Colin Charles Agenda

The Sunday before the MySQL Conference and Expo usually means the party at Marten’s house. This year, some of us arrived there rather early, and also made a beeline for the exit, rather quickly. This despite all the good alcohol, amazing food being served, and the great company of colleagues we hardly ever see. Why?

Some of us wanted to crashattend the MySQL Conf 2008 Community Dinner. And we did! The entire MySQL Community Team was there, as was Brian Aker, Mark Atwood, Monty Widenius, Timour Katchaounov, Eric Herman. We also naturally brought Barton George along (he gave us a ride! Thanks Barton). Oh, and did I mention, Rich Green and Jonathan Schwartz were there too? Jonathan picked up the tab, naturally :)

Monty and Brian chat, while Jonathan is in the background

A big thank you to Jonathan and Rich. All the conversation, all the people I met (old and new), it was just simply fabulous. Now of course, comes the great fun of following up, and getting things done!

Jonathan Schwartz with the MySQL/Sun plush dolphins

Did I mention that Santa Giuseppe also brought along little plush dolphins? Great party favours!

Giuseppe with some Sun/MySQL dolphins… Monty egging him on

All in all, a great start to the conference. Pictures (that I took anyway – all Creative Commons licensed by Attribution, non-commercial, share-alike) are at my MySQL Conference and Expo 2008 set. They’ve all been added to the 2008 MySQL Users Conference and Expo group on Flickr as well. I know Ronald Bradford was running around with a camera (a 40D, like I have at home :P), and Barton George took some snapshots, as did Lenz Grimmer. Watch their photo feeds soon…

Update: Giuseppe has blogged it too at Community dinner with Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green as has Kaj, at Jonathan Schwartz and Rich Green at the MySQL Community Pre-Conference Dinner party.

Technorati Tags: mysql, community dinner, santa clara, mysqluc08, mysqluc2008, mysqluc, jonathan schwartz, rich green, barton george, sun

The very brave soul, was Aaron Bockover, from the Banshee media player fame (via the LugRadio Live USA 2008 weblog). There were a few interesting highlights from these gong-a-thong sessions…

Zumastor
Dan Kegel spoke about the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Want snapshots and remote replication in your Linux filesystem? This one does just that. From the contributor list, it looks like its all Google engineers hacking on this… Yes, this is better than LVM. No, I haven’t tried it yet.

mod_ndb
J.D. Duncan spoke about mod_ndb. Here are my transcribed notes of the talk.

MySQL Cluster is a database designed to be fault tolerant, on cheap commodity hardware. Write SQL queries, and they access the data from the NDB nodes. A few deficiencies in web applications – 2 tier architecture (from PHP to MySQL), now it becomes a 3-tier architecture (PHP->MySQL->NDB). MySQL 5.0 also limited – no true VARCHARs, and entirely in memory. There are variable linked rows, VARCHARs support, and on disk support in 5.1.

Apache web server, link in mod_ndb in httpd.conf file, write something that looks like a SQL query, then you send a GET/DELETE/POST request to Apache (its a REST API). If its a GET, the data can come out of the database as JSON, XML, etc. From a browser, its as simple as an XMLHTTP request call.

Solomon Chang’s Irish Ballad
Folk at the MySQL Conference 2007 would remember active community member Solomon Chang. In fact, if you’ve read The MySQL 5.1 Cluster DBA Certification Guide, you’d also recognise the name.

Solomon went up on stage to entertain us with an Irish ballad. He used to be involved with an Irish woman, and has got the skills to mimic the accent really well, and make funny tunes. Solomon won a Neuros OSD for his efforts.

Technorati Tags: dan kegel, zumastor, mod_ndb, j.d. duncan, mysql cluster, apache, solomon chang

I’ve been seriously swamped in these last few weeks. Relocating (from Melbourne to Kuala Lumpur) has been interesting. Not to mention that all the work that’s still around…

I should mention that I am now Sun, having signed all paperwork a few weeks back. It just dawned on me when I picked up my ID card today from the Sun KL offices. No email address yet, but our @mysql.com addresses will continue to work (they’re on my business cards).

Which brings me to the fact that I am also sporting new business cards (no direct-line number, yet – still waiting on its creation), and they have an interesting logo on the back!

