After looking through my raw files, the audio for the Database Normalization session at the MySQL UC2006 was missing. In addition I never managed a recording of the Sakila session due to the laptop crash.

All is not lost, interested viewers can see the Normalization session from PHP Quebec 2005 and my Rough Version of the Sakila session as subsitiutes.

I have finished the rendering on the Managing Hierarchical Data With MySQL session:

http://www.openwin.org/mike/video/hierarchy2006/

Requires Flash

On top of everything else I saw at the MySQL UC, I saw enough snazzy digital SLRs to make me green with envy (curse you Stewart, Mike, George, Colin, Jeremy and Julian!)

So, I decided to whip up a way out-there camera wishlist to rule them all! I may not actually have any of this, but when some generous millionaire buys it all for me I shall have the mightiest setup of all at the next uc!

Ok so it is just an excuse to play with the wishlist plugin for wordpress.

This post recorded mid-day on Friday.

The MySQL User conference has ended and I find myself waiting for my flight home — a good time to gather thoughts.

I personally think the conference was a great success. We had over 1500 attendees and the feedback I heard on the conference was very positive. I did hear a few asking for the sessions to be longer than 45 minutes and I do agree that 45 minutes can be a bit cramped, especially for a speaker who is re-using a session previously delivered in a longer block, but overall the response was great.

I had three sessions this year, and those sessions seemed well received by the attendees I spoke to. I am *very* glad that I backed up my slides to a keychain drive and ghosted my drives before leaving as it made the crashing of my laptop an annoyance rather than an unmitigated disaster. I worry that the

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Update: High Res Versions at http://www.openwin.org/mike/wordpress/wp-gallery2.php?g2_view=core.ShowItem&g2_itemId=1198

This year there was a nice little bonus, Julian Cash was on hand to take photos of the staff with a proper studio setup. I’ve seen some of his work before and liked it, and was looking forward to a session. When the photo sessions were announced, we were asked to bring a prop that represented ourselves or our work or personality. I actually forgot about the prop requirement but went for a session on the way to my Hierarchy talk and walked in carrying a stack of books to give away. Julian took one look and pronounced ‘Great Prop!’ upon seeing my stack of books. It was not

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Mixi is a massive social networking site in Japan, nice user interface demo.

Began in late 2003 with 10,000 users and 600K pageviews a day. As it became clear that the site was viral, the question became how to scale out before getting overwhelmed.

In the first year they went from 600 users to 210,000 users.

2,000,000 users in the second year.

Now 3.7 million users, with 15,000 new users per day. Japan has 86.7 million users.

Site has 70% active users (logging in at least every 72 hours). Average user spends 3 hours 20 minutes on mixi a week. 35th on Alexa worldwide, 3rd in Japan.

Mixi now gets more traffic than Amazon Japan.

Mixi uses LAMP (perl), memcache, squid. Fedora for Linux.

Requests go mod_proxy to mod_perl, then either memcache or a set of MySQL servers divided by blogs, messages and other.

Using more

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I’ve finished my last of three sessions, finally getting through my hierarchies session. With the laptop failure, speaking just was not as enjoyable this year as in previous years when there were no such concerns to distract me from giving the audience a good session.

The Hierarchies session seemed well received, with the room packed and audience members up against the back wall. I do wish I had not been opposite the Second Life session, as I was quite interested in how they scale.

Materials

Managing Hierarchies

Sakila Sample Database -

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As I mentioned previously, I’ll be reporting on the conference swag along with the sessions at this year’s MySQL User Conference.

The first candidate? The SCO Giant Pen

Check it out!

I love our IT guys. One call to the Cupertino office and one of the IT guys drove to the conference center with the discs needed to reinstall Windows and Office.

I’m now getting everything patched and ready to deliver my session on Managing Hierarchical Data. Sadly there is no recording of the Sakila session because I had to deliver it on a conference-provided PC.

Lessons learned:

Do not sit near high voltage lines and work on your laptop. The only explanation I have for the issues is that I sat near a thick power cable for the lights during the keynote, perhaps it was not well shielded and corrupted files.

