Friday afternoon, I met with Tetsuro Ikeda-san and Teruyoshi Hazama-san of MySQL’s long-time key partner in Japan, Sumisho. Ikeda-san and Hazama-san taught me about their work on full text search in Japanese.

Senna is an engine for fast full text search in Japanese. The Senna project derives its name from Formula I driver Ayrton Senna. “But he’s dead”, I protested. “Sure, but he is a legend and will always be associated with speed.” I cannot protest there — and the numbers I saw for Senna’s full-text search defend the choice of name.

Tritonn is the combination of Senna into MySQL. The Tritonn name refers to two things: Triton Square in Tokyo, where Sumisho has its offices, and to the fact that MySQL through our dolphin logotype is associated with the sea. Tritonn is spelt with two n’s in order to simplify web search, so as not to be confused with the Greek god Triton (the messenger of the deep, son of Poseidon, god of the sea) and the many other things named after him.

I recommended Hazama-san to meet at the MySQL Users Conference with key guys in MySQL Engineering: Sergei Golubchik who wrote MySQL’s Full-Text Search feature, Peter Gulutzan who knows all there is to be known about standards and character sets, and Alexander Barkov who implements all there is to be implemented about character sets.

Good luck to Senna and Tritonn!

References:

• Tritonn home page: http://qwik.jp/tritonn/about_en.html

With 130 entries in the “MySQL” category and no MySQL-related subcategories, my blog had become impossible to search and navigate easily.

And thus I created a number of new categories for the MySQL entries within my blog. They’re listed in the left navigation bar, below the months, as well as below:

• MySQL Server, MySQL Cluster, Falcon
• Connectors: PHP, Ruby on Rails
• Tools: GUI, MySQL Workbench, MySQL Proxy
• Events: MySQL Users Conferences
• Licensing: GPL
• Architecture of Participation, Summer of Code, Virtual company
• Other: Release Policy, Documentation, Use cases

I hope this will make my blog more (re)usable.

(The picture is from this summer, when navigating the way up the Großvenediger, a 3662 m high mountain in the Hohe Tauern region of Austria.)

Followers of the Forum Nokia Developer Discussion Boards saw interesting pre-announcements last month:

Nokia has ported MySQL and PHP to Symbian.

With 165 million cumulative Symbian smartphones shipped since the formation of Symbian and currently 134 Symbian smartphone models commercially available, it would be interesting to see the effects on the 8,134 third-party Symbian applications commercially available by what Nokia calls “PAMP”.

Availability is planned for next month, at the CCNC 2008 (Fifth IEEE Consumer Communications &Networking Conference, 10 - 12 January 2008 in Las Vegas, Nevada).

Johan Wikman of Nokia, who has already ported the Apache web server to Nokia S60, writes in a Forum Nokia thread (emphasis mine):

I can now reveal that we at the CCNC conference in Las Vegas in January, 2008 will demonstrate and release what we call the PAMP stack.

PAMP stands for Personal Apache, MySQL, PHP, so yes, the full LAMP stack will be made available for S60 smart phones. In addition, there will be PHP extension modules that provide access to the core functionality of the phone. And on top of PAMP you can basically install any LAMP based content management system. For instance, Drupal can be installed off the shelf.

Yes, a fair amount of memory is needed and it’s still pretty experimental stuff, but it runs quite nicely on E90.

So, if you are in the neighbourhood, join us in Las Vegas

Johan

Richard Bloor comments in Symbian Blogs (again, emphasis mine):

At first sight this may seem like an example of porting just to prove it can be done. It does, however, have the potential to create a whole new way of looking at Web application. For example, I’ve recently been evaluating a number of GTD applications. Several of these use PHP and MySQL and it will be interesting to see if they work on PAMP.

As such PAMP could add yet another option for developers to create S60 applications and create a new paradigm for the “off-line” Web. Hopefully by January I’ll have an S60 device with the memory to run this baby.

Sources:

• Symbian Fast Facts: http://www.symbian.com/about/fastfacts/fastfacts.html
• CCNC 2008: http://www.ieee-ccnc.org/2008/
• Nokia Research Center, Mobile Web Server: http://research.nokia.com/research/projects/mobile-web-server/
• PHP running on Mobile Web Server: http://discussion.forum.nokia.com/forum/showthread.php?t=102803
• Getting Things Done: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTD, applications http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_GTD_software#Tools_and_Techniques
• S60 blogs: http://blogs.s60.com/mws/2007/11/hot_news_php_coming_to_s60.html
• Symbian Blogs / Richard Bloor, “Your S60 Web server gets a boost”: http://www.symbianone.com/content/view/5064/

Perhaps its time for me to upgrade my phone?

A good three years ago at the Linux Summit 26-27.2.2004 in the Finlandia Hall in Helsinki, I gave a presentation on “Why MySQL?” together with Osma Ahvenlampi, CTO of Sulake Labs, the creators of Habbo Hotel, one of the world’s largest teen online communities present in 29 countries.

