Today is the first day at the conference (aside from the tutorials, which were yesterday). Here’s what I went to:

New Subquery Optimizations in 6.0

By Sergey Petrunia. This was a similar session to one I went to last year. MySQL has a few cases where subqueries are badly optimized, and this session went into the details of how this is being addressed in MySQL 6.0. There are several new optimization techniques for all types of subqueries, such as inside-out subqueries, materialization, and converting to joins. The optimizations apply to scalar subqueries and subqueries in the FROM clause. Performance results are very good, depending on which data you choose to illustrate. The overall point is that the worst-case subquery nastiness should be resolved. I’m speaking of WHERE NOT IN(SELECT…) and friends. It remains to be seen how this shakes out as 6.0 matures, and what edge cases will pop up.

The Lost Art Of the Self …

This year’s conference has a great lineup. As usual, with 8 sessions concurrently, it’s impossible to pick which ones I want to see. However, I did learn a few things from last year’s conference, which I think will help me get more out of it this time.

Number one rule: not all sessions are created equal. I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure that when you see “How Product X Will Scale Your Databases” presented by a person from Company X, you can reasonably suspect that Company X is paying for this privilege, and it’s not really a session as much as a product demo. These sessions were not reviewed and voted on by the community (I know, because I was one of the community members who were asked to review and vote on proposals. Maybe I’m being a whistle-blower and won’t get this honor next year as a result…)

Number two rule: if the description is vague, or if it sounds like regurgitation, I’m skeptical. For …

I'll be attending the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo again this year, and I'm looking forward to hearing some great sessions, meeting new and old friends, and giving sessions myself. As a proposal reviewer, I looked at and voted on 250+ proposals for sessions and tutorials for this conference. There are going to be some great sessions and tutorials.

I'm on the select board of elite people who were duped into reviewing proposals for the upcoming MySQL Conference and Expo 2008, and I'm here to tell you how to get your proposal accepted. Aside from bribing me with chocolate, that is.