Here are some more photos from the MySQL conference during the keynote sessions.  I've also posted some video on YouTube.com with clips from presentations by Marten Mickos, Jonathan Schwartz and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon.

Update: I've added some more photos and videos from Wednesday also.

Keynotes

The keynote was kick started by Marten Mickos.  If you've never met Marten, he is, on a personal note, one of the greatest CEOs I've ever met.  The keynotes were especially interesting for me because it was the first time I've had the opportunity to listen to Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems.  Jonathan seems like a great guy who gives the impression he "gets it".

The last keynote was by Werner Vogels of Amazon.  His talk covered Amazon's growth and the new services they offer including EC2.  He announced that EC2 now supports persistent storage, which is a huge improvement, but doesn't quite solve all of the problems.

Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit

I've never been big into testing, but I'm trying to change that.  …

Yesterday, Oracle‘s Ken Jacobs and Heikki Tuuri, creator of InnoDB, have announced the immediate release of InnoDB Plugin 1.0 for MySQL 5.1. I’ve already downloaded it and played around with it a bit. I haven’t had time to do any performance benchmarks or similar just yet. Those will come in due time.

This release is the beginning of two exciting things: InnoDB is now officially decoupled from MySQL release-wise, and lots of new features have been added to this new release. I will come to what the decoupling means in a moment, but first, the major new features in this release of InnoDB (from my …

mysqlreport v3.5 has been released which has the following fixes, changes, updates:

• Fixed bug: incorrect checking of MySQL version caused mysqlreport to ignore InnoDB status values in some cases. Simplified version from 3 integers (major, minor, patch) to 1 (50024 = 5.0.24, 60001 = 6.0.1, etc.) for easier, more accurate version checking all around.
• Fixed potential bug: read_relative_infiles might have incorrectly divided infiles with multiple status value sets.
• Fixed bug: if wait_timeout was greater than –relative, mysqlreport would lose its connection while sleeping. Now the connection is closed and reopened for each live relative report collection.
• Infiles can now be given SHOW VARIABLES output (in addition to the old method of inserting values manually like: key_buffer_size=128M)
• Slow query …

Once again Jeremy weights in on the oddity called "MySQL Enterprise Edition". This time around it seems that Sun/MySQL is moving towards making their Enterprise Edition more proprietary by including features that will never be available in the Community Edition. Not sure, but I guess they are also not providing the source to the general public (I do not remember all the details of the continued mumbo-jumbo saga surrounding this product, but maybe they already pulled the source from the public version a while ago - please correct me here). I do assume that paying customers will still get the source, though obviously not under an open source license.

As before MySQL AB illustrates that they …

Properties:

Description:

As per MySQL documentation, this pool is used to store data …

MySQL has User Defined Functions. These are loadable modules, written in C, that can be loaded into a running MySQL server, and used like a "native" built-in function.

A UDF can be an aggregate function. An aggregate function is one that takes in multiple rows, but emits only one result. For example, SUM() is a built-in aggregate function.

I just proved to myself via testing and benchmarking that user defined aggregate functions are about three times slower than the call interface to the built-in functions.

THREE TIMES SLOWER!


In about twelve hours I am supposed to be presenting a talk titled Using User-defined Functions and Aggregates to Speed Up Your Data Warehouse Processing.

Um. Yeah...

UPDATE:

It turns out to be a MacOS thing. On Linux, the …

There is a fair amount of photography happening at the MySQL UC.

In a pure happenstance, the CEO of Sun, Johnathan Schwartz, and myself, ended up in the same frame. Almost



That's me, or at least about a third of me, on the left edge.

This morning, as I was looking for some introductory material on a programming language, I came across a document which would probably have done the job just right. It’s just that this particular document, despite its excellent technical points and clear explanation, will end up turning away a lot of its potential readers.

It’s written in English, which means that it is accessible to a very large part of the world’s population. Even where English as a second language is not that wide-spread, I think it’s fair to say that anyone interested in programming a computer is forced into learning at least basic English. People in India (pop. 1.1 billion) certainly read English, and I’ve met many Chinese (pop. 1.3 billion) with excellent English skills.

In other words, if you’re writing programming books in English, your potential readership is quite a bit larger than you might have originally thought. And yet, this document, like …

People reading this blog & friends have certainly noted my excitement about China in the last year.

Therefore I am pleased to disclose that I have been invited and I have joined advisory board of TargetSource, a newly formed Open Source company based in Beijing.

For more info see TargetSource Official Launch

I will soon interview Peter Cheng, the founder of the company, to share some of his ideas and vision for building Open Source business out of China.