Here is the quick notes from the session “Architecture of Maria” from Monty Widenius, one of my all time favorite developer and founder of MySQL.

• Goals
  • To create ACID complaint and Multi-version concurrency control (MVCC)  transactional storage engine for MySQL
  • To replace existing replacement for MyISAM and if possible the default transactional database
  • Maria can run in both transactional and non-transactional, so its easy to replace existing transactional and non-transactional engines
  • To create a storage engine which is good for data warehousing (DW) purposes
• Why Falcon and Maria
  • two different architectures
  • different in feature, compatibility, performance
  • Target is for data warehousing …

A: Maria, an ACID, MVCC engine that plans to be the default non-transactional and default transactional engine for MySQL.

Presently development with a team of 6 people and plans of adding 2-3 developers the work on Maria should see the 1.5 release this month.

It was great to here Monty say “We have a policy of zero MySQL Bugs, like the old MySQL way.”

Maria Version History
1.0 - “Crash Safe” — part of a existing 5.1 branch
1.5 - “Concurrent insert/select” to be merged as part of formal MySQL 6.0 release
2.0 - Transactional and ACID
3.0 - High Concurrency & Online Backup
4.0 - Data Warehousing

The schedule has all of the features to be available for the next MySQL Conference Q2 2009

Some points of note:

• This is a MyISAM replacement.
• It was interesting to hear about log file size (suggesting being big like 1G), and there are …

What would be great if people could create a single line (one tip) from each talk and we could aggregate these for an executive summary for tech people.

This was prompted from only a few minutes looking in on Baron Shwartz’s EXPLAIN presentation. What I didn’t know was.

EXPLAIN EXTENDED SELECT …; SHOW WARNINGS; gives the rewritten SQL query

If only I had time to whip out an application on my Google AppEngine and get twitter feeds with say a mysqlconf keyword. Perhaps we need a all night BoF hackfest to do it.

A small but committed group met at 8:30pm to hear more about our the plans from PrimeBase Technologies here at the 2008 MySQL Conference. Our discussion started in true MySQL form.

Monty Widenius presents to the group plastic cups and a bottle of Absolut Vodka.
After a shot, Paul starts with “While I can still talk”.
Monty, slams another bottle of Vodka on the table.
We all laugh.

Paul outlined some of the roadmap plans from existing the Alpha release to Beta releases.
He talked about the plans for Synchronous Replication and there was active discussion on various use cases.
There was also discussion and input on Solid State Drive (SDD) Technology which will be tested with PBXT in the coming months.

Minutes ago (when writing this), we have released a first preview version of PDO_MYSQLND for PHP together with the first preview version of MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org. Minutes ago, both new developments have been announced at the MySQL Conference.

PDO_MYSQLND announcement explained

We will explain you in more detail what both products are about during the next days. Let me start with a brief overview on PDO_MYSQLND and allow me to cite the announcement.

(...)
Read the rest of PHP: PDO_MYSQLND for PHP preview released (739 words)

Minutes ago (when writing this), we have released a first preview version of PDO_MYSQLND for PHP together with the first preview version of MySQL Connector/OpenOffice.org. Minutes ago, both new developments have been announced at the MySQL Conference.

PDO_MYSQLND announcement explained

We will explain you in more detail what both products are about during the next days. Let me start with a brief overview on PDO_MYSQLND and allow me to cite the announcement.

(...)
Read the rest of PHP: PDO_MYSQLND for PHP preview …

While reading Colin's post about LugRadio Live, I stumbled over the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Going through the project home page and their HOWTO got me curious - could this eventually become an alternative to using DRBD (for replicating data) and LVM snapshots (for performing backups)?

Zumastor is Free software that adds enterprise storage features (primarily improved snapshots and remote replication) to Linux.

Snapshots

LVM already lets administrators create snapshots, but its design has the surprising property that every block you change on the original volume consumes one block for each snapshot. The resulting speed and space penalty …

• Jay Pipes, Tobias Asplund
• Finding out the number of rows that would have been returned (MyISAM and InnoDB)
  • SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS and FOUND_ROWS()
  • COUNT(*)
  • MEMORY table
  • if query cache is on, then it makes no difference
  • if it's off
    • Memory MyISAM is fastest
    • FOUND_ROWS() is slightly slower than count(*)
  • more in the slides that I'll add later
• quite a lot of humor, these guys are fun
• query union vs index_merge union
  • SELECT … WHERE a UNION SELECT … WHERE b
    vs
    SELECT … WHERE a AND b
  • index_merge wins
• composite index vs index merge
  …

connector/odbc 3.51.25 and 5.1.4 were released today. the new 5.1 release has been deemed “generally available,” which is our really ridiculous term for a non-alpha/beta/rc release.

it was the day for the connectors team to do releases — previews of connector/openoffice.org and pdo_mysqlnd made it out before us, and i believe that a connector/net release is in the wings.

I’m pleased to say that I was able to see these in the flesh, but if you aren’t lucky enough to be here (or just want to watch them again), Zack has posted up videos on YouTube of the opening keynote presentations:

• MySQL Conference Keynote 2008 - Marten Mickos
• MySQL Conference Keynote 2008 - Jonathan Schwartz
• MySQL Conference Keynote 2008 - Werner Vogels

Sadly these are only snippets, but if you like what you see, make sure to book your place for next year’s conference early!