Ramblings of a web guy

So, as I said before, I will be at the MySQL Conference next week.  I am renting a car this year so I don’t have to wait on cabs or deal with them at all.  So, I am mobile and being from a modern Southern US city, used to driving 30 minutes just to go to dinner.  So, where should we go?  Anything good in San Jose?  Should I go all the way to San Francisco?  I am willing to go where ever.  Help me locals, you are my only hope!

In just two weeks I will be heading to the 2008 MySQL Conference.  I will be speaking this year.  My two talks are:

MySQL Hacks and Tricks to Make Phorum Fast
04/16/2008  4:25pm PDT Room: Ballroom A

From One Server to a Cluster
04/16/2008  5:15pm PDT Room: Ballroom C

I have to pull back to back talks.  *PHEW* I hope I can hold up.  To make it worse, they did not put me in the same room. If I remember right though, those are really close to each other.

Of course, the Phorum team will be in the Expo Hall in the DotOrg pavilion.  Just look for the big dog.

Wow! For the second time this year we had snow for the kids to play in. It was all gone by noon, but we got out early and took some pictures. Click the picture below to see more.

When
Tuesday, March 11, 2008 at 12:00 PM

Where
BizTech
515 Sparkman Drive
Huntsville , AL 35816

Details
Brian Moon of dealnews.com will be discussing best practices for writing database backed web based applications. Many users teach themselves SQL and programming on the web. Other developers may have experience in enterprise desktop applications. No matter what your background, there are common mistakes made when deploying web based applications that use a database.

Also, at this event, we will be giving away two copies of NuSphere’s PhpED. Plus, everyone who attends can purchase any NuSphere product at 50% off.

Lunch will be served at this event.

One of my favorite restaurants these days is Buffalo Wild Wings. They show the UFC fights. It is cheaper to go there than to throw a party at the house. I went there tonight to get some nutritional information for last nights snacks, I got this:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in C:Inetpubwwwrootindex.php on line 3

Dang.  I hate that for them.  I am sure they just pay someone to host their site.  Maybe it will clear up soon.  Someone should key them into how to turn display_errors to off.

So, one of master server’s disk filled up with replication logs last night. We had a permission issue due to our data center move. An oversight on my part. Anyhow, I got to the server and purged the old logs and the master server started responding with no problems. However, the slaves did not. Both slaves connected to the master would not respond to a slave stop. Nor would they respond to a mysqladmin shutdown. I had to kill -9 the daemons to get them to stop. When I restarted the daemon and started the slave, all was fine.

I am hoping someone knows what is going on or can tell me what to send in a bug report. I don’t want to just put that in a bug report. It is kind of lame and useless.

Update: This may be my problem. Bug #31024.  I certainly did not give the slave a long time to stop.

MySQL master servers won’t remove their logs automatically when slaves are done with them. You can set expire_logs_days to remove them after a certain number of days. But, you are not assured that a slave is done with the logs. So, we wrote a script to connect to slaves and then purge logs on the master servers. It works for us. Your mileage may vary. BSD style license. Enjoy.

flush_mysql_master.php.gz

I have seen it time and time again. And yet, every time, it irritates me to no end. You are on a professional web site. You are navigating around and at some point you hit the link for their forums. And just like that you feel transported to another place. The whole site design just changes. Colors, layout, navigation… everything. Here are some examples, including the new C7Y site from php|Architect which inspired this post. (I really do love you guys on the podcast I promise =)

• php|architect’s C7Y - main site - forums
• Zend’s Developer Zone - main site - forums
  Zend’s forums do at least use the Zend.com header, but you can’t get to the forums from the main Zend.com site. You have to go to the Developer Zone.
• TextPad (great windows editor) - main site - forums
  The header is kind of the same. Fonts and link colors change slightly though which is worse in some ways than a wholesale change. It looks like they just wedged in their HTML into the phpBB template.

I could continue to list some here, but you get the idea. So, what is the problem? Does most message board software make it too hard to edit their templates? Are forums an after thought and some underling is given the task to make them work and not allowed access to the main site’s templates?

Some people do better at it. MySQL for example. Theirs is still not perfect. An ad awkwardly appears in the forums in a way that makes it look like an error. However, thanks to Phorum (cha-ching), MySQL was able to make their own log in system work with their forums. Heck, even at dealnews I have not done that. Mostly because our forum logins predate our site accounts for email alerts and newsletters. I am not asking for perfection though. I would just like to feel like the company/entitiy gave some love to making their forums part of their site and not an afterthought.

So, I call for all web sites to start treating their forums like real pages. Give them the same love and attention you give that front page or any other page. And, if your message board software makes that hard, give Phorum a try.

I first saw it on dealnews, and read more on Google News.  So, selling lame stuff for really high prices doesn’t pay the bill?  Huh.  Who knew?

I had mentioned a while back that I submitted three proposals for the 2008 MySQL Conference.  Well, two were accepted.

From one server to a cluster

In the last 10 years, dealnews.com has grown from a single shared hosting account to an entire rack of equipment. Luckily, we started using PHP and MySQL very early in the company’s history.

From the early days of growing a forum to surviving Slashdotting, Digging and even a Yahoo! front page mention, we have had to adapt both our hardware and software many times to keep up with the growth.

I will discuss the traps, bottlenecks, and even some big wins we have encountered along the way using PHP and MySQL. From the small scale to using replication and even some MySQL Cluster.  We have done many interesting things to give our readers (and our content team) a good experience when using our web site.

MySQL hacks and tricks to make Phorum fast

Phorum is the message board software used by MySQL. One reason they chose Phorum was because of its speed. We have to use some tricks and fancy SQL to make this happen. Things we will talk about in this session include:

• Using temporary tables for good uses.
• Why PHP and MySQL can be a bad mix with large data sets.
• What mysqlnd will bring to the table with the future of PHP and MYSQL.
• How Phorum uses full text indexing and some fancy SQL to make our search engine fast.
• Forcing MySQL to use indexes to ensure proper query performance.

You can find my conference page here.  (as Terry would say, me, me, me!)