Coding wise, I’ve been at a standstill – I had to do a bunch of stuff for work, came up with a mess of ideas that I had to filter and decide what I actually wanted to work on, and then realized I didn’t want to start working on anything else until I finished ked_duffel, or at least got it to be usable. That itself became a bottleneck as I struggled to figure out how to handle variables within files, but I’ve come up with what I think is a relatively elegant, cheap, and maintainable solution, so I’ve started development. I’ll post details as I implement the stuff

The Conference

I have learned quite a bit of stuff. As I work at a place where we don’t have dedicated DBA’s, but are getting to the point where at least minimal optimization and scaling are becoming a necessity, it was great to hear some talks about efficient scaling, caching, and proper monitoring/query analysis and optimization. Of particular interest and use were the memcached talk and the various discussions of stored procedures. Though only useful in the future (it’ll be a while before MySQL 5.1 is available to us), partitioning also seems like something that would help us out a great deal.

All in all, I’m getting my (read: Yahoo’s) money’s worth and having a good time. I have generated lots of ideas on how we can drastically ameliorate a lot of our performance issues and make our database much more maintainable.

One thing that kind of sucks is that a lot of the talks about monitoring/alerting ended up a waste, as they talked about opensource products that we had looked at and ended up developing our own due to scale issues.