Colin Charles Agenda

If you couldn’t make the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2008, no worries – there’s recorded video!

• Upcoming MySQL Features (Stewart Smith) – focused on the future, as opposed to what’s available right now/soon
• MySQL Indexing Methods (Jonathon Coombes) AND MySQL Optimisation by Design (Arjen Lentz)– the slides are viewable from the video, and around 1 hour in, you’ll get to see a demo of Arjen’s tool, lossylogger at work. I blogged about these sessions…
• Getting started with MySQL Proxy (Giuseppe Maxia) – This goes on for a full hour, and is a most interesting talk
• MySQL Support Procedures (Trent Lloyd) – with slides written about 2 hours before the talk, Trent pulled off a great feat. There’s a little demo later of the Enterprise Monitor and Workbench (at which point the recording stopped)
• High Availability, Replicating MySQL database (Oliver Hookins) – the only talk not given by someone related to the MySQL family, and arguably, the most interesting talk (mainly because its very practical). I’d suggest watching the video! This talk was also given at the sys-admin miniconf, on the same day.
• Dealing with Hierarchical Structures (Arjen Lentz) – the slide deck is Mike Hillyer’s, the talk is interesting, and when you get about 15 minutes into the video, you’ll see Arjen talk about the GRAPH Engine that he’s been developing. There’s even some code snippets, of a new storage engine that Arjen is designing, essentially for graphing nodes
• Multi-Master MySQL Solutions (Jonathon Coombes) and a demo of Maria (Giuseppe Maxia) – pay attention to the drawings on the board for Jonathon’s talk, and if you’re fast-forwarding, go about 35 minutes into the video, to see the Maria demo.

For a full list of available miniconf talks that were recorded, check out what the LCA team has to offer. I’m surprised the LinuxChix talks never made it online (there was a really interesting memcache talk there…)!

If you download all the OGGs above, you’ll be down about 451MB. If you’re bandwidth starved, I have them on my laptop and will gladly share them on a thumb-drive.

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysql miniconf, linux.conf.au, lca08, video, storage engine

Day 2 for me started with watching Simon Phipps talk about Sun’s FOSS Philosophy and Strategy. It rained in the morning, so the talk started a little late, and there were hopes of better attendance. Nonetheless, the talk was interesting, and the announcement that there was money in it for FOSS developers, was just fabulous. I took away a few points, which I ended up Twittering:

• There’s this idea of a global mesh nowadays, and its leading to a changing society. FOSS is all about it. And “Its Going Mainer Mainstream”!
• Investment in skills is important for any country. There should always be a preference to invest in the local workforce. Simon mentions that all this allows you to keep the sovereignty of your country.
• You cannot pirate free software. Want to avoid foreign interference, and all the worries of WIPO? Free software is the answer.
• Simon Phipps thinks “software patents are bananas”. I tend to agree.
• I also found out that the Sydney Opera House owns a trademark on all photos taken of the Opera House. That seemed retarded, and not long after, I found out this was similar with regards to the Petronas Twin Towers in KL. I can take a photo, but apparently, I can’t sell it on say, ShutterStock Photo or anything. Ridiculous.

I didn’t get to attend the next round of talks, mainly because I was giving my talk! The room was full, the questions were good, I was happy. I read a report, from Ditesh, so that’s a pretty good summary, I guess.

I really wanted to attend the Mozilla talk from Mitchell Baker (mainly because I’d have liked to have met her), however, I couldn’t resist going to the PostgreSQL 8.3 talk by Josh Berkus. It was an interesting talk, well rounded, with the occasional jab or two at MySQL. The attendance was about half full, and we had some unwelcome loud noises in the talk! I took away from it:

• Contributors are full participants. PostgreSQL is owned and run by the community. Write a patch, and its accepted? Be prepared to write documentation.
• CSV logging is now built-into PostgreSQL 8.3
• I was introduced to Heat Only Tuples (HOT). Benchmarking, then seems to be skewed towards greater performance gains in PostgreSQL
• MVCC: Overwriting model (InnoDB, Oracle) or the non-overwriting model (PostgreSQL, Firebird)
• The attention to standards is great. Extending SQL, to create the SKYLINE feature, to power approximate queries, however, this was rejected for the core of PostgreSQL, and is available in their foundry
• Release engineering in PostgreSQL is amazing. 6 weeks development, 2 weeks commit, and repeat.
• There are doubts of an embedded PostgreSQL – this is what SQLite is for. I like the focus of the core team here.
• You never want PostgreSQL running on handheld devices – heavy writes it has.
• “There is no one size fits all solution, for databases” — Josh Berkus. I tend to agree
• Why are few hosting companies providing PostgreSQL? Customers don’t ask for anything else? CPanel doesn’t run with PostgreSQL. pg_hba.conf (my.cnf equivalent) needs fixing, for controlling quotas (can be implemented via tablespaces), etc.

Next up, was the OpenMoko: What, why and how talk by Harald Welte. The talk was packed to the brim, and I didn’t learn much more than I’d have found out from their website. Its an interesting project, but with the upcoming Android, and the idea that I need a working phone now, I don’t know if OpenMoko is right. Besides, the battery life on that thing is horrid.

Spent time talking to Josh Berkus, in the corridor, nearby the Sun booth about life, the universe, and everything. Then it was Lightning Talks, and dinner…

Technorati Tags: foss.in, foss.in 2007, sun, foss, strategy, philosophy, postgresql 8.3, simon phipps, josh berkus

A lot of people have repeatedly asked me why I’ve not mentioned my thoughts on the Sun-MySQL acquisition (and this blog post, clearly comes almost a month later). I’ve just been pre-occupied and have not had the time to come up with a lengthy blog post. I can however, recommend the following video, created by Mike Lischke, of MySQL Workbench fame.

Naturally, you should also read the Q&A Session with Marten Mickos, that was mostly whipped up almost immediately after the acquisition. Editorial kudos on that one goes to Lenz Grimmer, Steve Curry, and Zack Urlocker. I pretty much had those thoughts that Marten answered really quickly, so I hope the Q&A is a good reflection.

But what does this all mean for me? Its too early to tell, right? Besides, I do know the Sun community quite a bit, having spent quite a few years working on OpenOffice.org (from the unofficial FAQ, to being a community marketing contact, to PowerPC and OS X porting work – heck, at the 2005 linux.conf.au, I was the Sun Regional Delegate, nationally within Australia which tacked on a great prize of going to OLS, and my first time meeting Simon Phipps), so I should be stoked, in general ;)

Thats not to say, I didn’t ask my colleague Lenz, seated next to me, if this was some kind of joke. He reassured me, it wasn’t. On internal IRC, Kaj then posted the link to his blog post Sun acquires MySQL, and at that point in time, I realised, it was all true. Monty was positive about it on internal IRC, and if its OK for Monty, it must be OK for the rest of us.

Here’s to the next chapter in MySQL’s story.

Technorati Tags: writing, mysql, sun, q&a, interview, marten mickos, video, youtube, sun meets mysql, mike lischke