Way back on Monday (at the MySQL Conference and Expo), I gave a full day tutorial on MySQL Cluster (http://www.mysql.com/cluster). I awoke early in the morning to a “oh ha ha” URL in an IM; but no, it wasn’t jetlag playing tricks with me. Luckily, this didn’t take much (if anything) away from the purpose of the day: teaching people about NDB.

Distracting-and-this-time-really-annoying-thing-of-the-day-2: It seems that O’Reilly had cut back on power this year, and there were no power boards in the room. A full day interactive tutorial, and nowhere to plug in laptops. Hrrm.. Luckily, having over the many years I’ve been speaking at

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Busy day again: today the Percona conference joined the regular schedule, so more stuff to attend!

What did I attend?

Maria In Depth, Monty Widenius, MontyProgram AB (Percona conference): Monty was discussing Maria performance-wise as opposed to his later session which was feature-wise). He did delve just a little bit into the decision making issues in MySQL and in his new company. He also spoke (and I believe this took the most weight of the session, even if not the most time) of his new company, what he wants to achieve and how.

Build Your Own MySQL Time Machine, (Sun Microsystems), Mats Kindahl (Sun Microsystems). A web based utility for creating online backups and performing a point in time restoration was presented. The system is based on MySQL 6.0’s new backup

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I caught up with Marc Delisle (we have a relatively old interview with him on the MySQL DevZone) recently, and got him to give us an introduction to phpMyAdmin, the several books he’s written, and how the project gets new features from the Google Summer of Code. What’s really impressive? They continue winning awards (Marc won one from MySQL in 2009 as well!), and have a user base of nearly 18.5 million (this is downloads — not just users, considering how common it is in shared hosting environments). Watch the video for more.

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I caught up with Zach Skyles Owens, a PHP Evangelist at Microsoft. If you missed the embed, watch the video. I have some sparse notes below.

I learned some new things:

• Microsoft spends time working with the PHP community
• They are porting applications to work with an SQL Server backend
• They are ensuring that the language should “just work”, with the IIS and SQL Server stack. This is quite different from the usual AMP (Apache = server, MySQL = database, PHP = language) stack that we’re quite accustomed to.
• There is a Microsoft Web Platform, and there’s a

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Tuesday: day of the announcements and of numerous sessions. Busy day!

The day started with the State of the Dolphin by Karen Padir (Sun Microsystems). She threw in some announcement, among which were MySQL 5.4, MySQL Cluster 7.0, better release cycles (matching the Enterprise), better code import from the community. Anyway, there is already a lot of talk about that.

Later on, This is Not a Web App: The Evolution of a MySQL Deployment at Google, Mark Callaghan (Google) was a very interesting session, in which Mark described the needs for an enterprise database Google and (mysterious) others had, and the steps taken to modify MySQL in this direction. Mark explained the build & test process they use at

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At today's keynote by Mark Callaghan one of the new options he talked about are table change logs. He mentioned they might be of use to external applications, like Flexviews, which he mentioned but not directly. He asked if the guy who wrote it was in the audience, so I got to wave my hand and yell 'Flexviews!'.

I caught up with Mark at the Facebook party this evening. I had a chance to talk to him not only about the change logs, but also about Kickfire and the SQL chip. He asked me what I thought about working at Kickfire and I smiled and said I love it. I think I said "I've never been able to join a billion row table to a hundred million row table, sort, group and get results back in less than a minute" and I'm sure the smile never left my face.

As far as the table change logs, he verified:

• The global transaction id will be stored in the table


• OLD

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OK. That was a surprise!

In retrospective, there have been some hints along the way. But I don’t get hints. I’m the kind of man who, when watching a complicated movie, needs his girlfriend to explain him what goes on.

I was utterly astonished and honored to find my name on the screen, and have me being one of three people called to accept the MySQL Community Award for 2009.

Let me tell you: it is heavy! And it doesn’t fit in my bag, either, so I hang around carrying this big heavy box in both hands…

I guess this calls for a short Oscar speech, a written one.

My friends and neighbors have heard me say the word “community” quite a lot lately. I was mentioning to them how wild it is. I’ve been working with open source for some 10 years, and have been using MySQL in particular for 9 years now.

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I had the pleasure of having a quick video interview with Chuck Hagenbuch and Leigh Heyman, both from Blue State Digital, and people that helped run the my.barackobama.com campaign. They’re giving the closing keynote at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 alongside three engineers from Google, and its going to be great.

If you missed the embed, here’s the video. Don’t forget to see them, at their closing keynote titled Database We Can Believe In: Stories from the Front Lines (and Server Rooms) of Barack Obama’s Online Presidential Campaign.

