Condensed: One gora, a madrassi and two longdas (of whom only one deigns to be online) attended Kai Voigt’s MySQL Cluster talk at ValueOne today. Here are my thoughts:

First off, the talk was pretty interesting, and any talk that has a live demo in it has my vote on being useful and down to the metal. An interesting overview of the whole process, including what clustering means and an honest appraisal about its pretty crippling deficiencies in 5.0 [no on-disk store, no persistence, anyone?]. 5.1 is supposed to Make Things Better, but Fulltext Search is still hazy.

Which made me think about memcached and how similar clustering as it stands right now is to danga’s (semi)beast. Except of course, the pretty important difference of having an SQL interface to the data on top. Well guess what, I’m not the first person (Google Cache link) to think about this, and
even a thread on memcached lists asks this question. Multiple levels of caching seems to be the way to go though, right from Squid (or better yet, Varnish) down to an in-memory cache.
Right now, stuff that looks really cool for server deployment (from my 2 month experience at Slideshare):

1. Xen and virtualization. Dom0 Gentoo boxen running Gentoo kernels optimized for a web/app/db etc (see EngineYard [movie]).
2. Solaris and ZFS pools for reliable local storage (clashes with 1, (open)Solaris is not even yet domU). S3 or homegrown MogileFS-ish platforms for distributed storage.
3. Webcache – Squid & Varnish
4. MySQL tuned, PostgreSQL
5. Puppet, for dependency-based VM configuraton (?).
6. Monitoring: monit (watch process), munin (report), or Cacti
7. S3+EC2 (reduce latency to S3 via an EC2 stack and make S3 behave like memcached or better.)

Well, I want to play with all of these seven. Good news is that Leopard will have dtrace (and possibly even ZFS), the cool things from Sun, and I’ll be able to play with the rest on my Mac anyways.

Kai’s code is online. Word is, his slides will be too, pretty soon.

Pat on the back: the first line in the blog post reveals my growing understanding of hindiland. 🙂