eBay Wins MySQL Award

Yesterday eBay won an award at the O'Reilly MySQL conference. Congratulations to the Chris Kasten's team. Chris also did a presentation today at the MySQL conference. The caching layer his team created allows us to store "session" data on the server. This data can actually be persisted across sessions, depending on the use case, so it is really a little better than your typical HTTPSessions. Plus it actually scales :-)

The MySQL cache compliments HTTP cookies. We also use Flash for local storage as another alternative to the tiny world of HTTP cookies. Flash has a lot of advantages. The most obvious is the 100K default limit as opposed to the 4K limit of HTTP cookies. Flash "cookies" are not sent to the server, making them much more secure. One of the fun things I did recently was help setup guidelines on when an application should use plain 'ol HTTP cookies, Flash local storage, or the MySQL cache. I got to become much more familiar with the MySQL cache, and thus it wasn't suprising to me when I heard about it winning the award from MySQL.