Registration for the MySQL Conference and expo 2009 is now open.

Kudos to Colin Charles, who has the not easy task of being the program chair of the conference, for pulling the schedule together.

The schedule is not complete yet. If you haven't got either an approval or a rejection, your proposal is still under review. In the previous years, some of my talks were approved as late as February, but we are trying to finish off the schedule much earlier this time.

This is my last blog post for this year. I am going on vacation this evening. No computers, no internet. Therefore, no comments are enabled for this post (there would be nobody to moderate and approve them).

Happy new year, Community!

Yes, I’m speaking at  the upcoming MySQL Conference & Expo 2009 - on April 20 - 23 (and yes, it’s in Santa Clara again).

I have three sessions:

MySQL Cluster Tutorial: this time with 6.4 feature goodness. Very hands-on, very interactive.

MySQL Cluster on Windows:  (insert witty text about hating operating system freedom here)

Memory Management in MySQL and Drizzle: not magic setting of buffer variables, but memory allocation and management inside the server, a bunch of malloc() discussion and hopefully some interesting numbers.

Peter said me that previous results http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/12/18/xtradb-benchmarks-15x-gain/ are too marketing, and we should show other results also.

Here is the run for CPU Bound,or it would be more correctly to say in-cache benchmark, because there is a lot of CPU remains idle. This run is exactly the same as Disk Bound but with innodb_buffer_pool_size=8G which is more than enough to fit all data in memory.

The XtraDB is showing very modest gain of about 2.5% in this case which can be attributed to measurement error too.

The story becomes more …

Here's another ode to a small but fundamental aspect of Oracle, following the same theme as The Humble IF Statement. This time, let's look at the COUNT( ) function. I think when you look at it the right way, it opens up the whole story about database performance.What's the first thing you do when poking around an unfamiliar system? I'll bet it involves SELECT COUNT(*) queries in one way or

I just got word the Schedule for the MySQL Conference 2009 is now available!

In my previous post, and the one before that I already wrote about my approved proposals. I promised I would post more details on my sessions later on. Well, it's right here:

http://en.oreilly.com/mysql2009/public/schedule/speaker/198

While you're at it, check out the list of speakers. I think it is a pretty good line-up, and I am looking forward to …

Department expands its biometrics-based border database, which requires all 10 fingerprints, a digital photograph, home address, and other information that privacy advocates have criticized as too intrusive.

In the 19th Jolt Product Excellence Awards, our High Performance MySQL book is listed under the Technical Books category. That is so cool!

How I found out: I don't think O'Reilly or any of the authors were notified of this, but I got a Google alert because someone else referred to it (interesting that the Jolt Awards site itself didn't trigger an alert).

I have to admit that I'm actually "caffeine free" at the moment, but I hope Jolt will forgive me for that ;-)

Peter noted that MySQL itself is not one of the database category finalists. It doesn't have to be, but "traditionally" MySQL tends to always be a strong contender in these things. So I agree that its absence is somewhat noteworthy (in as far as the absence of something can be regarded as news).

Just listened to the Net@Night #79 netcast (during my morning walk); this episode has a very interesting interview with Don Tapscott who is the author of "Grown up Digital" (follow-up from "Growing up Digital") and many other insightful books about the online world and its humans. I was going to list some keywords of particular interest, but there's just too much - the whole interview is excellent, go and listen to it already!

My first exposure to Don Tapscott was years ago (must've been around 2003), and quite accidental. I was teaching a MySQL training course at the University of Queensland, and walked past the uni bookstore which had a crate outside with old textbooks and other assorted stuff. I grabbed some useful resources on accounting and marketing, as well as one of Don's books (Digital Capital).

Don has been writing about things since the late 70s. An …