jcole’s weblog

Today is September 28th, and it’s currently snowing in Reno. Things are looking up for a good snowy winter and some skiing/snowboarding!

A week ago I got a useless invite for Yahoo! Mash — useless since the service wasn’t open even by invitation yet, and required a Yahoo! Backyard (employee only) login. The service has now officially launched, so I gave my invite a try again, and it worked! It’s invitation-only, so forgive me if you can’t follow along.

There seems to be a damn good reason it is invitation-only… it is totally lame. It is nowhere near ready for the public, embarrassingly so. It’s kind of amusing actually. Lots of things are broken, several things want you to type in e.g. size of pictures in pixels. The lameness comes from many things, not the least of which is that it comes with a “Mash Pet” which is kind of a Tamagotchi composed of pictures of a whiteboard smiley face.

The service overall is like a mix between MySpace and Facebook, and overall pretty lame. Actually, the only thing that it seems to have that is innovative (and a feature people have been wanting for YEARS) is a “this is fugly” link to turn off the custom styling of a profile. Yawn.

MySQL has a new section on their site about MySQL 6.0, which they are now calling “ready for pre-production testing”. I’m not sure when this section appeared, but I don’t spend much time on the MySQL site outside of the manual and downloads sections. Browsing around this new section I found a real gem: “Top Reasons Falcon is Cool” (or, as alternately titled on the page itself, “Top Reasons to use Falcon for Online Applications”¹ … did someone forget to rename one or the other?). This page gives a top ten list² of reasons why one should consider using Falcon, the new “not an InnoDB replacement, not at all!” but “really, you should try migrating your InnoDB application to it” storage engine.

I do think that Falcon will eventually be quite interesting, and it will hopefully have a bunch of nice tricks and whatnot, but MySQL’s marketing folks are really pushing it way too early and losing a lot of credibility in the process. Do they not realize we (as MySQL users) and a lot of others (as analysts, Oracle, DB2, and yes, even MS-SQL users) are laughing at them? I know it’s hard work to come up with 10 things sometimes, but if you get stuck at 7, make it a “Top 7″ instead of a “Top 10″. Don’t add a bunch of crap to fill it out. There are some minor chuckles in the first 7, but here’s the last 3, with my commentary:

8. Simplified Configuration

There is no complexity whatsoever in terms of configuration as only a handful of variables exist to control the behavior of the Falcon engine.

Hmm, s/bug/feature/ and you’re done! It’s so easy to configure!

9. High Availability

Extreme degrees of high availability are easily accomplished for a Falcon-driven system by using either MySQL replication or supported third-party high availability solutions such as DRBD.

This has nothing to do with Falcon, whatsoever.

10. Parallel Execution

Falcon’s design takes advantage of multi-core systems to provide parallel execution of user and service threads. Falcon uses fine-grained multi-threading to increase parallelism with locking on internal structures being done at a low level. In some cases, two threads can change different attributes of the structure at once, because the attributes are separately lockable.

Yay! Awesome! Parallel execution! It’s finally here!!!

Oh, wait, they don’t mean parallel execution of queries they mean parallel execution of internal threads. That’s nothing new, and InnoDB is already doing that. Maybe Falcon has finer-grained locking and can do this better, but that doesn’t make for a big bold title of “Parallel Execution”.

Come on, folks. Try harder.

¹ Who else gets a headache from American rules for capitalization of titles?

² How trite, yet another top ten list.