Amidst all the Oracle/Sun/MySQL news today, the MySQL Conference kicks off this week. So I just spent a few minutes putting together my picks for the sessions I'd like to attend at the MySQL Conference and the Percona Performance Conference (schedule). There's quite a lineup and I have some hard choices to make. Both groups have put together excellent events. And, wow, there are a lot of new storage engines and appliances coming out.

To make my life easier, I'm putting the list of interesting sessions from both conferences here so I can try to decide where …

Part 1 of "Understanding How MySQL Works by Understanding Metadata", presented by Sheeri K. Cabral (The Pythian Group) and Patrick Galbraith (Lycos Inc.). This was a 3-hour tutorial.

The PDF of the slides can be found at http://technocation.org/files/doc/2009_04_Understanding.pdf.

From the official abstract at http://www.mysqlconf.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/detail/5682:

We have spent countless hours researching over 1,000 pieces of metadata. In the process, we have learned a lot about how MySQL works, and realized that it was a pretty good learning method.

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So the news is everywhere. Sun has some info, Oracle has some info. If you’re thinking MySQL, you should definitely be at the MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 (if you’re not already registered). Find a speaker, they’ll give you a 20% discount code (heck, find me, I’ll do the same).

What does this all mean for MySQL? You bet you’ll find out a lot at the conference. I can highly recommend the keynote on Tuesday morning - you want to see Karen Padir deliver the State of the Dolphin.

What does this mean for the Linux distributions that MySQL widely …

Here I am again, at a conference away from home, waking up to learn that my employer has been acquired. MySQL to Sun. Sun to Oracle.

This time I have fewer opinions, and more things to think about.

I have many options and opportunties, and fortunately I am in a place where I can decide without rushing.

As for MySQL and Drizzle and Gearman and MemCacheD? They are all open source, they are all GPLed, so they are all remarkably immune to the threats and risks of corporate games. For as long as people use them, there will always be support and services and fixes and features for those projects.

Sun Java and JVM are open source and GPL now, so they also are safe.

For other stuff? I have no idea. I hope for the best.

I find it surprising that in the official Sun Announcement there is no mention of MySQL for two reasons. Firstly, this was Sun largest single purchase of $1 billion only 12 months ago. Second, MySQL’s largest competitor is Oracle.

While the Sun website shows the news in grandeur, the MySQL website is noticeably absent in any information of it’s owners’ acquisition.

On my professional side, as an independent speaker for Sun Microsystems with plans for upcoming webinars and future speaking on “Best Practices in Migrating to MySQL from Oracle”, this news does not benefit my bottom line.

Remember the what’s printed on the front of the Guide… “Don’t Panic”.

First we all get hit hard with News like this…  So we go through lots of stages. Panic, dear, acceptance, etc.  They all come and everyone is left asking now what.

First… look around at and get reassurance from others…

Sheeri has a decent post on her take on the news here.

Second:

As I mentioned earlier, it’s way to early to speculate on what’s going to happen.  Integration can not begin until all the regulatory stuff get handle, which could take months and months.  So their is going to be a really long quiet period of time.  For us internal folks this will be a scarey time of course.  So anything you hear now is …

If you review the recent years of Oracle’s history, you’ll see that its purchase of Sun makes perfect sense. Oracle has tried to get in the OS business (Oracle Ubreakable Linux), the hardware business with their different partnerships (e.g.: Hewlett Packard Partner Relationship), and even into the MySQL business back when they bought InnoBase (Oracle and Innobase).

MySQL was in many ways a leader for the Open Source industry, both in the way the way it marketed OSS and in the way MySQL the company was built. It’s the latter aspect that worries me. MySQL was a world pioneer in having a global workforce and this shaped both its culture and products.

When I joined MySQL in 2001, 90% of the company was distributed outside their native Swedish offices. (When Sun bought it, it …

Today Virident announced a set of servers, called GreenCloud, aimed at increasing performance for MySQL and memcached servers. Last week I got a chance to talk to Vijay Karamcheti and Shridar Subramanian at Virident about their technology and get a preview on what they are up to.

The technology Virident use to improve performance is a third level of memory storage based on Flash. But it goes way beyond just adding SSD disks. To put things in perspective, look at how resources in an average server has developed in the last 20 years or so. We have now something like 1000 times more memory, and 1000 times more CPU performance, but disk performance has increased very little, maybe 5 times, and that is an optimistic number. Note that this is regarding disk performance, available disk storage has increased also 1000 times or so.

What does this mean then? Well disk I/O is an …

to oracle…

Ricky Ho and I are busy at the UC ... pulling our hair out. There are no certification exams on Monday but we found all sorts of network glitches. The Hyatt had some network ports blocked that just happened to be the ones we use for online exams. And the Sun Remote Lab Data Center had a glitch over the weekend that kept the virtual images from starting.

The picture is from Kai Voigt's tutorial on DBA certification. The room is full and I pop n and out between 'hair pulling' sessions. The attendees are asking good questions and I am sure we will have some new certified DBAs by the end of the conference.