Keep your slides in at least three places. When I left I copied my slides from my desktop to my laptop and also to a keychain drive. When my laptop failed I was annoyed but did not panic because I was able to simply insert my keychain into the

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Just a warning to everyone that I will not be posting many blog entries from the UC today, my laptop is suffering from an unknown issue that I need to diagnose and repair before I can do any work from it.

On the bright side there is a great blogger contingent here this year and there is plenty of content to go around.

Session attendees: I will get content online as soon as I can.

Session by Laura Thomson, OmniTI. Laura is author of a number of popular PHP and MySQL books.

Session will be on security at the developer level and is written from a programmer’s perspective.

Many developers plug along without any knowledge that they have security problems, security awareness is a relatively new thing. This session is not about guru-level knowledge, it is about developer-level practices.

MySQL Security Basics

• Do not run your mysqld as the unix root user. Run it as a purpose-created user.Do not use the purpose-created user for anything else. MySQL root user is not related to the Unix root user.
• Set permissions on DB data files directory so that only mysqld user can access them.
• Disable symlinks to tables with –skip-symbolic-links unless

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For those who can’t wait for next week or who won’t be at the UC, I’m posting a flash recording of a rough practice run of my Sakila DB session that I will deliver next week. I wanted to get a feel for duration without audience questions or closing activities. I came in at 30 minutes so I am comfortable that with audience questions it should be good.

Feedback is of course appreciated.

See it at http://www.openwin.org/mike/video/sakila.html

So, here’s the rough plan of what I will attend next week:

Monday AM:

Secure Your PHP and MySQL Web Applications, Laura Thomson

Monday PM:

Data Warehousing with MySQL, John Paul Ashenfelter

Tuesday AM:

Welcome!, Arjen Lentz

State of the Dolphin, Kaj Arnö, David Axmark, Michael (Monty) Widenius

Introduction to Database Normalization and Joins,

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I leave for the MySQL User Conference this Saturday. In the meantime, I’m working on final preparation. This involves things like tweaking my slides, configuring my laptop, packing, getting a haircut, and all the little things you need to do before attending a conference for a week.

Tweaking my Slides - Going over my slides, doing test deliveries to check time and content. Once I have them how I want them I push them online so attendees can follow along. Tweaking happens even this late into things because I can be a bit of a perfectionist with the slides (most slides even have a good number of notes).

Configuring my Laptop - Because I work from the desktop when at home, I take some time to make sure the laptop has all updates and a good defrag before I head out. I also ensure that my slides are on the laptop and that its desktop is clean so attendees

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Just in case the HypnoToad did not convince you to attend my sessions at next weeks’s conference, I’ll up the ante.

Thanks to Apress and O’Reilly I’ll be giving away several MySQL related books at each session.

There, now you have to come. And of course watch this space for session notes.

Well, after consulting with licensing guru Zak Greant and talking to one of the official powers that be at MySQL, I now have a name and a license for the new sample database.

The name? Sakila. Yup, no issues with using the name I have been using so far, which is a good thing.

The license? The new BSD license. This should make it as easy as possible for authors to use it in their books and articles without any licensing concerns at all.

I’m trying to clean up a bug I found and flesh out the docs a bit more, I hope to post what could be considered a release candidate tomorrow.

And remember, come to the session on Sakila at the MySQL UC.

(Click to be Controlled)

The hypnotoad commands you to attend my sessions at the MySQL User Conference. All Glory to the HypnoToad!

• Introduction to Database Normalization and Joins
• Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL
• MySQL 5 Applied: The Sakila Sample Database

At last year’s MySQL User Conference I got the idea that it might be fun to create a web site that cataloged the various swag that one receives at such events and I registered www.swagreport.com while the idea was fresh in my mind. Well, I finally got around to loading up Wordpress and getting something started.

So, this year you can look forward to not only knowing about at the sessions I attend, but you can also keep up with the swag.

Enjoy

P.S. Anyone else attending conferences who would like to document their swag let me know and I will get you added as an author.

One nice thing about speaking at the User’s Conference is that you get admission not only to the conference, but also to the Monday tutorial sessions.

This year I plan to attend two tutorial sessions:

Secure Your PHP and MySQL Web Applications

This one is delivered by Laura Thomson, whose writing and sessions I always love, can’t miss this one.

