Blog: Pete Loshin

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YouTube and MySQL

YouTube, it turns out, uses MySQL as its backend.

Paul Tuckfield, the YouTube DBA, speaks about using MySQL at YouTube.

Before I even finished listening to the whole presentation, I got several key points:

• Paul Tuckfield started out at YouTube with a lot of database experience under his belt as an Oracle DBA--but no MySQL experience. Which tells me that switching from Oracle to MySQL, while retaining people, should not be an obstacle.
• MySQL scales, nicely. YouTube has three DBAs. They served 100 million videos a day, back in mid-2006. Without DB2 or Oracle.
• Scaling MySQL to YouTube-scale is non-trivial. Tuckfield talks about using master/slave architecture and doing clever things with replication, to make MySQL work for such a huge database. Which tells me that you're not going to scale anywhere unless you have people who are smart enough to make it work.

The talk, recorded last year at the 2007 MySQL Conference, is only about 40 minutes long, so it's the perfect length for listening during your commute--and Paul is an engaging and funny speaker!

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