Mr. Sulu steers Facebook to MySQL solution

Facebook's engineering team has given a public nod to "Star Trek" celebrity George Takei for helping them fix a site performance problem that could be traced to MySQL. Judging by a recent account from Facebook engineer Mark Callaghan, however, the site's database infrastructure team struggles on a daily basis with wringing snappy, reliable performance out of database that, by some accounts, is simply ill-suited for a site like Facebook.

In a recent post to the Facebook Engineering Notebook, Callaghan credited Takei -- who played Mr. Sulu on "Star Trek" and currently has over 1.2 million Facebook followers -- for posting an update about inconsistency with his Facebook experience. In a post dated Feb. 23, Takei observed that his posts hadn't been showing up in some of his followers' news streams.

"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," Callaghan wrote, praising the power of crowdsourcing.
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http://www.infoworld.com/t/sql/star-treks-mr-sulu-steers-facebook-mysql-solution-188269