I checked in in the speaker lounge and picked up my bag of shwag. This year O'Reilly is giving speakers some free books, slide:ology and Confessions of a Public Speaker . It makes sense for them to give these books to their speakers, as the better the speakers are, the better the conference is, and the more successful O'Reilly is at getting more conference business.

I spent the first part of the day fielding scheduled calls with members of the tech press about Gear6's …

From the MySQL keynote today by Edward Screven. The Oracle LAMP Stack is looking pretty impressive. The stack includes: - Oracle Enterprise Linux - Oracle VM (Xen-based) - Apache, Glassfish - MySQL - Java, PHP, Perl, Ruby, C, C++ More … Continue reading →

Yes, no kidding, I'll be wearing an old Oracle T-Shirt from my days at Big-O in the 1980's. I was, and your Oracle dudes who has been around for a while might remember these, an Oracle Unix Wizard. Actually I was a Wizard II (I went to the second training), but the T-Shirt I will be wearing is from Oracle Unix Wizards I.

Where will this take place you ask, as you just HAVE to come? Well, no further than my BoF tonite on the History on Databases. And I can tell you, this is not a T-Shirt that I would normally wear in public, but there is a lot of stuff I would do to attract a crowd to a BoF (just to see everyone running away in disgust). So at 7:00 PM tonite, tuesday, in Ballroom C (unless the location changes). Bring your good mood, ideas on the past and on the future, and above all, your barf-bags, to see what an ""Oracle Unix Wizard" looked …

PACKT Publishing sent me titled "MySQL Admin Cookbook" to review and I told them that I would be brutally honest about it. They said cool and well here, we go.

Overall, the book is cool if you are starting out in MySQL administration and want to get a box up and running. If you are looking to scale MySQL or make your application faster this is not the book for you. If you are worried about consistency and getting the most out of your hardware-this is not the book for you. If you are trying to figure out what the best index combination is-again-this is not the book for you. If you want to know how to add users, or set up replication, or dump a CSV format text file of data then this is the book for …

Here is some pointers to my MySQL conference slides.
Here is the presentation on MySQL 5.5 Performance and
Scalability improvements
here

Here is the presentation on the MySQL 5.5 Performance
and Scalability benchmarks
here

I have noticed a definite increase in NoSQL buzz over the last few months.  This is partly confirmed by Google Trends, this service shows data relating to how search topics rank:

The last couple of months has seen a dramatic rise in both the number of searches and also the number of news items relating to NoSQL. 

But the traditionalists need not yet fret, interest in NoSQL is yet but a blip on the data management radar, as demonstrated by this compairson between NoSQL and MySQL search rankings:

I will be interesting to see how the dynamics of this change throughout 2010 though.

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Done! Here are the slides:

And video:

The MySQL Conference and Expo started with me and Lars Thalmann doing the replication tutorial. Unfortunately, we cannot at this time distribute the slides (please watch the replication tutorial page at the conference site), but there is a replication tutorial package for easy setup of server to play around with—including some sample scripts—and a paper that both explains how the package can be used as well as giving some example setups.

• The software package can be downloaded from the forge and requires Perl at least version 5.6.0 to execute.
• The article can can also be …

The performance work I was involved in in 5.5 had its few moments of fame today. However, if you looked carefully at the graphs on Edward's slides, you'd seen that 200% gains come from workloads where MySQL performance would previously simply deteriorate (128 threads and more). The good news is that we didn't just fix the high-thread-count results, but significantly increased peak performance, reached at 32-64 threads. I'm sure community will figure this out, and post independent benchmarks. The results are excellent in any case.
Too bad Edward left without taking any questions, the whole thing looked a bit rushed.

We are happy to announce the new and exciting replication features in the MySQL 5.5.3 development release.
If you are at the MySQL User Conference, you are most welcome to join the "New Replication Features" talk at 2pm today where these will be presented in more detail.

• Semi-sync replication plugin - you can now have improved resilience of the overall replication by having a master server to wait for the slave server to collect and persist events in the relay log on a per transaction basis. As a consequence, by the time the user commits a transaction there is a guarantee that the events are already written to one or more slaves relay logs. This feature is provided as a plugin and using it is as easy as installing the plugin and enabling it.
• Slave fsync tuning - you can now fine tune relay logs and {master|relay-log}.info fsyncs operations so that corruption is much less likely …