George Takei Helps Facebook Debug MySQL

Actor George Takei is best known for his role as Lieutenant Sulu in the original Star Trek TV series and movies. In recent years he has made memorable cameo appearances on network TV shows, including Heroes, The Big Bang Theory, Celebrity Apprentice and the Facebook Engineering blog.

Wait - what was that last one? In today's update on the Facebook Engineering blog, Mark Callaghan discusses the challenges in getting MySQL to scale on Facebook's multi-core servers. The post provides technical insight into Facebook's scalability initiatives, and then gives a shout out to Takei for helping resolve a database issue.

"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," Callaghan writes. "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. This allowed us to improve his experience, and in turn, the experience of everyone else on Facebook."

Takei's Facebook page has more than 1.2 million followers, who enjoy a steady stream of humor tailored for the Trekkies and techies.