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

1. Guy Kawasaki - Don?t let the bozos grind you down.
   • Boy, the bozos have ground me down this week. I slept for 16 hrs today, the first day of solid rest in 3 weeks.
2. Paul Tuckfield - YouTube and his various caching tip insights.
   • I’ve seen the promising results of Paul Tuckfield’s comment of pre-fetching for Replication written recently by Farhan.
3. …

Jonathon Coombes recently blogged in MySQL Cluster Certified that he passed the MySQL Cluster DBA 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 graph)”. This …

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, 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 PROFILE, and 5.0.33 so I have …

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. Iwould wake up, and in my mail …

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

…

“The web is broken you can all go home now.”

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? …

?What ever advice you got, keep it to yourself, your not the target market.”

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.