Images Moved

So I've retired my old picture hosting sub-domain, and moved all the files which were hosted by the dynamic system into a large web-root.

This means no more uploads are possible, but each link continues to work. For example:

• http://picshare.steve.org.uk/2OrKrfem9XQWz.jpg

Happily the system generated "random" links, and it was just a matter of moving each uploaded file into that static location, then removing the CGI application.

The code for the new site has now been made public, although I suspect there will need to be some email-pong if anybody wishes to use it. Comments welcome.

MySQL replacements?

Lets pretend I work for a company which has dealings with many MySQL users.

Lets pretend that, even though it is true, such that I don't have to get into specifics.

Let us pretend that we have many many hundreds of users who are very happy with MySQL, but that we have a few users who have "issues". That might be:

• mysqld segfaulting every few months, with no real idea why.
  • Transactions are involved. So are stored proceedures.
  • MySQL paid support might have been perfect, or it might have lead to "yup, its a bug. good luck rebuilding with this patch. let us know how it turns out kthxbai."
  • Alternatively it might not have been re-producable.
• Master-Master and Master-Slave setups being "unreliable" such that data inconsistencies arise despite MySQL regarding them as being in sync.
  • Good luck resolving that when you have two almost-identical "mysqldump" outputs which are 6Gb each and which cause "diff" to exit with "out of memory" even on a 64Gb host.
  • Is it possible to view differences in table-data, via the binary records? That'd be a fun project .. for a masochist.
• Poor usage of resources.
• Heavy concurrancy caused by poorly developed applications in a load-balanced environment, leading to stalling queries. (Wordpress + Poor wordpress plugins I'm looking at you; you're next on my killfile).

To compound this problem some of these installations may or may not be running Etch. let us pretend they are not, just to simplify things. (They mostly arent' these days, but I'm sure I could think of one or two if I tried)

So, in this hypothetical situation what would you recommend?

I know there are new forks aplenty of MySQL. Drizzle et al. I suspect most of the forks will be short-lived - lots of this stuff is hard and non-sexy. I suspect the long-lived forks are probably concentrating on edge-cases we've not hit (yet), or on sexy exciting things like new storage engines and going nosql like all the cool kids.

Realistically going down the postgresql road is liable to lead to wholly different sets of problems, and a significant re-engineering of several sites, applications and tools with no proof of stability.

Without wanting to jump ship entirely, what, if any, are our options?

PS. MySQL I still mostly love you, but my two most recent applications were written to use redis instead. Just a coincidence... I swear. No, put down that axe. Please can't we just talk about it?/p>

ObQoote: "I've calculated your chance of survival, but I don't think you'll like it. " - Hitchhikers Film.

Tags: homework, lazyweb, linkti.me, mysql, picshare | 2 comments