While I can not consider myself a member of MySQL's community of developers,
I've been watching those developments the same way I follow the development of
Linux and many of the Java and Apache projects our own services depend on. It
was great to meet many of the core members of the development community and get
some insight into their thoughts about the future.
Baron Schwartz called in his
Percona Performance Conference keynote
on Thursday for a new, active MySQL community to take the driver's seat in the
development of the database, not just in the incremental improvements way of
bug fixing and performance improvement, but also by setting a vision for the
next generation MySQL. It's a call to action greatly needed, and an important
one despite the active existence of the Drizzle project. This is because while
Drizzle already has a vision for the future, it's a radical diversion for the
MySQL userbase and one which will not necessarily have smooth upgrade path.
Many of the same MySQL users feeling most of the pain of MySQL's current
limitations are also those who will not be able to easily upgrade to a
radically different architecture due to the amount of data and dependencies in
their existing infrastructure.
It's a gap which needs a careful approach of incremental changes to the MySQL
base functionality to help users bridge over to a new, brighter future. These
changes do not need to be slow. Rapid incremental changes are likely to be
easier to digest with a clear upgrade and downgrade path from iteration to
iteration leaving the organizations with biggest infrastructures to consider a
way to set their own pace through the transition, rather than being forced to
take one huge leap and risk a crash to the concrete wall of unexpected
incompatibility.
A few such pieces of incremental community improvements I learned a great deal
of during the week were the performance and scalability improvements by Google
and Percona and their MySQL 5.4 equivalents, the
Xtrabackup utility not only as an alternative, but improvement on the
Innobackup tool
which has significant limitations to its use in large-scale deployments, and
the Tungsten
Replicator providing useful cross-database replication and rapid failover
features helping upgrades and transitions to new database installations while
minimizing downtime and impact to users. I'm also curious about the storage
engine development by Primebase - I
don't think there's ultimately a lot of room for multiple transactional storage
engines, but as a competitive research topic, it's certainly good to see
alternatives to InnoDB.
[Be sure to check out my earlier posts of the conference learnings as well!]
To explain it
in detail, lets look at two assumptions behind a flexible pricing business
model: first, that the number of customers grows as the cost of goods drops,
and second, that the maximum consumption is unrelated to the minimum. There is
no average customer who would spend more than half of others, and less than
half of the rest. If there were, the picture of that customer base would look
something like the image here, and it's pretty strange looking, wouldn't you
say? You've probably seen pictures resembling this one where they don't start
from the dominating $0 value point - that's the normal distribution.
This is a simple exhibit of
power-law market dynamics, and is easiest observed when looked at through a
logarithmic chart. Readers of books like The Long Tail or Critical Mass should
not be surprised. There's a twist through - because this starts from zero gains
(at the free players), the exponential behaviour follows a different path in
the beginning. This model also turns Pareto's Law on its head - due to the (in
my experience) relatively high exponent, the highest total value is at the
lowest end of the spending.