I hinted last week of my acceptance with Oracle before the formal announcement this week at the MySQL Users Conference, not for a job but as Oracle ACE Director. In today’s State of the MySQL Community keynote by Kaj Arnö I was one of the first three MySQL nominees that are now part of this program.

What exactly is an ACE Director? Using the description from the Oracle website.

Oracle ACEs and Oracle ACE Directors are known for their strong credentials as Oracle community enthusiasts and advocates, with candidates nominated by anyone in the Oracle …

The day started out with 3 keynotes: Brian Aker, Michael Widenius, and Sheeri Cabral.

Brian gave his "The Drizzle Story" talk, which I tweeted via @drizzledb. Then Monty spoke about about Monty Program AB and MariaDB, which is his continuing work on his fork of MySQL. Following them both was an excellent talk from Sheeri about how the community interaction model will continue to work in this Oracle era.

I went to my employer's Gear6's session done with Answers.com. Answers is a top 20 web site, and is the 2nd fastest growing one, after Facebook. It was fun to see their performance and scaling numbers, and how they are using Gear6's memcached product, especially how two 1U G6 boxes replaced an entire rack of 20 2U memcached servers.

I also really enjoyed the Facebook operations session, and also …

Another plug for Bradley’s talk Thursday morning at the MySQL User’s conference. Spending the day talking to DBA’s and other potential users of TokuDB, I (Zardosht) noticed the same question/theme come up numerous times in conversation. “Oh, so your indexes are in memory, that is why iiBench is so much faster for TokuDB than InnoDB”. Good guess, but not what we do. The iiBench benchmark is designed to run so long that it is physically impossible to store all index data in-memory.

Fractal trees are written to disk. They are written much faster than traditional B-trees. They are a new data structure, not B-trees, not hash tables. Come to Bradley’s talk to learn some of the algorithmics behind how we are fast, even for large data.

Here are the minutes of the meeting. They can also be found online
with the irc logs here.

Review ACTION points from previous meeting

• mathiaz to fix a broken script with bug reporting link above (not done)
• ttx to follow up with ivoks/RoaKSoax on cluster stack state (done, but needs refresh)
• mathiaz to propose removal of dovecot-postfix on MLs (not done)

[ACTION] mathiaz to fix the “server fixed bugs” broken script

[ACTION] ttx to follow up with ivoks/RoaKSoax on cluster stack state

[ACTION] mathiaz to propose removal of dovecot-postfix on MLs

Lucid release status

FinalFreeze will hit us tomorrow, and then all uploads will need …

I gave a presentation today at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2010, titled SQL Injection Myths and Fallacies. Thanks to everyone who came to my talk! I appreciate your interest in learning to develop more secure applications. SQL Injection is a serious threat to web applications, and it's only going to get worse. It's incumbent on you as software developers to learn how to write secure code!My

We started with the morning keynotes again today and I was a little surprised at the snipping going on while people are promoting their products it felt very counterproductive and will end harming the MySQL eco system. The Community Keynote on the other hand looked into the future for itself under the Oracle umbrella. Its still remains to be seen what form the conference will have next year.

The first session that I attended today were around MySQL partitioning in the beta releases and beyond. They were saying the right things but it remains to be seen when some of these features will be available. I would hope that the engineers responsible for MySQL partitioning have a little talk with their Oracle counterparts which have been at it for quite a while. They should sync the features up which would make it easier for us multi-disciplinary DBAs

The next set of sessions were on IO bottlenecks, MySQL data warehousing and finally …

presentation is here
src tarball, that do contain bugs if node-failure occurs, is here

thanks for attending for those of you that did
feedback on preview is welcome, e.g here

maybe we'll do a binary version...if so i'll make a new post

I've heard this question a lot, but never thought to blog about the answer. "Is there a performance difference between putting the JOIN conditions in the ON clause or the WHERE clause in MySQL?"

No, there's no difference. The following queries are algebraically equivalent inside MySQL and will have the same execution plan.

PLAIN TEXT SQL:

1. SELECT * FROM A, B WHERE A.ID = B.ID;
2.  
3. SELECT * FROM A JOIN B ON A.ID = B.ID;
4.  
5. SELECT * FROM A JOIN B USING(ID);

Personally, I prefer to stay away from "comma joins" because a) the ANSI join syntax is more expressive and you're going to use it anyway for LEFT JOIN, and mixing styles is asking for trouble, so you might as well just use one style; b) I think ANSI style is clearer. But that's just personal preference.

Entry …

This is a maintenance release which fixes some remaining bugs in the 5.0 version. Also, the 5.1 release introduces some new features:

* New feature: Editor for scheduled events on MySQL 5.1+ servers
* New feature: "Databases" sub tab on "Host" tab. Displays number or tables, procedures etc of each db, plus the last update date and default collation.
* New feature: When editing contents of a InnoDB table which has a foreign key, the relevant cell displays a lookup pulldown menu with the first available text column of the foreign table
* New feature: Call stored procedures and functions from context menu. Parameter input is prompted.
* Bugfix: Startup errors on multi-monitor set ups, reading some non existant registry value.
* Bugfix: Startup errors in portable mode ("List index out of bounds")
* Bugfix: Quote collation value in table editor, so "binary" does not cause SQL errors
* …

I caught some of the keynotes and discussion at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit today, and was particularly interested in the panel discussion on open source and cloud computing. While we are used to hearing and talking about how important open source software is to cloud computing (open source giving to cloud computing), moderator John Mark Walker posed the question of whether cloud computing gives back? The discussion also rightfully focused on openness in cloud computing, how open source might or might not translate to cloud openness and the importance of data to be open as well.

The discussion also centered on some issues regarding open standards and how open is open enough for cloud computing? …