From the recent MySQL Conference a number of things resonate strongly almost daily with me. These included:

Jonathon Coombes recently blogged in MySQL Cluster Certified that he passed the MySQL Cluster DBA Certification (http://mysql.com/certification/) as was the first Australian. Lucky for him I passed the exam after my presentation on the second day of the conference. I guess us Australian’s are leading the world!

As Jonathon said it was rather hard, certainly more difficult then the other DBA exams but nothing for an experienced Cluster DBA.

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 rolled quickly into the second keynote Scaling MySQL at YouTube by Paul Tuckfield.

The introduction by Paul Tuckfield was; “What do I know about anything, I was just the DBA at PayPal, now I’m just the DBA at youTube. There are only 3 DBA’s at YouTube.”

This talk had a number of great performance points, with various caching situations. Very interesting.

Scaling MySQL at YouTube

Top Reasons for YouTube Scalability

The technology stack:

• Python
• Memcache
• MySQL Replication

Caching outside the database is huge.

It a display of numbers of hits per day it was said “I can neither confirm or deny the interpretation will work here (using an Alexa

In a community session yesterday at MySQL Conference 2007, I first heard about Dorsal Source. A collaboration between Solid DB and Proven Scaling that allows for community people to upload patches to MySQL (http://www.mysql.com), get it compiled across multiple platforms, and have a downloadable distribution available on H/W individual contributors will never have access to.

That’s a great idea. I also hope we get the opportunity to get compiling of patches into multiple versions, as well to get builds of a lot of patches together. Personally, I’m running 3 versions just to diagnose one problem. 5.0.36 with a custom binary change, 5.0.37 so I have SHOW

MySQL Conference 2007 Day 4 started early again at 8:20 am with PHP on Hormones by the father of PHP Ramus Lerdorf.

A very funny man, one of the best insightful talks of the conference (rather scary actually). Here are some opening comments.

• In his own words as Keynote speaker. “I’m here because I’m old”.
• Php 1 from 1994 started after seeing Mozilla in 1993. Because it was just me using it, I could change the language any time.
• In 2005 the code looks like this (in comparison on 1995) — I’m not sure if this is worth 10 years of development
• I wrote PHP to avoid programming
• It’s changed to be more OO because people expect that. Universities teach this.
• Hey, I was fixing bugs in my sleep.

MySQL: The Real Grid Database

Introduction

• Can’t work on performance problems until we solve the availability
• We want MySQL to fix our problems first.

The problem

• Deploy a DBMS for a workload with
  • too many queries
  • to many transactions
  • to much data

A well known solution

-use many replicas to scale read performance
-shard your data over many master to scale write performance
-sharding is easy, resharding is hard

- make it easy to run many severs
- unbretable aggregate perfomance

The grid database approach

• Deploy a large

Ramus Lerdorf — Father of PHP — MySQL Conference 2007

Here are some notes from the MySQL Server Roadmap session at the MySQL Conference 2007.

MySQL: Past and Future

• 2001: 3:23
• 2003: 4.0 UNION query Cache Embedded
• 2004: 41. Subqueries
• 2005: 5.0 Stored Procedures, Triggers, Views
• Now: 5.1.17 Partitioning, Events, Row-based replication
• 2007?: 6.0 Falcon, Performance, Conflict detection
• 2008?: 6.1 Online Backup, FK Constraints

2007 Timeline

• Q1: 5.1 Beta, 5.1 Telco Production Ready, Monitoring Service 1.1, MySQL 6.0 Alpha, Community GA
• Q2: MySQL 6.0 Beta, New Connectors GA
• Q3: 5.1 RC, 6.0 Beta, MS 2.0, Enterprise Dashboard beta
• Q4: 5.1 GA, 6.0 Beta

Where are we today?

• We are by fare

Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child UI Designer to bunch of suits - MySQL Conference 2007

I have just completed my presentation at the MySQL Conference 2007 on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

Not mentioned in my slides, but referenced during the presentation was what I consider the most important page to document from the MySQL Manual — 5.2.1. Option and Variable Reference

You can download a PDF copy of my presentation here.

Moving into the user sessions on the first day at MySQL Conference 2007, I attended Building a Vertical Search Engine in a Day.

Some of my notes for reference.

Web Crawling 101

• Injection List - What is it seed URL’s you are starting from
• Fetching the pages
• Parsing the content - words and links
• Updating the crawl DB
• Whitelist
• Blacklist
• Convergence — avoiding the honey pots
• Index
• Map-reduce — split a large problem into little pieces, process in parallel, then combine results

Focused content == vertical crawl

• 20 Billion Pages out there, a lot of junk
• Bread-first would take years and cost millions of lives

OPIC + Term

Our third keynote at MySQL Conference 2007 was titled Building the Ultimate Database Container with RHEL, MySQL, and Virtualization by Michael Evans.

