This is the second and final part of my notes from the MySQL conference. In this part I'll focus on the technical substance of talks I saw, and didn't see.

More than ever before I was a contributor rather than attendee at this conference. Looking back, this resulted in seeing less talks than I would have wanted to, since I was speaking or preparing to speak myself. Sometimes it was worse than speaking, for instance I spent half a day picking up pewter goblets from an egnravings shop... (congratulations to all the winners again :-) Luckily, I can make up for some of that by going back and browse their slides. This is especially important whenever 2 good talks are scheduled in the same slot, or in the same slot when I was to speak. So I have categorized topics here along various axes, but also along the "things I did see" versus "things I missed" axis.

My own talks

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Have you ever wanted to get a list of indexes and their columns for all tables in a MySQL database without having to iterate over SHOW INDEXES FROM ‘[table]’? Here are a couple ways…

The following query using the INFORMATION_SCHEMA STATISTICS table will work prior to MySQL GA 5.6 and Percona Server 5.5.

SELECT table_name AS `Table`,
       index_name AS `Index`,
       GROUP_CONCAT(column_name ORDER BY seq_in_index) AS `Columns`
FROM information_schema.statistics
WHERE table_schema = 'sakila'
GROUP BY 1,2;

This query uses the INNODB_SYS_TABLES, …

Note: I’ve decided not to use Veewee due to silly compatibility issues for now.

Quoting from Vagrant’s web site:

Vagrant is a tool for building and distributing virtualized development environments. By providing automated creation and provisioning of virtual machines using Oracle’s VirtualBox, Vagrant provides the tools to create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable virtual environments.

A complementary technology called Veewee makes building VirtualBox VMs easier by automating away a lot of manual steps. Marius Ducea has a great blog post on how to use it.

My observations:
1. According to Vagrant’s web site, it should work on Windows. I’ve …

I was doing some research on Percona Server, and came across this great tip by Baron: if you are using Oracle’s MySQL and want to test out and learn new/improved features that are present in Percona Server, you can just stop the mysqld instance, extract Percona Server binary from its rpm/deb package or tarball file, swap the binary, and do a successful restart. You can then do a test drive, kick the tires, learn and observe to your heart’s content. Swap the original mysqld back after you are done, as necessary.

I tested it and it worked great for me. Specifically, I did the following:
1. sudo /etc/init.d/mysql(d) stop
2. sudo cp /usr/sbin/mysqld /location/mysqldFromOracleOrWhatever
3. sudo cp /perconaBinaryDirectory/mysqld /usr/sbin/mysqld
4. sudo /etc/init.d/mysql(d) start
5. Test …

Usually people do this around New Year, I will do it in February. Actually, I was inspired to do this after reviewing all the talks for this year's MySQL Conference - what a snapshot into the state of where we are! It made me realize we've made important progress in the past year, worth taking a moment to celebrate it. So here we go...

Diversification

In the past few years there was a lot of fear and doubt about MySQL due to Oracle taking over the ownership. But if you ask me, I was more worried for MySQL because of MySQL itself. I've often said that if MySQL had been a healthy open source project - like the other 3 components in the LAMP stack - then most of the NoSQL technologies we've seen come about would never have been started as their own projects, because it would have been more natural to build those needs on …

Sometimes, I make mistakes. It’s true. That can be difficult for us Systems Engineering-types to say, but I try to distance myself from my ego and embrace the mistakes because I often learn the most from them. ..Blah, blah, school of hard knocks, blah, blah…. Usually my mistakes aren’t big enough to cause any visible impact, but this one took the site out for 10 minutes during a period of peak traffic due to a confluence of events.

Doh!

Here is how it went down…

We have an issue where MySQL table statistics are occasionally getting out of whack, usually after a batch operation. This causes bad explain plans, which in turn cause impossibly slow queries. An ANALYZE TABLE (or even SHOW CREATE INDEX) resolves the issue immediately, but I prefer not get woken up at 4AM by long running query alerts when my family and I are trying to sleep. As a way to work around the issue, we decided to disable InnoDB automatic …

In early 2006 Paul Hurley (ideeli’s CEO) and I (Mark Uhrmacher, CTO) were thinking about a new business. We had the idea to create a community based around great deals for Women’s fashion products where we saw a great deal of potential for great content and product sales. Now, over five years later, we’ve realized much of that vision. Our business success has been chronicled over the years in several places (see here and here). Though we’re very proud of our achievements there, that isn’t what this blog is about.

Insatiable Demand is about a mostly untold story. Over the past five-plus years we’ve built a phenomenal technology platform and team. From two people and three servers to a 70 person team and a 100 instance production environment, …

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Surge 2011 conference in Baltimore, MD.  I thought it was a great conference, and I’m already looking forward to next year.  I’m sure there’s already a plethora of great blog posts on Surge, but here’s just some thoughts based on my experience.

In no particular order:

EC2 has changed the world, everybody hates EC2

I don’t think I heard a presentation where somebody didn’t use EC2 and the other assorted AWS products.  Amazon (as far as I know) was not represented at the conference, and it seemed awkward for them to not be there (to me, at least).  This …

MySQL Connector/Net 6.4.4, a new version of the all-managed .NET driver for MySQL has been released.  This is an update to our latest GA release and is intended for full production deployment.

Version 6.4.4 is intended for use with versions of MySQL from 5.0 – 5.5

It is now available in source and binary form from here and mirror sites (note that not all mirror sites may be up to date at this point of time- if you can’t find this version on some mirror, please try again later or choose another download site.)

The release is also available for download on the My Oracle Support (MOS) and will be available from Oracle eDelivery.

This release includes several bug fixes including a fix to using Windows authentication.  Please review the change log and documentation for a review of what changed.

Enjoy and …

Update: I won't be in Moscow after all. I was denied visa on grounds that my passport is beginning to fall apart and there wasn't time to get new passport, invitation and visa. Maybe next year - I was excited to go.

October brings 2 very interesting conferences. I will be speaking first on Oct 3rd at HighLoad++ in Moscow and a few weeks later on Oct Oct 25 at Percona Live in London. I will give a talk called Choosing a MySQL Replication / High Availability Solution which is based on my thinking developed in my recent blog post The ultimate …