12-Step Program for Performance, with Wanelo.com

Few of my readers will be familiar with Wanelo, the social shopping site, because you just aren't in its target market.  But Wanelo.com is currently the darling of the dot-com world, or as Bloomberg puts it, "the next big thing in ecommerce".  And most importantly to you: they run PostgreSQL.

Last night Wanelo CTO Konstantin Gredeskoul described their "12-step Program for Application Performance" to a packed crowd at their HQ in San Francisco.  This is kind of a recipe book for scaling a social web site backed by Postgres.  Wanelo's stack includes Rails, PostgreSQL, Joyent, SOLR, Redis, Memcached, Manta, and mobile applications.

Video for the talk is here (sorry about quality, Google Hangouts has ... issues).  Konstantin's slides are here.

SFPUG Live Video: Wanelo's 12-Step Program

Tommorrow for San Francisco PostgreSQL User Group, recent dot-com success and social shopping site Wanelo will be explaining their 12-Step Program for Application Performance.  I can't give away the details, but it will involve replication, sharding, and the Joyent cloud.  If you can't make it in person (and you can't, it's full up), then join us on Google Hangout.

Note: this is our first time using Google Hangout to broadcast SFPUG.  It may or may not go well.  Don't expect any video before around 7:15PM Pacific.  If it works, there will also be archival video on YouTube.

New Survey Up: Configuration Management

What configuration management system do you use with your PostgreSQL servers?  Answer on the community survey page.

Time for a change of slogans?

So the folks at DatabaseFriends, a blog I was completely unaware of until now, posted a survey whose results surprised a lot of people.  In a "favorite database" survey, PostgreSQL came in ahead of MySQL and MariaDB combined.  And not just a little ahead, but 2X the votes.

These results don't particularly surprise me, at this point.  I've seen MySQL declining in popularity since before the Sun acquisition (and precipitiously after the Oracle acquisition), and even the heroic efforts of MariaDB/SkySQL isn't going to turn that trend around.  I think the booth picture above really says it all: that's in the middle of the show day at SCALE.  The "most popular database" booth is deserted by staff and attendees alike.  (To be fair, the SkySQL booth was somewhat busier).

Now, you can say what you want about the unscientific nature of the survey.  But the core PostgreSQL community didn't organize a write-in campaign; heck, we didn't even know about the survey until the results were posted.   And frankly, it's the same kind of thing I've seen from other sources: the Freshmeat stats from 2005-2010 for click-throughs (sadly, no longer online); the report from 451Research showing former MySQL users migrating to PostgreSQL. 

Now, MySQL still has a huge installed base (still, at this point, something like 4X that of PostgreSQL), so it's not going away any time soon.  And MariaDB is winning new users.  But I think it's time that MySQL had a new slogan, because it's pretty clear that the old one no longer applies.

Mind you, PostgreSQL could use a new slogan too ...