What a busy week! Lots of MySQL 5.5 announcements that just happened to coincide with the MySQL Conference and Expo in Silicon Valley. Here are some highlights of the performance and scalability work that the InnoDB team was involved with.

A good prep for the week of news is the article Introduction to MySQL 5.5, which includes information about the major performance and scalability features. That article will lead you into the MySQL 5.5 manual for general features and the InnoDB 1.1 manual for performance & scalability info.

Then there were the conference presentations from InnoDB team members, which continued the twin themes of performance and scalability:

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Thanks to Brian Aker for including me in Wednesday night's Ignite presentation lineup at the MySQL User's Conference. My slides are now available for viewing and download.

I just announced our continuation of the Embedded InnoDB project under the name of HailDB. Check out the announcement over at http://www.haildb.com/.

HailDB is a relational database that is embeddable within applications. You embed HailDB by linking to a shared library and calling a clean and simple API. HailDB is a continuation of the Embedded InnoDB project. It is not itself a database server, but is a library implementing the storage layer. With the addition of the HailDB plugin to Drizzle you get a full SQL interface.

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Saw this interesting paper about highly concurrent programming methods and figured the word should be spread! It’s not new material but it’s a good read. See the full article here: http://www.usenix.org/events/hotos03/tech/full_papers/vonbehren/vonbehren_html/

“Highly concurrent applications such as Internet servers and transaction processing databases present a number of challenges to application designers. First, handling large numbers of concurrent tasks requires the use of scalable data structures. Second, these systems typically operate near maximum capacity, which creates resource contention and high sensitivity to scheduling decisions; overload must be handled with care to avoid thrashing. Finally, race conditions and subtle corner cases are common, which makes debugging and code maintenance difficult.

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Been at the MySQL conference the last few days, and I have to say, I’m really blown away by MySQL 5.5.4‘s improvements.  Last year I keynoted and I begged Oracle on stage to realize that MySQL and InnoDB under one roof represented opportunity.  It’s clear they heard the community – this is some serious progress, and right when we needed it.

Jeremy Zawodny’s blog post covers most of the stuff I’m really excited about, and there are some great detailed technical slides …

Been asked a few times in the last few days about where my slides are from my MySQL keynote from *last* year.

Ooops.

Um, yeah.  Sorry about that.  Here’s a link to ‘The SmugMug Tale’ slides, and you can watch the video below:

Sorry for the extreme lag.  I suck.

The important highlights go something like this:

• Use transactional replication.  Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have no idea where a crashed slave was.
• Use a …

It was awesome to see everyone at the 2010 mysql UC. Sorry if I did not get a chance to chat with everyone, time just flew by! I had great turn out for my two sessions and had a lot of great conversations with people. If people are looking for my slides they are posted on the User Conference Website here: http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2010/public/schedule/speaker/75377 .. Thanks Everyone!

At the MySQL UC, I went to a talk on MySQL for Geospatial applications, as for those of who know me and have read my blog before, you know that this is a hot topic for me! I will try to drive this a bit more, more specifically, getting the "real" MySQL functions for Geospatial applications, that currently only exists in a MySQL Preview release, and have them firmly in the MySQL GA version. This will happen eventually, and we need to make sure sure it happens. The current preview release is maintained and updated, so it's not that far behind the main server, and the GIS functions themselves are stable enough.

If you have an interest in this, let me know. I will try to organize some kind of community around this somehow, at least that is my plan, but …

I will not write much on what went on at this BoF, but a few words are appropriate I guess.

• We were some 10 to 15 people in the room at the end.
• I started the thing by talking about the ancient history of databases, and went on to talk a bit on the reasons of the Relational databases appeared on the scene.
• We talked more on these reasons. The old Network and Hierarchical were largely tape oriented, even when data was on disk.
• My theory on search being a very major factor for adopting the relational database technology in the 1970s and on seemed to be accepted.
• As I went on to discuss search in an RDBMS being contextual, and the need for non-contextual search caused quite a few debates.
• That non-contextual search will be a factor in moving to NoSQL, as is a theory of mine, was not accepted by anyone else but myself :-)
• Contextual and non-contextual serach …

Today is you last day to take MySQL Certification Exams at a deeply discounted price. So if you want to test, head over before the doors close on the Magnolia room for 2010!!