Data Warehousing with MySQL

John Paul Ashenfelter is a cool guy who really knows his stuff, I missed this session last year and don’t plan to miss it again.

As usual, you can expect a flurry of notes come conference time.

There are four .NET specific sessions at the MySQL User Conference this year:

Tuesday, April 25th, 2006

Creating .Net Applications with Linux and MySQL
Matt Lord, Support Engineer, MySQL AB

MySQL and Windows: Playing Well Together
Reggie Burnett, Software Developer, MySQL AB

Wednesday, April 26th, 2006

MySQL Connector/Net: Work the Way You Want To!

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I was browsing through the session grid for the MySQL User Conference when I cam across a session titled My Second Life Runs on MySQL: War Stories from the Metaverse:

Second Life is a 3D online world where the users call the shots; from creating simple objects to writing complex distributed programs, they build and do pretty much whatever they feel like. And what they feel like doing is often something we never predicted.

This talk will cover the evolution of Second Life’s database architecture over the past three years, as they’ve gone from a handful of users to tens of thousands. Wilkes will discuss the biggest hurdles they’ve overcome along the way, and give an overview of where they plan to go over the next few

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If you can’t get a discount to the registration fees for the MySQL UC, you are either waiting too long or not trying hard enough.

First off, there’s the $200 early registration discount that ends March 6, then there are the various other discounts:

Academic Instructor discount 50% off with proof of full time academic instructor status on organization letterhead, or copy of faculty ID. Fax to (707) 829-1342. Please use mys06ac in the discount field. Academic Staff discount 25% off with proof of full time academic employment status on organization letterhead or copy of faculty ID. Fax to (707) 829-1342. Please use mys06sa in discount field. Alumni discount Have you been a paid attendee at a previous O’Reilly conference? If so, you are eligible for a 15% alumni discount. Please email us at

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Well, it's official. I've been accepted for at least two sessions at the 2006 MySQL User Conference.

Get ready to register and you could be watching:

Managing Hierarchical Data in MySQL
The Sakila Sample Database

Which of course means I need to get the Sakila sample DB released *soon* so that I can tweak it before the conference gets too close.

I'm looking forward to this year's conference, every year is bigger and better than the last.

Thanks to all those who have provided feedback on my session ideas so far.

I have another session proposal that I would appreciate feedback on at:

http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/presentations/the-sakila-sample-database-proposal/

This one discusses the new MySQL Sakila sample database, how to use it, and how it was implemented.

I have another MySQL UC2006 session proposal I am working on at http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/presentations/securing-a-mysql-server-in-12-easy-steps-proposal/

Any input would be appreciated.

I'm working on some session proposals for the 2006 MySQL User Conference, and I have the first one pretty fleshed out. If you have a minute please click the following link and provide some feedback for the proposal: is it a session you would attend? Is there any information you think is missing, topics you would like to see?

Thanks

http://www.openwin.org/mike/index.php/presentations/documentation-at-mysql-ab/

Well, we are getting very close indeed to a production release of MySQL 5. Today MySQL is releasing MySQL 5.0.13, a Release Candidate (formerly known as Gamma) version.

You can read all about it at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_959.html (http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/news/article_959.html), but here's the feature highlights:

The new ANSI SQL features include:

• Views (both read-only and updatable views)
• Stored Procedures and Stored Functions, using the SQL:2003 syntax, which is also used by IBM's DB2
• Triggers (row-level)
• Server-side cursors (read-only, non-scrolling)

Implementing ANSI SQL standard ways of using existing MySQL features means there will be fewer

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Well, it looks like preparation for the 2006 MySQL User's Conference and Expo is underway, with the http://www.mysqluc.com/ site updated to reflect the 2006 conference.

What we can discern so far is that the theme is this:

Discover. Connect. Succeed. Scale Your Business with MySQL

The dates will be April 24-27, 2006, and the conference is going back to last year's location is Santa Clara, California.

The Call for Participation is open till November 7, and I am starting to brainstorm some sessions. This will be my fourth MySQL User's conference, and I want to try some new content. In 2003 I spoke on VB development with MySQL, in 2004 I spoke on Migrating Access and SQL Server data to MySQL, and in 2005 I spoke on Migrating Access and SQL Server

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