be Oracle yet", but as someone who just evaluated both Oracle and MySQL for a large enterprise application, it is an order of magnitude more usable. Ever tried setting up 10g? It took me a couple of hours to screw it up and then to start over from scratch. A part of this story isnt just how much more capable MySQL is becoming, but how bloated Oracle has become over the years. When I install MySQL I get a database, when I install Oracle I get this heavy resource hog and more than I ever needed.
I hope MySQL continues onward to victory, but I also hope it never becomes Oracle.