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George Takei Helps Facebook Troubleshoot MySQL

Posted by samzenpus on from the good-work-sulu dept.

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)."

18 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparently by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    People have been reporting these problems for months, if not years.

  2. Worst association ever... by arse+maker · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Worst association ever... by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Funny

      What they didn't mention, for competitive reasons, are the parts of their datacenter now running MySQL on 23rd century technology, helpfully provided through some sort of plot hopefully less lame than that one with time-travel and whale extinction...

    2. Re:Worst association ever... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      The great thing about George is you actually think for a second that maybe he knows MySQL, and are disappointed. If the headline was "Chuck Norris Helps Facebook Troubleshoot MySQL" then you'd know it wasn't with the code.

      Remember that: George Takei beats Chuck Norris.

    3. Re:Worst association ever... by jd2112 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Oh, come now, Sulu was helmsman, not engineering.

      He want fixing the problem, just pointing them on the right direction.

      --
      Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
  3. Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen by stonedcat · · Score: 4, Funny

    But they weren't Sulu.

    --
    You can't take the sky from me.
  4. Not so much by Dogtanian · · Score: 4, Informative

    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).
    1. Re:Not so much by jd · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Do you know how rare *good* bug reports are?

      --
      It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
    2. Re:Not so much by dubbreak · · Score: 4, Funny

      Mod parent up. Good bug reports are rarer than good sex (for most slashdotters).

      And if you think you maybe had a good bug report but aren't sure.. then you haven't had a good bug report before.

      --
      "If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
  5. Talented by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 4, Funny

    Swordsman and technical troubleshooter: a potent combination, particularly when done shirtless.

  6. Re:Actually Takei just called Scotty, who said.. by Rene+S.+Hollan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Pon farr not Pom'Far.

    --
    In Liberty, Rene
  7. Re:As Takei might say.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Oooh MyyySQL

    FTFY

  8. Re:Actually Takei just called Scotty, who said.. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'm vaguely disturbed by your knowledge of Vulcan sexuality.

    I'm even more disturbed by how you got a +4 informative.

  9. Ahh, I see how this works... by tool462 · · Score: 5, Funny

    This just in--Slashdot helps load test web servers.

  10. Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen by Jesse_vd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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

  11. Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Seriously? Anyone knows 69 isnt ATM... it's P2P... DUH.

  12. Re:Should have simply used a better DB by Grishnakh · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  13. Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Besides, hes fucking Sulu.

    No, he is Sulu.
    It's the other guy who's fucking Sulu.