… Ya se que estás piantao, piantao, piantao…

For my lastest blog, a review of the MySQL, NoSQL and Cloud Conference, I’ll continue to use the tango metaphor. Balada para un loco (ballad for a crazy one) is a Piazzola classic and explains what I think of Santiago Lertora from Binlogic for single handedly putting together this event; he had to be piantao (slang for ‘crazy’) to pursue his vision to kick start the Open Source database community in South America into becoming as active as it is in the US and Europe. He was able to gather some renowned speakers such as our own Martin Farach-Colton, Sheeri Cabral from Mozilla, Max Mether and Massimo Brignoli from SkySQL, Colin Charles from Monty Program, Alejandro Kojima from the MySQL team at Oracle, Oracle ACE director Ronald Bradford, and many more. Among the firms attending, some …

It’s with great pleasure that I announce that my friend and colleague, Francisco Bordenave, will be talking about MySQL Replication at 2:10pm on the 28th of June 2012. This is the 1st Latin American MySQL, NoSQL and Cloud Conference in Buenos Aires being held at the Hilton Hotel.
Replication is at the heart of many highly available MySQL installations. Francisco will be giving an introduction to replication, the fundamentals behind the feature and he will be disclosing some of his tips and tricks for monitoring and troubleshooting. He will also be talking about some of the awesome features that Oracle are releasing in the next major version, 5.6.

If you use replication for your product then this is one not to miss!

There are some other great talks going on this week at the conference. If I was at the conference I would be keen to see;

How …

Volver,
con la frente marchita,
las nieves del tiempo
platearon mi sien…

Martin’s blog (Mi Buenos Aires Querido) was named after a tango, so I decided to follow his lead. The 4 lines of the refrain make reference to someone returning to Buenos Aires after 20 years, now looking a little bit older. I moved to the US about 15 years ago and have returned many times to visit. However, I have never gone back to participate in an event like this with so many renowned speakers from the MySQL community. The list include many people with whom I have worked with over the past decade. …

Next week, a couple of us at Tokutek will be heading to Buenos Aires for the MySQL / MariaDB Conference & Expo LA. Gerry Narvaja actually grew up in Buenos Aires. My own family is Argentinian. I spent several years there as a child, and my childhood home in South Carolina was Argentinian in spirit: absolutely no English, and the only grits that entered my house were served with tomato sauce and called polenta!

As some of you get ready to visit Buenos Aires, maybe for the first time, I thought I’d share an abbreviated list of my favorite things to do.

First of all, make sure to watch the really fantastic con movie Nueve Reinas. Not only is it a great movie, but much of it takes place in the Hilton where the conference will be held.

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Modern file systems are well equipped to deal with large writes. One area that remains challenging however is to efficiently write out “microdata”, such as metadata and small portions of large files, while showing good I/O utilization when the data is read back. This challenge is evident with mount options like “noatime” which disables updating file access time on reads. This kind of solution avoids the problem altogether. Another approach, delayed allocation, is meant to coalesce small writes in memory as long as possible before writing it out to disk. Filesystems like ext4 and Btrfs use delayed allocation to make a best-effort at reducing fragmentation and random I/O.

Isn’t there a way to fundamentally solve filesystem fragmentation and random I/O?

This week, I’ll be speaking at HotStorage 2012 in Boston. My talk …

I’ll be attending this year’s US based Open Database Camp from June 8-10 in Charlotte, NC. The conference is co-located with SouthEast LinuxFest 2012.

It appears that OpenSQL Camp was renamed Open Database Camp since I see many database technologies listed on their site that do not use SQL as an access method. The final schedule of presentations shows lots of MySQL content for Friday. There is one session each for MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB on Saturday. Sunday is “unconference” style, hopefully we can get more variety in those sessions.

I love attending this type of conference because I learn how real-world users are implementing MySQL to meet their needs. It also gives me a chance to see some …

Do you want to closely follow what MySQL is doing around the globe? We've created a Lanyrd guide just for that. It's curated by the MySQL Community, Marketing, Presales and Product Management teams and with some other contributions too.
Tomorrow we'll host the MySQL Innovation Day (in streaming too) and MySQL Connect is also quickly approaching. If you'd like showcase your products and services to the MySQL Community you can take advantage of the various sponsorship opportunities.

Stay tuned for the latest and greatest updates from the MySQL team at Oracle and from our vibrant community!
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A big thanks goes out to everyone involved with the MySQL Connect Content Committee. We had a great response to the call for papers and realize that it took a considerable amount of time and effort to review the submitted sessions and BOFs. While Oracle employees aided with this effort, the MySQL Community deserves to be acknowledged for the time they took out of their busy schedules to help with our conference. Their input was invaluable to the support of the MySQL Community. Continued support such as this from the community is another reason that MySQL continues to be #1 open source database. We'll keep you posted as we finalize and publish the sessions, BoFs and HOLs for MySQL Connect.

Thanks to the following committee members:

MySQL Community:

• Ronald …

Why demos?

For as long as I can remember in my public speaking activities, I have always planned my presentations with some sort of live demo in it. I am always surprised when a conference venue asks me to provide my slides in advance, to be loaded in an anonymous computer with no chance of demos. I always turn down such offers, as I always want to provide a demo.

There have been times when technical or time constraints prevented me from demoing something, and in these cases I felt that the presentation was lacking a vital part. But I always try. I have even given demos during lightning talks, and those were the ones that made me feel really good.

I have given hundreds of presentations, and hundreds of demos, and as in every human activity, I have made plenty of mistakes. I believe I have learned some valuable lesson from my mistakes, and this article is my attempt at sharing the joy with wannabe presenters and also with …

Challenges of Big Databases with MySQL

Many database management tasks become difficult as you move from millions of rows and gigabytes of data to billions of rows and terabytes of data. Such tasks include ingesting data while maintaining indexes; changing schemas without downtime; and supporting connections, replication, and backup. For some scaling problems (connections and replication), MySQL is better than most of the competition. For others, such as indexing, schema changes, and backup, MySQL has typically been harder to use. Fortunately, the tasks MySQL does well are in its core, whereas the tasks that are more difficult can be solved with storage engine plug-ins.

This presentation discusses how MySQL’s storage engines have recently made dramatic progress in large …