The MySQL Connect conference is only a couple of weeks away, with MySQL engineers, support teams, consultants and community aces busy putting the final touches to their talks.

There will be many exciting new announcements and sharing of best practices at the conference, covering the range of MySQL technologies.

MySQL Cluster (http://www.mysql.com/products/cluster/) will a big part of this, so I wanted to share some key sessions for those of you who plan on attending, as well as some resources for those who are not lucky enough to be able to make the trip, but who can't afford to miss the key news. Of course, this is no substitute to actually being there….and the good news is that

Almost two weeks ago, I encouraged GlassFish users who need load-balanced JDBC connections to MySQL Cluster (or master-master replicated MySQL Server) to set the loadBalanceValidateConnectionOnSwapServer property to true in order to help ensure the connection chosen at re-balance is still usable.  That advice triggered finding a bug (14563127) which will cause the following Exception message:

No operations allowed after connection closed. Connection closed after inability to pick valid new connection during fail-over.

If you implemented the loadBalanceValidateConnectionOnSwapServer property and are seeing the above error message, updating your driver to the

Members of the MySQL Support Team wear a number of different hats here at Oracle.  Obviously, our top priority is to provide amazing technical support that makes customers rave (http://www.mysql.com/support/quotes.html" target="_blank).  We also have a team dedicated to processing bug reports from the MySQL Community.  Some of us are active bloggers or assist on mailing lists or forums, while others find other ways to contribute to the MySQL Community.  We help out with QA and product planning, write

Having supported a number of successful load-balanced JDBC applications using MySQL Cluster and MySQL Connector/J over the years, I’ve found a few problems that are unique to specific Java app servers.  A recent customer inquiry reminded me of a GlassFish-specific issue, and the Connector/J connection property we introduced to help solve it.  I thought it might be useful to document this here for any GlassFish users looking to deploy a load-balanced JDBC application with MySQL (Cluster or multi-master replication).

If you’re entirely new to the load-balancing functionality in MySQL Connector/J, you may want to review some earlier

With its distributed, shared-nothing, real-time design, MySQL Cluster (http://www.mysql.com/products/cluster/) has attracted a lot of attention from developers who need to scale both read and write traffic with ultra-low latency and fault-tolerance, using commodity hardware. With many proven deployments (http://www.mysql.com/customers/cluster/) in web, gaming, telecoms and mobile use-cases, MySQL Cluster is certainly able to meet these sorts of requirements.

But, as a distributed database, developers do need to think a little differently about data access patterns along with schema and query optimisations in order to get the best possible performance.

Sharing best practices developed by working with MySQL Cluster's largest users, we recently ran a Performance Essentials webinar

Introduction

Attracting over 2m subscribers in just 4 months and growing by 30,000 new users per day, Playful Play needed a database that was able to

The MySQL Cluster engineering team recently ran a live webinar, available now on-demand (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-716.html) demonstrating the ClusterJ and ClusterJPA NoSQL APIs for MySQL Cluster (http://www.mysql.com/products/cluster/), and how these can be used in building real-time, high scale Java-based services that require continuous availability.

Attendees asked a number of great questions during the webinar, and I thought it would be useful to share those here, so others are also able to learn more about the Java NoSQL APIs.

First, a little bit about why we developed these APIs and why they are interesting to Java developers.

ClusterJ and Cluster JPA

ClusterJ is a Java interface to MySQL Cluster that provides either a static or dynamic domain object model, similar to the data model used

Summary (aka TL/DR):

Support for Foreign Key constraints has been one of the most requested feature enhancements for MySQL Cluster

In my previous blog post, I discussed the enhanced performance and scalability delivered by extensions to the multi-threaded data

Summary

The scalability enhancements delivered by extensions to multi-threaded data nodes enables MySQL Cluster 7.2 (http://mysql.com/products/cluster/) to deliver over 8x higher

I’m excited to attend the MySQL Innovation Day at Oracle headquarters in Redwood Shores next Tuesday. There are some great sessions planned on MySQL advances, including:

• InnoDB online operations
• Global transaction IDs for replication and failover
• NoSQL interfaces to InnoDB and NDB
• PERFORMANCE_SCHEMA improvements
• Optimizer enhancements

This is a great opportunity for MySQL users to get details straight from MySQL developers on upcoming features.  While the focus is entirely on what is being done in Engineering to drive MySQL forward, I’ll be around to chat about MySQL Support at the community reception in the afternoon.  If you’re a MySQL Support user, or just interested in learning more about the value MySQL Support can offer

Following the release of MySQL Cluster 7.2 (http://mysql.com/products/cluster/), the Engineering has been busy publishing a range of new performance benchmarks