Memcached for MySQL: Advanced Use Cases (Recoding and Slides)

My second webinar (hey it's an officially recognized word now!) on memcached, Memcached for MySQL: Advanced Use Cases, is now available on-demand from MySQL website.

Also see:

• Slides for Memcached for MySQL: Advanced Use Cases
  

Memcached for MySQL Webinar: Advanced Use Cases

Today at 1PM EST I am presenting the second part of memcached for MySQL webinar. I was told that the registration numbers look as good as the previous one. This one will be a bit more technical than the previous webinar. Sorry for the late notice but hope you can join!

Memcached Webinar - 560+ registrants

A big thank you to all those who attended the memcached webinar today on which I was a panelist. I was told that there were more than 560 registrants.

The feedback I received directly and indirectly shows that there is a lot of interest about memcached. In the future, I hope to work again with MySQL/Sun on more memcached related webinars.

If you attended the webinar and have some suggestions, comments or questions, please contact me at fmashraqi at yahoo dot com or post a comment on this blog.

Special thanks to Jimmy Guerrero, Monty Taylor, Rich Taylor, Edwin DeSouza and Alex Roedling for their hard work in arranging the webinar. Also thanks to Brian Aker, Matt Ingenthron and Trond Norbye for their assistance at various phases.

In case you missed the webinar:

• webinar recording: Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL ( you'll need Webex player to view the recording )
• memcached webinar slides

Memcached Webinar - 420 Registrants and Counting!

Regarding my earlier post on memcached webinar, I was informed today that more than 420 registrants have signed up. Space is limited and filling up fast so if you are interested in memcached and haven't registered yet, click on the following link to register now!

Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL (June 29)

Presenting a Webinar on Memcached Use Cases

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Quick link: register for Designing and Implementing Scalable Applications with Memcached and MySQL webinar (June 29)

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Ever since its introduction, memcached has been changing the way cost-efficient caching is perceived. Some passionately love it, others cynically hate it.

Today, many large scale web 2.0 properties (including my employer) save millions of dollars by depending on memcached to bring their application response time under control and to offload pressure from databases.

There are several success stories about using memcached to speed up database driven websites. Facebook, for instance, runs the largest memcached installation and the numbers only keep increasing. In May 2007, Facebook was reportedly running 200 dedicated servers with 3TB of memory in their memcached cluster. At the "Scaling MySQL Up or Out" Keynote, Facebook revealed they are now using 805 dedicated memcached servers. That's more than a 400% increase in less than a year!

Twitter, digg, Wikipedia, SourceForge, and even Slashdot depend on memcached to keep their users happy.

For my employer, memcached has been a crucial component of the infrastructure that has been instrumental in handling explosive growth in a cost-efficient manner. In addition, memcached has helped us offload billions of queries from our database.

To highlight several real-life use cases of memcached (see below), I will be presenting a memcached webinar on Thursday, June 29 at 1 PM EST (10 AM PST). Monty Taylor (Senior Consultant, Sun Microsystems) and Jimmy Guerrero (Sr Product Marketing Manager, Sun Microsystems - Database Group) will also be speaking at the event. Space is limited and filling up fast (200+ registrants already) so I highly recommend registering now.

In this webinar, I will be covering several use cases for memcached including (but not limited to):

• deterministic cache
• non-deterministic cache
• proactive cache
• "state" cache
• filesystem cache replacement

Hope to "see" you at the webinar.

Note: This memcached webinar is not to be confused with the memcached webinar being presented by Ivan Zoratti on June 28.

Is Read Replication Really Dying in Favor of Memcached?

I spent my Sunday working on my three presentations that I will be presenting at the upcoming MySQL Conference. About two hours ago, as I was reviewing my stuff, I told my lovely wife that I may talk in my sessions how replication for read scalability no longer makes sense in high traffic environments. I told her, I am probably going to vote in favor of investing in memcached vs read slaves for scaling reads.

Believe it, or not, she hammered me with all sorts of questions. I spent some time answering her questions. I scanned my brain to gather more evidence to support myself including that at work we are moving and staying away from replication as much as possible.

Then, I got busy writing the post about Facebook using MySQL replication to update Memcached. After publishing the post, I checked Planet MySQL and found Arjen discussing (and agreeing with) Brian Aker's post about "The Death of Read Replication."

At that point, I simply turned my MacBook screen towards my wife and smiled :)

I consider Brian's post a brave one from MySQL point of view as I can imagine not everyone at Sun/MySQL will be happy about this. I appreciate his can

However, what Brian says about replication, caching and memcached is very true. memcached is an incredibly important part of our infrastructure. It doesn't has painful latency of MySQL replication associated with it. It requires much less hassle to setup, reset and scale. Like Facebook and all other major Web 2.0 sites, we have a considerably large memcached farm that allows us to serve our ever increasing demand.

P.S. Just to be clear, I highly favor using master-master replication for high availability and a small number of slaves. I just don't favor investing money in slaves alone for scaling reads.

P.P.S. I will leave you with a quote from Arjen's post:
"What needs to be fixed is distributed writes. And economically!"

Facebook using MySQL to replicate Memcached

Faced with the challenge "to figure out a way for memcached servers to replicate data concurrently with the MySQL databases," across the country, Facebook came up with a clever solution of "embedding extra information in to the MySQL replication stream that allows [Facebook] to properly update memcached [servers] in Virginia."

This is very smart! I am curious about how they implemented this. I wonder if by "replication stream" they are just referring to binary logs. The article didn't mention whether they hacked MySQL to do synchronous replication as well, like Google. That would be really neat: synchronous replication that updates memcached.

Synchronous or not, the idea is still uber cool and I would love to see more discussion from Planet MySQL community regarding this.

Making replication possible for Brian Aker's memcached storage engine for MySQL can be another way in the future to making MySQL replicate to memcached. Brian's blog post shows:

ENGINE=MEMCACHE DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 CONNECTION='localhost,piggy,bitters'

The multiple host specification looks very interesting. I will definitely love to talk about this with the brains at the conference.

Also, something like this would make a nice candidate for programs like Google summer of code.

Thanks to my colleague and friend A. Lee for brining this to my attention.

Kickfire looking to push MySQL limits

For the past few months, like Baron, Jeremy and Keith, I have been consulting KickFire (formerly known as C2App). There is another startup currently in stealth mode with some very impressive solutions for MySQL. Unlike Kickfire, this other startup isn't SSD based. I was hoping they will be ready for announcement at the conference as well, but it seems they will need some more time. I cannot go into much detail on this startup at this point.

I have been wanting to write on KickFire but I certainly won't be able to beat Baron. He does a wonderful job in capturing what is KickFire and presenting a detailed insight for PlanetMySQL readers.

Like Baron, I only provided consulting and didn't get a chance to actually play with the solution. If KickFire is able to deliver what they have been promising then I can see them becoming a major solution provider to MySQL community.

I can't wait for Kickfire's keynote. Should be very interesting for those interested in giving MySQL scalability a whole new meaning.