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All the sessions for all the MySQL Camp days can be seen at, but here is today’s schedule in a nutshell (all sessions in Bayshore, on the mezzanine level of the hotel):

Tuesday 10:50 am - 11:35 pm

Matt Yonkovit (Sun/MySQL, Waffle Grid, Big DBA Head, [blog]) presents Learning from others’ MySQL Performance Mistakes. Matt has spent the last couple of years helping customers who are all dealing with the same MySQL related problems over and over again. During this session he will give you some of the most common issues in MySQL deployments he sees on a day to day basis, and how to fix or avoid them. These include:

* More is not always better
* Text Fields are not cool
* Data Size does matter
* Fun with Data Conversions
* Its all about IO
* Left join love
* Self Induced

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[See http://forge.mysql.com/wiki/MySQLConf2009MondayNotes]

Monday: day of tutorials. Plenty of interesting tutorials on the Conference itself, plus a session with Mark Callaghan - it was hard to choose. I settled for two tutorials, which turned out to be three.

Practical MySQL Plugin Development: As a C/C++/Java developer, I am very interested in the plugin API. I have used UDF before, and these turned out to be extremely helpful, and solved me a lot of headache. With the new plugin API I was expecting to learn how to properly write INFORMATION_SCHEMA tables, functions and engines.

Wasn’t it possible to learn all this on the web? Sure, but this presentation was delivered by Roland Bouman and

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Today, for me is day 1 of the MySQL Confernece & Expo 2009. It seems to be going pretty well - and its only 2.45pm.

If you follow Planet MySQL, or happen to just have random conversations with people, the main buzz for the day is “Oracle buying Sun”. But let me not bore you with that. I just want to log some of my interesting conversations.

Over lunch I had a good discussion with users of MySQL, and one potential user of MySQL (his company uses Oracle, MS SQL Server, Sybase, and are now looking at MySQL). We talked about quite a number of things:

• The documentation (which I, and the rest of the MySQL users use) seems to not be complete for an Oracle person. Why? It seems we’re missing out on things like the models. We lack enough theory. People would like to “see” (visually) what the InnoDB

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oracle!

While everyone is sleeping and preparing for four busy days of MySQL Conference, here, in Santa Clara – I started getting SMSes asking if I already learnt PL/SQL, and here, I’m jetlagged, and finding out that I work for another company.

If they don’t kill MySQL, InnoDB and MySQL will finally be together.

If they kill MySQL, I’ll have to look for a job. Will anyone use MySQL then, or will I have to fall back to more generic non-MySQL work I’ve been doing for my hobby projects, teeeheeee.

And for now, I see 6AM faces showing up, and greeting Oracle buddies – some jetlagged, some just early birds.

While Zack covered the storage engine and appliances sessions pretty well, I feel he’s missed out on a few important new engines (or engine related talks):

• DDEngine will be represented, speaking about Automated data versioning with a storage engine
• Long time MySQL Community Member Beat Vontobel, will be presenting on the SeqEngine, in Solving Common SQL Problems with the SeqEngine
• Kazuho Oku, from Cybozu Labs in Japan, will be talking about Q4M, a queuing engine for MySQL. Mixi.jp uses it for their Twitter like service,

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This is a “first-timer’s” guide to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009. It is by no means official, but are things I think are somewhat important. Its broken down into sections: What days to attend, What to bring, Laptop, Blogging, Twittering, etc…, Be Social, The Attendee Directory, Evenings, and Did I miss something? Its long, but do bear with me — its just some friendly advice after attending this conference for quite the number of years.

What days to attend

The conference runs from Monday to Thursday. Monday is tutorial day, and Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are days where you have the conference proper.

Tuesday and Wednesday are days the Expo Hall is open. Go there, visit the place, learn about the ecosystem, and probably walk away with goodies

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I’m very proud to share with you a few things: Sheeri K. Cabral, Nick Westerlund, Paul Vallée, Peter Ling, and I (Augusto Bott) will be in Santa Clara, CA for the MySQL Conference and Expo, MySQL Camp, and the Percona Performance Conference, next week.

Nick and I will be presenting a session called Proactive Operational Measures on the Percona Conference, and another session called 8 Rules for

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Coming to the Hyatt Santa Clara, for the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009? Beware, that this year, the in-room Internet just isn’t so peachy.

When you check in, there’s this option of a “Business Plan” that Hyatt sells you - USD$30, for free wired in-room Internet (a $12.95/day value), free breakfast (this includes 15% gratuity, so a $20+ value), a free bottle of water (yes, otherwise its $3.95), and all the local and long distance calls in the US that you’ll need (depending on what you do, YMMV). It seemed like a good deal.

Now, for the benefit of others, which has taken about four days for me to fix. When you’re on this plan, the Hyatt rebates your Internet within an hour or so of you signing up for the deal. This tells their ISP that you’re now not

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Today I spoke with Farhan “Frank” Mashraqi, former Fotolog DBA, now working at a startup, NetEdge, working on social analytics. He’s talking about the two sessions he’s giving next week at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009, as well as the benefits of being at the MySQL Conference & Expo.

He’s giving two talks:

Hadoop and MySQL: Friends with Benefits in where he will tell you about how you can combine data sets and queries, some of which run on Hadoop, and others which run on MySQL, but eventually probably end up in MySQL (he

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