George Takei Helps Facebook Troubleshoot MySQL 86
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)."
Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparently (Score:5, Insightful)
People have been reporting these problems for months, if not years.
Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen (Score:5, Funny)
But they weren't Sulu.
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But they weren't Sulu.
George is a little odd (from my point of view; see the Shatner roast), but that's allowed. Besides, he looks great wielding a katana.
Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously? Anyone knows 69 isnt ATM... it's P2P... DUH.
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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....
Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen (Score:5, Funny)
Besides, hes fucking Sulu.
No, he is Sulu.
It's the other guy who's fucking Sulu.
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Time travel man, Time Travel.
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Indeed, I'm certainly an oddball (if you're reading this you probably are too), but I'm not gay.
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I guess I've been doing it wrong. When I do 69 with another man, I usually have his dick in my mouth, and mine in his.
Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Sulu would have fixed the bug himself and used his sword to cut the head off the person who created it.
Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:Facebook only listens if you're famous, apparen (Score:5, 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
Worst association ever... (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.
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Re:Worst association ever... (Score:5, Funny)
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Oh, come now, Sulu was helmsman, not engineering.
Re:Worst association ever... (Score:5, Funny)
Oh, come now, Sulu was helmsman, not engineering.
He want fixing the problem, just pointing them on the right direction.
Re:Worst association ever... (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm pretty sure the whole whale plot was intentionally silly. I view Star Trek IV as an experiment in something different and funny/oddball ("Nuclear Wessles", "Cap'n, there be whales here!", "[Said into mouse] Hello computer", etc.). It contrasts well with Star Trek II and III which were both very serious/dramatic (especially II).
If you want a truly flimsy TOS-era plot, there's always Spock's Brain and its many ridiculous moments [youtube.com]
.
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Well, call me when Brent Spinner helps debug MySQL
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He did what technical people WISH more users did: He reported the probvlem clearly, characterizing exactly what was going wrong and didn't throw in a metric assload of obvious irrelevancies. That *IS* quite helpful.
"It doesn't work!" = not terribly helpful.
"I entered xyz test in the title box, abc in the body box, and clicked submit and it said error 2343" (and none of that is correct) = not at all helpful.
Same as above, but the information is correct = very helpful
Same as above but add (for about 30 minute
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If I had users who were half as helpful in reporting problems as Mr Takei was in this instance, I might like my job.
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Same as above but add (for about 30 minutes) "I think it might be because I gave my car beefy delight instead of seafood surprise! ...
Car analogy fail!
Re:Worst association ever... (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.
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It reminds me of him being a project manager (PM) in the previous/last Celebriity Apprentice [nbc.com] episode. :P
Re:Actually Takei just called Scotty, who said.. (Score:5, Informative)
Pon farr not Pom'Far.
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Jamie Farr
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Porn Star
Re:Actually Takei just called Scotty, who said.. (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.
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+5 LOL :-)
Re:Actually Takei just called Scotty, who said.. (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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I thought it said "Porn'Far" and I was OK with that.
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Rand was a yeoman.
She started out as one [memory-alpha.org], yes...
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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.
Not so much (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Not so much (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know how rare *good* bug reports are?
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Still, the angle of this story is a somewhat poor attempt to give a misleading impression.
Re:Not so much (Score:5, Funny)
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.
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Don't forget the ability of someone with a million followers to draw attention to a problem and ensure everyone knows about it, not just the dev team, such that it becomes an embarrassment to the company that they have to fix to save face.
Think of accounts like George's as being those of the president and board of the user's union...
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As Takei might say.. (Score:1)
Oooh myyy
Re:As Takei might say.. (Score:5, Funny)
Oooh MyyySQL
FTFY
Re:As Takei might say..OBLIG Star Trek quote (Score:2)
Captain Hikaru Sulu: *Fly her apart then!*
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Captain Hikaru Sulu: *Fly her apart then!*
I swear there's a gay joke in there somewhere....
Talented (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook uses MySQL? (Score:1)
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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 bet
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Yes, they are too cheap for Oracle. Who the hell on their scale isn't?
Of course, you're joking. The cost of Oracle licenses for their infrastructure would in all probability be dwarfed by the cost of the person-hours they've put into developing and supporting Cassandra and their Heath Robinson MySQL setup.
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No, I'm not. Oracle is expensive as hell aprox 36,000 per standard edition dual cpu socket server. And Facebook has a hell of a lot of database servers aprox 60,000. So thats what 2. 1 Billion? Vs what ever the costs were to do what they've done now, where they have the software experts in house and on call 24/7. I think they chose correctly. Feel free to update me on the real costs of Oracle, its sort of tough to find accurate pricing on the web.
VoltDB? (Score:1)
Maybe a new DB technology like VoltDB would be better...
I can only imagine the pain and horror their DBA's experience. But what do I know?
Should have simply used a better DB (Score:2)
Re:Should have simply used a better DB (Score:5, 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.
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Facebook should just switch to writing to /dev/null for the best possible performance...
Now that you mention it, MySQL has had this option for years [mysql.com].
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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.
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Maybe if the "S" stood for Sucking.
And the "Q" stood for Queer.
But I'm not sure what the "L" would stand for.
Lads, maybe!?
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Troubleshooting MySQL is advanced computer science?
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Nope. All you have to do is press the "Upgrade to PostGreSql" button ;-)
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But he knows who to ask to get the warp-drive to reroute the MySql signals thru the deflector dish using aluminized tribbles disguised as phaser-cannon cleaning brushes while nosy Klingons are onboard. Not your average user.
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Dude, people stop actors who play medical roles on TV and ask them medical questions. They have to explain they're not real doctors.
OOOhhhhhh (Score:2)
MMMyyyyyyyyy
Dammit, Jim (Score:2)
I'm an engineer, not a navigator!
Ahh, I see how this works... (Score:5, Funny)
This just in--Slashdot helps load test web servers.
Oblig (Score:2)
In something totally unrelated why is the only thing I've seen George in been Star Trek and Heroes? I've always thought he was a good actor.
I can imagine the message exchanges... (Score:1)
"The new screens held!"