I just read about FriendFeed using MySQL as a data storage engine.  Very interesting post that highlights how much people have come to trust MySQL.  FriendFeed basically built their own object storage system inside a single table.  They manually create and update indexes in other tables in a nicely distributed and sharded database server setup.  Overall its what I’d call a “very impressive” implementation.  I can’t help but think back to how BlogLines used (or perhaps still uses) BerkeleyDB to store their data without a traditional RDBMS storage engine.  I wonder if FriendFeed considered using a solution like that?

I came across a pretty good presentation by Andrei Zmievski from Yahoo! Inc.  Its a 77 page walk-through of VIM for PHP Programmers – quite comprehensive!  It covers essentials like setting marks and jumping to them quickly – which was a personal pet peeve of mine.  Little did I know vim had that covered – even global marks across files !  Of course vim is a bottomless bucket if you’re going to pour sweat into learning it, Andrei admits it quite succinctly on slide 18 for instance – “vim regexp language is too sophisticated to be covered here.”

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