Will this stick?

I've semi-started a lot of blogs, will this one last?

My name is Jay Janssen. Amongst other things I am a MySQL guy (tm) at Yahoo! This is a role that I more fell into, rather than one I specifically applied for. My background is Operations, somewhere between Coding/Developing and a System Admin/Colo Tech. I've done both, to some extent, and what's great about Yahoo is finding a lot of opportunity to set stuff up, see it run and fix it when it breaks.

MySQL, of course, never breaks. Unfortunately this only really true most often for the blogger, the guy on the hosted website or on an old P-III 1 Ghz running Debian Sarge off of his cable modem. These are the guys who don't know what hit them when digg.com comes around. In reality, the true test of any software is what happens when you beat the snot out of it. What's a better OS, Linux or BSD? What happens under extreme loads to each? Try it and find out.

The same holds true for MySQL. There's a lot of great (and free, as in beer) features, 5.1 is badass. But when there's a few million in advertising, brand reputation, and a lot of execs breathing down your neck, you need to think hard about stability. Once you slap a thousand page views a second on a website, and all sorts of User-generated, Web 2.0 features, you'll really find out where the rubber meets the road.

If you don't believe me, ask Google. There was a lot of head-scratching going on at the MySQL User's Conference when the Google presenters said they used 4.0.

So that's what I think about all day. Yahoo has a lot of sites and sub-sites, acquisitions and in-house builds, small sites and big sites. I get to see how they all work and try to make sense out of how we can best make use of MySQL at Yahoo.

This blog might end up with lots of posts of general types of MySQL nuggets that I can talk about, or it might not. I'm not that good at keeping blogs up.