MySQL and us

File this under: Best tool for the job.

We heart Weblogs here at Fusion. And we heart Moveable Type for building and writing them - it's easy to set up new Weblogs and easy for newcomers to figure out.

But we have a problem: The current set-up isn't at all scalable. We're currently running MT on a single server, rather than as part of our overall server farm because of its use of Berkeley DB (a very nice product, but one our folks haven't tinkered with much).

One example: A few months ago, Keith Shaw posted what we all thought was an innocuous item about a new Sony CD/DVD player. But that got Linux Ogg Vorbis fans riled up and they deluged Keith's Weblog with comments. The Weblogs server ground to a halt. Not a Good Thing.

Now the ideal thing would be to figure out how to use this puppy with our existing Oracle databases. For example, the software we use to maintain our resource links area has a connector for Oracle. Alas, that would take some programming time, which our busy (and small) programming staff doesn't have.

Fortunately, Moveable Type supports MySQL and equally fortunately, Rocco, our senior network guy, has been playing with MySQL. He got the backend db running on a test server on Wednesday (after first installing or updating several Perl modules, such as the one that lets Perl apps like MT talk to MySQL) and I got the frontend to talk to it (that was the easy part, given the way MT is designed and documented). Then we got the all-important OK from Puneet, our DBA, to put MySQL on one of our existing database servers (we're basically an Oracle shop).

This'll let us tie MT into our Web-farm replication system (which, however, means posts such as this one could take up to five minutes to go live, since our replication service works on five-minute intervals). With any luck, our first MySQL app goes live next week.

Update, 02/24/03: Piece of cake. Made a couple of required modifications to the Moveable Type config file, ran a converter script that comes with the package and voila, our Weblogs are now SQL-based. Now to deal with replication around the server farm.