MySQL/Sun logo

At the conference, if folk are still giving out “older” MySQL cards, keep them – they’re collector’s items now. Me? I’ll be bringing my new ones ;)

Technorati Tags: sun, mysql, logo

A session at the MySQL Conference 2008 that I’d have loved to attend, would have been the Adopting and Adapting OSS at Shinsei Bank. As a case study, Shinsei Bank in Japan is a great MySQL customer and use case – they’re a bank. A pretty large bank…

Sadly, the session has been cancelled. Never fear, because at 4.25pm on Wednesday, the 16th of April 2008, there are seven other great sessions.

If you’re interested in web security, then look no further than Eli White’s talk titled Help, My Website Has Been Hacked! Now What? Eli works at Digg, and might have some invaluable practical advice for you.

If you’re more the systems administrator, you have to look at Using MySQL Cluster in a High Volume Email Environment by James Blair and Paul Fisher (both from the UC Berkeley). Learn how to configure Exim to use MySQL, or learn how to get Postgrey working with MySQL, and a whole lot more. I think this could be a highly interesting talk to be at (I’m sure the UC Berkeley mail system, like any other university, is honking huge).

Need to squeeze MySQL? Best way to do so is to benchmark and monitor the server. Tom Hanlon has Part 1 of his talk, titled Benchmarking and Monitoring: Tools of the Trade. Talks with the words “performance” or “benchmarking” tend to usually be standing-room only crowds… Be warned :)

While Falcon and InnoDB are different storage engines, and have different end goals, if you’re currently an InnoDB user, thinking about Falcon, you want to attend Falcon for InnoDB users by Kevin Lewis (Falcon Team Lead) and Ann Harrison. Should prove to be very interesting, and I’m sure Jim Starkey (father of Falcon) will be nice and up-in-the-front of the audience…

Everyone’s screaming about Web 2.0 now… Patrick Galbraith, a member of the MySQL Alumni, decided to focus on Web 2.0 (Grazr) rather than just database code (Perl DBI, FEDERATED, mysqlslap, etc.). In Grazr: Lessons Learned Building a Web 2.0 Application Using MySQL, Patrick and colleague Michael Kowalchik tell you how MySQL scales in the startup environment, using replication, many character sets, and so on.

There’s 5/7 talks that I’ve recommended you attend. How does one split oneself? As homework, go read the schedule to find out about the two other great talks (if you use Phorum, there’s one you need to be at too).

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqluc, mysqluc2008, mysqluc08, santa clara, mysql conference & expo, shinsei bank, web securite, eli white, digg, mysql cluster, email, exim, uc berkeley, benchmarking, monitoring, falcon, innodb, web 2.0

If you haven’t already signed up to attend the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, you know you’re clearly missing out. Most tutorials in the conference have sold out, so I suggest getting to it as soon as possible. Remember, that all speakers have access to a 20% discount code, so email me if you’d like one.

Igor Babaev, is speaking on Wednesday, 16/04/2008, at 2pm, on Batched Key Access: a Significant Speed-up for Join Queries. To whet your appetite, there are also Batched Key Access Software Previews available now!

So what is Batched Key Access (BKA)? Its a new advanced technique to execute queries with multi-way join operations. The idea behind it is to accumulate several keys in a buffer, then only access the joined table, possibly changing the order of lookups, to optimise the sequence of disk seeks. Used with the NDB Cluster storage engine, it helps minimise the number of round-trips between the server and cluster nodes.

If you’re after the nitty-gritty technical details behind the BKA Join, look no further than reading WL#2771. If you’d like to try it out, there are binaries for Solaris, Linux and Windows available at the software previews page. If you need to know more, don’t miss Igor’s talk next Wednesday, on the 16/04/2008 at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008!

Technorati Tags: mysql, mysqluc, mysqluc2008, mysqluc08, santa clara, mysql conference & expo, batched key access, bka, igor babaev, bka join, join, software previews, bka previews

MySQL has till the 18th to review all the student applications we’ve had for the Google Summer of Code 2008.

We’ve had 48 applications (it was 49 before one withdrew), up from the 35 that we had last year – growth! Currently, we also have 3 non-MySQL’ers being mentors (this is expected to grow), and we’ve also invited the phpMyAdmin team to mentor folk with their projects in mind, as its a very popular web-based UI.

What really is interesting is that out of the 48 applications, 13 already have owners wanting them! That’s 13 mentors, ready to go with the early applicants, and this can only mean good news (i.e. more to come).

Let’s hope that Google provides us more than our previous 10 slots, as in the early stages, we already have a 27% approval rating of students and their projects. Interesting times ahead.

Technorati Tags: gsoc, gsoc2008, mysql, google, summer of code