In celebration of my arrival in Bangkok the opposition party is apparently planning a million person “red shirt” rally. Exciting! On the bright side, “The UDD [United Front for Democracy against Dictatorship] can only afford to keep its protest going for three to five days. If the government has not fallen by that time, it will have to withdraw and draw up a new strategy.” I always pick the best times to travel. (Mom, don’t worry. I’ll stay safe!)

As I'm sure everyone has figured out by now, I've joined Rackspace where I will continue to work on Drizzle. I'm honestly thrilled with my new home, and there are a myriad of reasons for that. I think the one that I'm most excited about is that they are already the thing that all of the hype was about MySQL and RedHat and IBM wanting to become: A Service Company Rackspace doesn't want you to run Rackspace-Apache or RackspaceDB or EC-Rackspace. They want you to be able to run bog-standard Apache. And Linux. And MySQL. And PHP. And Drizzle. Then, Rackspace wants to be the best at providing you the service you need around those. No ludicrous MySQL Enterprise "we'll sell you a license to a free product, and then we'll include bundled with that a subscription a piece of non-free monitoring software" upselling. Rackspace actually wants to provide you a valuable service, and they want to do such a good job at it that you will …

Giving a talk at the University of Utah on everything from scaling, clustering, mysql, mysql internals, noSQL (Cassandra) to how to manage all this stuff. If you are there at University I'm bringing some Swag!

Also I will upload the slides and put them here.

I will be doing two talks at the O’Reilly MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara CA.
Performance Schema Tuesday April 13, 11:55am.
Demos Of All The Big New Features Thursday April 15, 11:55am, with Konstantin Osipov.

The other MySQL server engineers giving talks are:
Alexander Barkov (globalization)
Chuck Bell (backup)
Mattias Jonsson (partitions)
…

* First bug report came in on April 19, 2006
* We have a total of 1,753 issue reports (1,110 bugs, 639 enhancements)
* 259 out of these are duplicates to other issues
* 1,038 issues were fixed (726 bugs, 312 enhancements)
* 392 invalid issues, marked as upstream, needinfo, wontfix or invalid

I've been doing Google Summer of Code projects with students since its creation. As far as intern programs go, it has been one of the most successful I have ever worked with.

Last year was particularly awesome in that with Drizzle we were able to have students work on projects that made it back into Drizzle. While I have always seen good work created, it has always been hit or miss on whether the student's work has made it back into the project. Last year though we got more code in then ever before and I believe this year will be the same. We have had students go on to jobs thanks to the work they did on Drizzle.

Interning gives you real experience, and it provides resume material which differentiates students who are going on to work in the software engineering field. Working on open source means that you have …

I want a tool to make some long-running schema changes almost non-blocking. They should block access to a table for no more than a few seconds. I also want to do some of these in place on a master rather than on a slave that has been taken offline.

I think this will work for most schema changes. It doesn't have to work for all of them and there are restrictions. This will not work when statements that modify the table for which the schema change is done reference other tables and the other tables are modified during the schema change. If production SQL cannot be changed to meet this restriction, then the schema change can be done on a slave that has been taken offline.

Is anyone else interested in such a tool? A hand-waving description of the process is:

1. Create the new table on the master. The new table might use MyISAM without indexes initially to make the insert as fast as possible and reduce the load on InnoDB. …

GNUnify is one of the major annual FOSS events here in India. Organised by the students of Symbiosis Institute for Computer Science & Research and the Pune Linux Users Group (PLUG), GNUnify is an event of consequence in the Indian FOSS ecosystem. This year, the conefrence took place on Feb 19th and 20th in the wonderful city of Pune.

I submitted two papers on MySQL and fortunately both of them were selected. Thanks to the organising team, who were helpful enough to schedule both sessions on …

Together with Berndt I’ll be presenting on the new features in MySQL Cluster 7.1 at this year’s MySQL Cluster User Conference – Santa Clara, on April 12th. If you’re interested in using MySQL Cluster but aren’t sure how to get started (or you’ve used it but would like some tips) then this is a great opportunity. Check out the presentation description.

If you register by 15 March then you get the early-bird price and if you use this ‘friend of a speaker’ code then you get an additional 25% off: mys10fsp

mys10fsp

If you missed the recent webinar on running MySQL Cluster on Windows then you can watch/listen to the replay at http://www.mysql.com/news-and-events/on-demand-webinars/display-od-517.html