LinuxPark ’08: Globo.com and MySQL, some answers…
Today i was at the LinuxPark event, that for the first time was here, in Porto Alegre (Hotel Plaza São Rafael). A lot of good presentations, and success cases about Open Source software in many companies all around the country. The first “talk” was one of the more interesting, which have presented the many Open Source applications used by the globo organizations (globo.com).
Globo.com is the biggest portal here in Latin America (newspapers, magazine, Television, and radio), and when the speaker said the line: “We are moving from Oracle to MySQL“, everyone was with the same face as you. :) Ok, we hear a lot of things about that, but when BIG companies say that for real, is big impact. Yes, now i understand why Sun did pay $1 billion for MySQL (here a tip for Jonathan Schwartz: they have complains about the Sun’s support…. c’mon, spent a lot of money in such aquisition, and don’t take care of such client?)
I did ask them about the “barrier” that some big companies have, when thinking about use Open Source software in “mission critical” applications, no backend company (nobody to blame), etc… but the answer was:
– First, you need the know-how to walk with your own legs, and have skilled people to patch the Open Source application that you use, or have a formal support with one of the many companies that sell it (many people don’t know that Open Source apps have support plans).
– In the specific case of MySQL, the developers need to change the way they write applications. With the excuse that Oracle accepts anything and give you the answer, many developers write “bad” software, and with MySQL they have changed that habit.
– Test, test, test. And at the end, more tests.
The company is investing in training, to have the power to use the real sense of Open Source, and seems like they follow what other big companies do too, they said: “Google uses python a lot, so do we”.
They have the rights to the BigBrother show here, and showed some numbers about the “pico” of utilization (bandwidth and access hits):
– 5.000 votes/second
– 70.000.000 total votes, and 11Gb bandwidth (they have explained that this was the problem they faced on the last day of the show).
All of it with Open Source software! (That is really good news globo.com)
The company has a “custom” cache solution called “globocache”, that i don’t know if they will give to the community. Actually, they talk a lot of cache, many layers of it… squid patches, and the migration for a new application that i dont remember the name… they gave the example about some “breaking news” in television or radio that indicates the site for more information. So, you have 6Gb bandwidth and in the other minute 10Gb! (400k users).
Other interesting points:
1) They use Java, tomcat, GNU/Linux and apache, a lot!
2) The load balance that they use, are not based on Open Source.
3) They make many improvements in Open Source software, and they are planning to make all of it plublic, soon (mirrors, patches, etc…)
4) They use ruby, php, and python.
5) Squid, NFS, MogileFS, MySQL, JBoss, mongrel, and Oracle
6) They use ITIL and SCRUM
7) They use a custom wordpress version to the company’s blog.
In the sidebar you can see a few pictures about the event, and here you can see a video showing the last part of the presentation’s DATAPREV, about digital television, and the Open Source software ginga.
Obviously Relational Database Management Systems aren’t their specialty.
Nobody in their right mind would go from Oracle to MySQL. MySQL just can’t touch Oracle in features and performance, let alone scalability: think of Sun or Veritas cluster + Oracle RAC + Oracle ASM. MySQL has nothing even close to that, as much as they try…
Don’t you worry one bit, after they blow a few tens of millions of USD equivalent of Reals, they’ll either wise up and switch to PostgreSQL, or they’ll go back to Oracle.
Ok, that’s a good point, and the line i’m used to hear today is: “I don’t believe them”…
So, what the DBA’s out there, and the MySQL readers of my blog (i have received a mail from one of them these days), have to say about it?
The answer is: With big websites you need scale-out, not scale-up. How Oracle scales on some big servers and clusters is irrelevant, because its terribly expensive yet still will not be enough for the site. MySQL architecture is built on the idea that you add more cheap servers, not move to big expensive ones.
As for features, it is true that Oracle has tons of proprietary (not standard) features that MySQL doesn’t. These are typically quite irrelevant on a site that is about serving lots content of content as fast as possible.
O’Globo may use a lot of open source software to produce their content and good on them but just try accessing that content using open source, if you ain’t running MS and WMP forget it.
Agreed. ;-)
Leal.