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George Takei Helps Facebook Troubleshoot MySQL
miller60 writes "Actor George Takei recently helped the Facebook infrastructure team troubleshoot issues with its MySQL databases. Takei, a veteran of the original Star Trek series, now has more than 1.2 million fans on Facebook. Takei recently noticed that some status updates were missing or appearing inconsistently. That led to a dialogue with the Facebook Engineering team, which gave Takei a shout-out on its latest blog post, which also included some technical discussion of Facebook's challenges in scaling MySQL (a topic of previous discussion here at Slashdot)."
People have been reporting these problems for months, if not years.
He helped troubleshoot? Seems like devs were just following him and reading his posts saying something was wrong.
Not only that, they only took interest because they knew of that issue and were already working on it.
In that case every user on facebook is helping to troubleshoot MySQL.
But they weren't Sulu.
You can't take the sky from me.
From reading the links, it sounds like Takei had some problems, and reported them to the Facebook team with some helpful to-and-fro exchange of information (i.e. giving them a useful bug report) before they fixed them in the usual manner.
No disrespect to him intended, it just sounds like someone is trying to make this story sound like a bigger deal than it is. The Slashdot headline doesn't help, compounding the misleading impression (probably intentionally) that Takei was sitting alongside the Facebook techies debugging nested right joins.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Swordsman and technical troubleshooter: a potent combination, particularly when done shirtless.
Pon farr not Pom'Far.
In Liberty, Rene
Oooh MyyySQL
FTFY
But they weren't Sulu.
There's something to be said for celebrity - it get's your messages noticed more often than us ordinary slobs.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
They had to resort to Takei because Kim Jong-il is no longer available.
I eat only the real part of complex carbohydrates.
He wasn't looking through their databases or anything, he was offering them in-depth details of the errors he was getting. Nobody said he knows the slightest thing about SQL.
I'm vaguely disturbed by your knowledge of Vulcan sexuality.
I'm even more disturbed by how you got a +4 informative.
This just in--Slashdot helps load test web servers.
No, they noticed Takai's posts, because they liked his page. They apparently either ignore your page, or openly hate it. Either way, they don't read what they don't read.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Yes, they are too cheap for Oracle. Who the hell on their scale isn't? Also, They're the ones who manage Facebook's data. What is the largest size of database on Postgres? What minute fraction of Facebook's data is it?
The reality is they're on mysql, because they started with mysql. Mark Calligan ( the author of the post) has said in the past, that it was just what people picked up due to its easy setup and easy built in replication. Oracle was/is expensive, and Postgres was more difficult to setup.
Its better to be easy, understandable and quirky, than difficult and correct.
FYI, they invented Cassandra, but don't really use it anymore. I think they migrated to Hadoop for facebook messages.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
George Takei has a lot of fans with us and since we've all Liked his Page, a while back some of us saw an update from him about an inconsistency in his Facebook experience. We realized what he was experiencing was an issue we were already trying to fix on the database side, so when we saw him post, it gave us more information that helped us get closer to resolving the issue. This allowed us to improve his experience, and in turn, the experience of everyone else on Facebook.
They were already aware of the problem and working on a solution
Seriously? Anyone knows 69 isnt ATM... it's P2P... DUH.
MongoDB may be webscale, but /dev/null is even higher performing. Facebook should just switch to writing to /dev/null for the best possible performance; it's not like their users are going to notice that much.
There's something to be said for celebrity - it get's your messages noticed more often than us ordinary slobs.
failing celebrity status, you can get extra attention to your messages by using apostrophe's.
Captain Hikaru Sulu: *Fly her apart then!*
I swear there's a gay joke in there somewhere....
He's not "a little odd", he's openly homosexual. Why do you have such a problem with a man inserting his penis into another man's (willing) asshole? Or two men performing an ass-to-mouth 69 on each other?
I have always found him a little bit odd as well, and that was before I even knew he was gay. Odd is not bad, at least I don't take it to be that way. Besides, hes fucking Sulu. He rocks man.
As for your ass-to-mouth 69 comment..... I think somebody would flunk "spatial mechanics" on the Starfleet entrance exam. I suggest you get a couple of dolls and try to work out your "theory" there.
Find me a great actor that is not a little odd anyways....
Rand was a yeoman.
She started out as one, yes...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Mr. Sulu, the database, she canna take no more of this stress!
And Sulu said "The Captain says you fix it or we all die!"
But fortunately, Spock was there, for some reason, to help. Unfortunately, it was also Pom'Far time, and well, Ensign Rand was on her period, so...
Later Spock served spaghetti. Its the logical thing to do.
I'm vaguely disturbed by your knowledge of Vulcan sexuality.
I'm even more disturbed by how you got a +4 informative.
I find your lack of faith in the +4 th disturbing.
Besides, hes fucking Sulu.
No, he is Sulu.
It's the other guy who's fucking Sulu.
Time travel man, Time Travel.
It pays to be obvious, especially if you have a reputation for being subtle.