Now, browsing the web pages of COSS, the Finnish Centre for Open Source Solutions, I ran across their slide repository and specifically Osma’s slides on the topic of “Infrastructure for Innovation, which is all about scale-out and describes their site which is built with MySQL as the database.

Sulake Corporation was founded May 2000 in Helsinki, and is an interactive entertainment company based on online communities and casual multiplayer games. Their tagline is “everyone can play“, which they expand in their credo “Habbo provides the most fun and creative hangout packed with friends and excitement“.

Now for the slightly more technical overview:

• Global infrastructure: 4 data centers, 29 countries
• Distributed game servers
  • Over 300 live CPU cores
  • 20 MySQL servers
  • Capacity for 130,000 concurrent users
• Self-developed game server technology
• Director/Shockwave based in-browser game client

The technology they build upon is the Linux-Java-MySQL stack, mostly with Linux servers, some Solaris. The server software Java 2 Standard Edition, with transaction processing using J2EE / JBoss. Look at Osma’s slides for more buzzwords: Hibernate, Spring, Jakarta Commons, EHCache, ICU4J, DOM4J, JMock, JGroups, JS Rhino, Junit, Sitemesh, Webwork…

Habbo runs on MySQL 5.0 with terabytes of data. Sulake claims they upgraded since they found 5.0 to perform better with complex queries, and their setup now includes the 5.0 features of federated tables and SQL views. Most interesting is probably their unique scale-out solution, with multi-master, backup+analytics replicas, averaging 10000 events / second. The nature of the online community application is such that they get an order of magnitude more write-intensive database load than traditional Master + Slaves applications. Distributed replication is used for online backups, where Ibbackup and filesystem snapshots minimise availability impact. Data volumes aren’t exactly modest, with over 10 gigs of transaction logs per day.

Go Habbo! Go Sulake! And go Osma!

On Thursday/Friday this week, I visited Linbit in Vienna. They are the creators of DRBD. Quoting Wikipedia,

DRBD is an acronym for Distributed Replicated Block Device. It is a Linux kernel module, that, working together with some scripts, offer a distributed storage system, frequently used on high availability clusters. DRBD works as a kind of network RAID.

This means DRBD can give high availability to MySQL users. Through configuring DRBD to be used on your system, you can have synchronous replication between two different servers, giving a MySQL database a failover server to redirect to instantaneously, should the main server running MySQL fail.

For those interested in more detail on how to combine DRBD and MySQL, let me mention that Kristian Köhntopp of MySQL has written a great blog article on “Quick tour of DRBD“.

I was impressed when listening to DRBD’s main author DI Philipp Reisner describing the technical workings and business opportunities of DRBD. In many respects, he reminds me of our very own Monty years ago.

I also learnt plenty of things from Florian Haas, Senior Software Engineer with Linbit. Among other things, he taught me that r is a vowel (in many of Austria’s neighbouring countries), meaning that you can pronounce DRBD without spelling out the letters. Sounds like “Good day!” in Slovenian.

On a more serious note, I think the prospects for DRBD look fascinating. Or in other words, remembering my recent insight on vowels: DRBD rcks!

From time to time, MySQL employees are approached with proposals from universities and other research institutions about MySQL participating in research programmes financed by governmental initiatives in the US and in the EU. This is much appreciated. Often, there is a mutual interest, where

• academics need an industrial partner to anchor the results of the research into a real-world application and even to fulfil the requirements of getting a grant, and
• the MySQL user community needs new features in MySQL Server, or in the Connectors enabling the use of MySQL from various development environments.

Left: MySQL University refers to the highest form of education when it comes to learning how to develop MySQL Server (as opposed to using it). It’s opening up for the MySQL community to attend, at no cost.

So what do I suggest you to do, if you’re drafting a Framework Programme proposal (these are collaborative research projects funded by the European Commission) or equivalent other type of application involving governmental funding, and you think MySQL (whether AB, Inc., GmbH or KK) would be a possible industry partner?

• First, think about how your research can end up as a benefit for the MySQL user community. Who needs it? To fulfil what requirement? Why is your project going to end up in deliverables that are usable by the MySQL ecosystem?
• Second, think about what MySQL can do to help. We have limited resources for developing MySQL Server further, and we deploy them carefully. However, we absolutely want to help, if your research proposal provides good answers to the primary questions above. We are more likely to be able to help, the more concrete the contribution of the research partners is.
• Third, email me or anyone else in the MySQL Community Team, at firstname@mysql.com. Or if you happen to know someone at MySQL, or you know of a MySQL employee close to your geographic location, approach that person — who in turn will approach the Community Team at MySQL. We will then act as your contact persons and primary interface towards our development organisation, who in turn are the domain experts in Data Warehousing, High Availability, Geographical Data, Clustering, Replication, or whatever the specific domain of your research is about.

While none of us in the Community Team has yet acquired a PhD, we’ll connect you with those MySQLers who have — once we’ve determined that your research proposal has a common goal with what MySQL is trying to accomplish.