BLOB Streaming presentation at the Hamburg MySQL User Group

I have just posted the presentation that I gave at the Hamburg MySQL User Group last Tuesday. You can download the presentation here.

I have added a few slides on advanced topics: backup, replication and the distributed repository, which did not actually make it into my talk. However, these topics came up in the discussion over a few drinks afterwards.

Thanks to Lenz for the opportunity to present the BLOB Streaming Project and to those that were there for the good feedback.

As Lenz said, it was a "pretty technical crowd". For example, it did not go unnoticed that a denial of service attack could be launched by a malicious client, that establishes many upload connections that fill up the server's file system. Although unreferenced BLOBs of this type are deleted from the repository after 5 minutes, this is still a serious threat for anyone that exposes the MyBS HTTP port to the internet.

To prevent this it may be necessary to limit upload to clients with specific IP addresses (which could be specified by a system variable). Lenz suggested using HTTP-based authentication such as digest access authentification. Any other ideas would be welcome.

Another question was whether a BLOB could be deleted while it is being downloaded from the repository. Although BLOBs are not locked while they are downloaded, I have just realized that this is not a problem. The BLOB remains in the repository after deletion until the compactor thread removes it by deleting a repository file that contains the BLOB. And this is only done once all readers have release the repository file.

I have submitted this talk under the heading An Introduction to BLOB Streaming for MySQL Project as a proposal for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008. And, if it is approved I will also be presenting Inside the PBXT Storage Engine at the conference. Ronald mentioned that there have been nearly 300 submissions so I will be quite lucky to get both talks approved! :)