The presentation was on Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child. His initial Quote was “Thinking Past Platforms: The Next Challenge for Linux”, By Doc Sears, 2007-04-16 http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000210

OLPC

• A Non profit idea from Nicholas Negroponte.
• Aim is to build & distribute inexpensive laptop systems to primary & secondary school students worldwide.
• Sell to young children in developing countries.

In summary at presentation to Red Hat

Without missing a beat at MySQL Conference 2007, we moved from Marten’s keynote to The Art of Innovation by Guy Kawasaki.

Extremely fun and entertaining. His 10 points.

1. Make Meaning

• “To change the world”
• To a VC, do not say “you want to make money”, that is understood. You will attract the wrong team.

2. Make Mantra

• Not a Mission statement (50-60 words long), but 2 or 3 words.
  • Wendy’s - “Healthy fast food”
  • Mike - “Authentic Athletic Performance”
  • FedEx - “Peace of Mind”
  • eBay - “Democratize commerce”
• Create a mantra

As I mentioned in MySQL Conference - Rewarding the Community, Paul McCullagh, the creator of the Community Transactional Storage Engine PBXT won the Community Code Contributor of the Year award.

A photo for Paul. Great work.

It’s an early start this morning at 8:20am at MySQL Conference 2007 with CEO Mårten Mickos keynote talk Welcome and State of MySQL AB.

Here are some of the key points that impressed on me.

“The Participatory & Disruptive spirit of the Dolphin.”.

Open Source disrupts inefficient models and produces new wealth.

Architecture of Participation.

• GPL and FOSS licenses
• Google
• del.ico.us

MySQL Architecture of Participation
You have the forge, the planet, community contributer program and many more.

Production of Amateurs

• You Tube
• Second Life
• Wikipedia

At MySQL Conference 2007, CEO Mårten Mickos in his opening keynote Welcome and State of MySQL AB rewarded the community. Those that contributed to “The best database in the world”.

2007 MySQL Applications of the Year
#1 in Online Video
#1 in 3G Mobile Entertainment
#1 in Creative Software

And the Winners- YouTube, Amp’d mobile, and Adobe

2007 MySQL Partners of the Year
#1 reseller of MySQL Enterprise to govt
#1 in MySQL Enterprise integration
#1 in Open Source

And the Winners - Carasoft, HP, and RedHat

2007 Community Members of the Year
Quality Contributor
Community Code Contributor
Community Advocate

And the Winners

Martin

If you were quick you may have noticed at the MySQL Conference 2007 keynote Welcome and State of MySQL AB talk this morning, Robin Schumacher in his quick demo of MySQL Monitoring & Advisory Service showed the MySQL Network Enterprise Dashboard, you would have noticed the MySQL Version 6.0.0-alpha-pb518.log

Did anybody else spot it?

It’s an early start this morning at 8:20am at MySQL Conference 2007 with CEO Mårten Mickos keynote talk Welcome and State of MySQL AB.

His spirit is evident with his opening slide “The Participatory & Disruptive spirit of the Dolphin.”. Stay tuned for more, it’s going to be a big day today.

My first tutorial today at MySQL Conference 2007 is Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling.

Basic Tenets

While not discussed, the premise is to Cache Everything. MemCache is a key component to any scalable system.

Lifetime of a scalable system

Using the analogy from a newborn child Jeremy stepped us through the categories Newborn, Toddler, Teenager, Late teens to 20s, Adult.

In Late teens to 20s, is where most systems die a slow death, he termed “the awkward stage”. This is where scalability is critical, and a meltdown for example can ruin you. Downtime is also just not acceptable for your user community.

When

The MySQL Conference has started. It will be a long week, still yet to prepare my own presentation for tomorrow. Old friendships already renewed, plenty of faces to names already, and we have yet to hit the first session.

Today is tutorial day, this morning I’m with Paul McCullagh Mr PBXT in Scaling and High Availablilty Architectures by Jeremy Cole and Eric Bergen of Proven Scaling

I’ll be speaking at the upcoming 2007 MySQL Conference & Expo (Why they dropped the word User, who knows), this time with Guy Harrison (Author of many books including MySQL Stored Procedures). We will be talking on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

Anyway, good friend Paul McCullagh, creator of PBXT will be also speaking on PrimeBase XT: Design and Implementation of a Transactional Storage Engine. He coined to me in an email “CU at the