Meeting with David Axmark (founder of MySQL)

Last week David Axmark the co-founder and author of MySQL visited my office. Thanks to Sun for making this meeting happen. We spent some time discussing about MySQL and development of applications in general. These are some of the key "take-away" points from that meeting. A lot of these points may seem obvious, but a lot of companies decide not to implement them for various reasons.

• Move to the latest GA release.
• Invest in good DBAs and developer training.
• Use MySQL Enterprise Monitor for monitoring your servers.
• Stick to the mainstream. Be it filesystem or hardware.
• Look at Solid Storage Drives for storing data.
• Run frequent DB Audits.
• Invest in MySQL Support (this has numerous advantages).
• Pick the right engines for the right job.
• Hook memcache (use consistent hashes where possible) for better performance.
• Experiment and benchmark as much as you can.
• Use MaxDB only if you need carrier grade reliability. Else your better off with Master/Slave setups.
• If you have too many slaves hooked up to one master; have a look at using the Blackhole Engine.
• Experiment with mysql-proxy.
• Importance of slow query logs and regular analysis of the log files.