I’ll be speaking at Surge again this year. This time, unlike last year’s talk, I’m tackling a very concrete topic: extracting scalability and performance metrics from TCP network traffic. It turns out that most things that communicate over TCP can be analyzed very elegantly just by capturing arrival and departure timestamps of packets, nothing more. I’ll show examples where different views on the same data pull out completely different insights about the application, even though we have no information about the application itself (okay, I actually know that it’s a MySQL database, and a lot about the actual database and workload, but I don’t need that in order to do what I’ll show you). It’s an amazingly powerful technique that I continue to find new ways to apply to real systems.

Take a …

This year I'll attend OSCON for the first time. I'll give two talks:

• PHP and MySQL - Recent Developments
  PHP’s MySQL support recently received many changes under the hood. PHP 5.3 introduced mysqlnd – the MySQL native driver which is a replacement for libmysql deeply bound into PHP. In this presentation you will learn what the PHP and MySQL development teams were up to. After starting with an introduction of the PHP-stack, demystifying things like mysqli, mysqlnd or PDO, this presentation will show you how to build mysqlnd plugins as PHP C extension and hooking into mysqlnd from PHP userland. It will also discuss existing plugins like a client side query cache or a module for doing read-write-splitting, both working transparently, without changes to your application.
• …

By popular request, here’s the PDF of the slides of this talk as presented in January 2011 in brisbane; it’s fairly self-explanatory. Note that it’s not really extensive “tuning”, it just fixes up a few things that are usually “wrong” in default installs, creating a more sane baseline. If you want to get to optimal correctness and more performance, other things do need to be done as well.

This week we have feedback from Percona Live in NYC last Thursday. We talk with:

Chander Kant of Zmanda, talking about the fact that Zmanda Backup Recovery now officially supports the Percona patched binary of MySQL.
Barry Leung of CafeMom.com who talked about all the stuff he'd learned during the day, including "How to use MySQL and DTrace on Linux" and the new mk-tcp-model.

Patrick Galbraith of BlueGecko talked about his talk, "The Building Blocks of Scaling: Drizzle/MySQL, Memcached, Sphinx, and Gearman", backups, FLUSH ENGINE ____ …

Two years ago I published a post entitled “things I wrote down during OSBC”. It tuned out to be surprisingly popular, so I decided to try the same formula again.

Just as was the case two years ago these are presented chronologically. I wrote down a lot more than this, to be clear, but these were the most quote-worthy things. Also, as in 2009, some of them confirm things we already think about commercial open source (or in some cases data management), others were interesting ways of expressing old ideas:

“The next generation of computing is being led by users, rather than vendors.”
Jim Whitehurst

“The value of open source has moved from commoditization to innovation.”
…

At Open Database Camp in Sardinia last week, there was a hackfest to try to get replication working from MySQL to MongoDB. In only 2 hours and 45 minutes, a small group of hackers did it! This week I interview Flavio Percoco, the MongoDB guru on the team, who talked about getting replication from MySQL to MongoDB working via Tungsten Replicator (which we talked about on last week's podcast).

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Next Monday, May 16, I will be hosting session at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco focused on NoSQL, NewSQL and Beyond.

The presentation covers our recently published report of the same name, and provides some additional context on the role of open source in driving innovation in distributed data management.

Specifically, the presentation looks at the evolving influence of open source in the database market and the context for the emergence of new database alternatives.

I’ll be walking through the six core drivers that have driven the development …

This week we talk about what's new in MySQL 5.6 and the return of labs.mysql.com. We also feature people's reactions to the 5.6 announcement and a special song by Solomon Chang (lyrics below).

Show notes:
If you want to see it for youreslf, there is a video from the O'Reilly Conference of Tomas Ulin's Keynote, "State of the Dolphin".

Olav Sandstå's blog post on index condition pushdown optimization.

…

I split my time last week between the IOUG’s Collaborate conference in Orlando, Florida and O’Reilly’s MySQL Conference & Expo in California. The contrast was stark. For me as a MySQLer, Collaborate was a dud. On the other hand, the MySQL conference O’Reilly puts on is superb. It is vital to MySQL as a project and as a community, and it follows that it’s vital to MySQL’s business success. Oracle needs to participate to make it a success in the future.

MySQL at Collaborate had good speakers and content, but no one there is interested in MySQL. MySQL is just from a different world — it is a curiosity at an Oracle conference. Also, as a speaker, sponsor, and attendee, Collaborate was a giant frustration. I can’t recommend it to anyone. (These comments do not reflect on the work that MySQL community members did in recruiting and organizing the MySQL content at the Collaborate conference.) In particular, the experience of …

The slides for my talks at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference and Expo are posted.

Related posts:

1. Videos and slides for MySQL Conference 2010
2. Slides for the innotop workshop at MySQL Conference and Expo 2007
3. Recap of CPOSC 2009, plus slides
4. I’ll be speaking at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference 2010
5. …