Tag: talk

Wikipedia at Velocity conference

Next Monday I’ll be presenting (if jetlag doesn’t kill me) at Velocity 2008 – webops and performance conference. It won’t be my first time talking about Wikipedia infrastructure, but this time people will know the technology and scaling methods anyway.

As I see it, in such context Wikipedia is more interesting as a case of operations underdog – non-profit lean budgets, brave approaches in infrastructure, conservative feature development, and lots of cheating and cheap tricks (caching! caching! caching!).

Also, I’ll be able to share (making audience jealous) how it is great to be on non-profit ops team (and one of example perks – we can be cheap about getting conference passes too ;-)

The best part (for audience, not for me) – I will be forced to be honest. Nearly whole tech team will be at the event, and if I fail to attribute any developments, or start talking crap – not only they can throw rotten tomatoes, but also disable my login access and claim they never knew me, without me being able to fight back :) I didn’t publicly present in front of these guys since 2005 – will be tough.

Speaking at MySQL Conference again, twice

Yay, coming this year to the MySQL conference again. This time with two different talks (second got approved just few days ago) on two distinct quite generic topics:

  • Practical MySQL for web applications
  • Practical character sets

The abstracts were submitted weeks apart, so the ‘practical’ being in both is something completely accidental :) Still, I’ll try to cover problems met and solutions used in various environments and practices – both as support engineer in MySQL, as well as engineer working on wikipedia bits.

Coming to US and talking about character sets should be interesting experience. Though most English-speaking people can stick to ASCII and be happy, current attempts to produce multilingual applications lead to various unexpected performance, security and usability problems.

And of course, web applications end up introducing quite new model of managing data environments, by introducing new set of rules, and throwing away traditional OLTP approaches. It is easy to slap another label on these, call it OLRP – on-line response processing. It needs preparing data for reads more than for writes (though balance has to be maintained). It needs digesting data for immediate responses. It needs lightweight (and lightning) accesses to do the minimum work. Thats where MySQL fits nicely, if used properly.

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