Interview with Brian Aker

MySQL architect Brian Aker discusses a wide range of issues in an interview with Don Marti, editor of LinuxWorld.

When I look at your Web site, I see some pretty unusual storage engines for MySQL. You can use a Web site as back-end storage or even memcached for memory-backed storage. Do those engines have any practical application? Or are they more in the nature of sample code?

Well, they actually have quite a bit of practical application. In the database industry, we’ve been hearing, especially from companies like IBM, for some time now, about federating sources of data. So, taking data from different sites or, in this case, just different data strategies and putting them together. This is kind of a very early concept that Monty Widenius had when he first came up with MySQL, though it was more around analytics and transactional engines. What we’ve done is we’ve kind of spread that concept out.

The HTTP engine is an interesting one to look at. It was written as a piece of sample code, designed so that it can communicate with a Web site. It can fetch basic data through HTTP methods and then translate that to being able to use as SQL. OK. So what’s the big deal? Well, one big deal of this has been the S3 engine by Mark Atwood. Here’s an engine where you’ve got Amazon, who’s got this large infrastructure of available storage, and what Mark has done is he’s made that available through an engine.

For instance, I know one of his early cases right now is they’ve got a real estate agency that is collecting ongoing statistics and data about sales. And instead of creating a local repository of terabytes or petabytes of data storage, they’ve started architecting it to just like normal SQL. They insert it into their database. But instead of having to store that data locally, it’s actually placed into S3 for long-term archival. So they can take a data set that they may not really need access to all that often and put it into an environment where they don’t have to pay for anything but the actual storage costs. Which, when you work out the numbers between storing that data locally, having more sysadmins, having more infrastructure or just storing it in S3, the numbers are kind of strong toward using the S3 servers.

And just to give you an idea of some things that can be done, we were at the MySQL users' conference. I was explaining the HTTP engine to a group at the bar there. And this one guy is watching, and he talks to me a little bit, and he goes off. We’re sitting around for the bar for like another hour, and he comes back and says, "Look at this." He had been to Google Spreadsheets, and what he had done was written a RESTful URL and placed it into the HTTP engine and then started collecting data off of a Google spreadsheet and displaying inside the database. So every time he did a SELECT on the database, it was actually pulling data from this Google spreadsheet that he had connected to. So that whole concept of taking different data sources and federating them has some very practical applications we see.