Here’s a rundown of Thursday (day 3) of the MySQL Conference and Expo. This day’s sessions were much more interesting to me than Wednesday’s, and in fact I wanted to go to several of them in a single time slot a couple of times.

Inside the PBXT Storage Engine

This session was, as it sounds, a look at the internals of PBXT, a transactional storage engine for MySQL that has some interesting design techniques. I had been looking forward to this session for a while, and Paul McCullagh’s nice explanations with clear diagrams were a welcome aid to understanding how PBXT works. Unlike some of the other storage engines, PBXT is being developed in full daylight, with an emphasis on community involvement and input. (Indeed, I may be contributing to it myself, in order to make its monitoring and tuning capabilities second to none).

PBXT has not only a unique design, but a …

I know I’m a little late to the discussion, but Brian Aker posted a thought-provoking piece on the imminent death of MySQL replication to scale reads.  His premise is that memcached is so cool and scales so much better, that read replication scaling is going to become a think of the past.  Other MySQL community people, like Arjen and Farhan, chimed in too.

Now, I love memcached.  We use it as a vital layer in our datacenters, and we couldn’t live without it.  But it’s not a total solution to all …