Colin Charles Agenda

Conference time! While I understand Frank’s feelings, there’s always hope that there will be some great “blog reports”, amazing IRC, and if at all, some form of podcasts.

However, if I was going to the MySQL Users Conference 2006, I’d probably attend things in this order:

• Monday – Arjen’s Optimizing MySQL Applications Using the Pluggable Storage Engine Architecture because this is important stuff all folk should learn about. Performance being the name of the game these days, it’d be silly to miss MySQL Performance Optimization that our very own performance guru, Peter Zaitsev will be giving.
• Tuesday – Mono is hot, right? Might as well listen to Creating .NET applications with Linux and MySQL. In the VoIP and telco industry, it would seem that The Case for Carried Grade Linux in Telecom would rock. Go for Jay’s Performance Tuning Best Practices (his last webminar rocked!). Come 4.30pm I get torn between Embedding MySQL, MySQL Partitioning, or the Sakila Sample DB. Again, back to performance, Peter runs the 5.0 vs. 4.1 review – these results will be really interesting.
• Wednesday – How do you choose between Speeding-up Queries or a talk on Backups? Or an Asterisk talk versus Security by Example? Heck, even at the tail end of the day there’s competition – Tuning Stored Procedures or a more “in this world” talk by Alcatel on Building scalabale Telecoms databases on MySQL. This is a talk I’d love to see in a Webminar so everyone else can watch.
• Thursday – I haven’t mentioned any of the keynotes per se, but I suggest all wake up and attend Mark Shuttleworth’s talk on Ubuntu (and MySQL). I’d then hit Plugging Your Applications into the MySQL Storage Engine Layer by Brian Aker (even though there’s a .NET session that looks interesting). Technical talks like Optimizing MySQL on Source Code Level will definitely be worth your time, as will the Django talk. Heard of ipTel? Their real-life large scale VoIP deployments should be interesting.

Well, that pretty much sums it up. The MySQL Users Conference looks like a little week of lots of learning. If you can go, be there.

I’m going to be at my first MySQL Meetup tomorrow. Its at the Mercat Cross, 456 Queen St at 7pm. This is quite near Melbourne Central, and definitely has a good view of the Vic Market night market. I hear (from AdamF) that there’s lots of beer on tap, if that catches your fancy.

We can talk about all things MySQL, and get more users into MySQL 5.1. Hello event scheduling! Hello partitioning! Hello tables in information_schema!

Guess its time to mention the antics of Sunday. I was on a VLine train, heading from Melbourne to Corio, to send my cousin back into school. The stop was announced, and I was trying to open the door. It seemed jammed.

I moved to the next door. It swung open. At this very time, the train decided to start moving (or at least pick up speed). The impact of it all was that I got swung out of the train, and hit the gravel platform.

First aid was provided by the conductor, who was highly apologetic. Doors don’t open while trains move…. They offered to pay my full medical fees provided I visited the Geelong hospital, but when he found out I stayed in Melbourne instead, he said contact Vline if there were bills, and so on.

His responsiveness to the situation seemed to me like this was normal happenings on Vline trains.

On Monday I headed to the doctors, who served me with iodine (now on open wounds, thats painful), and gauzed up both my ankles and left arm. I got a tetanus jab, and am on antibiotics now.

Seems that its not a good idea to wet the wounds, so showering sparingly is a good idea. Today, I had a Glad Wrap, and plastic bag shower. This is highly annoying… More news come Thursday when I get re-dressed.

Congratulations to Giuseppe Maxia, who’s won himself an iPod Nano!

Giuseppe has been actively submitting bug reports for MySQL 5.1, plus he’s got an interesting blog (syndicated at Planet MySQL), mentioning new features that are available in MySQL 5.1. Of interest, is your performance related post on Partitioning. To add to that, your bug reports are reproducible, and simply facilitate “cut-n-paste” verification! (mysql#17894)

Giuseppe, thanks for your help and helping make MySQL 5.1 rock!

P/S: Thanks for the help on the Sakila sample database as well.

So, earlier today I was playing around with compiling MySQL on a 64-bit platform, as there was a bug reported that there were problems allocating a large amount of memory to it. I compiled it, and tried running a few tests beyond the usual make test to see if I could make it run into problems.

I couldn’t. From a chat earlier in the morning, Stefan told me to try a really large table, with a stored procedure that repeatedly queried it. I tried that, but never got my out of memory errors. And my test box had 1GB of RAM.

So my question to readers are:

1. Have you had grief with MySQL 5 (or later, see 5.1 just hit beta) on a 32-bit or 64-bit platform, where you had issues allocating a large amount of memory to the MySQL server?
2. Do you have useful test harnesses designed to stress test your greatest/latest/newest database installation? How do you, the community QA the next release of MySQL?

If you answered yes to any of the above, do drop me e-mail at colin@mysql.com, or comment here. Thanks.

In other interesting news, Jay, my colleague presented a webminar on Coding and Indexing Strategies for Optimal Performance. It was well received, I had a really good time attending it (even though it was at 5am!) and I suggest folk going to these webminars. Sure, it requires an icky Java client, but you do learn a lot following presentations and listening to the presentation. Its like a recorded lecture/podcast, except its all automated :)

Oh, and MySQL 5.1 just hit beta. Seeing my iPod 3G died, maybe its time to make MySQL rock and win an iPod Nano. File reproducible bug reports, talk about it, and get picked to win an iPod Nano. 1 given away every week!
(yes, yes, I know I can’t get to win an iPod Nano)