This week is the annual MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara and I'm happy to report that we have hit record numbers with more exhibitors (over 50) and more attendees (over 2,000) than ever before. Monday was primarily tutorials as well as our Customer Advisory Board and partner meetings. Those are great sessions as we get tons of input from bleeding edge customers including some of the world's largest web sites, retailers, telecommunications customers and software ISVs and OEMs who embed MySQL. It's a "no BS zone" in that we have product management and lots of developers there to... READ MORE

I prefer to install mySQL using the pre-compiled binaries. Depending on the environment, these usually go in either /opt or /usr/local. When you choose this type of install, chances are you are going to need to ensure that you somehow configure your system so that the mysql binaries end up in your PATH. If you are [...]

• Paul McCullagh presents
• BLOB
  • invented by Jim Starkey
  • Basic Large OBject
  • Binary Large OBject
  • photos, films, mp4 files, pdfs, etc
• how MySQL handles BLOBs
  • mysql client send buffer -> receive buffer on the server (max_allowed_packet)
  • streaming a BLOB
    • continuous data stream
    • stream BLOB data directly in and out of the database
    • store BLOBs of any size (>4GB) in the database
    • create a scalable back-end that can handle any throughput and storage requirements. Wouldn't need to know in advance how big the database will get
    • provide an open system that can be used by all engines
    • provide extensions for …

Architecture of Maria: A New Storage Engine with a Transactional Design

Goals of Maria:

• 
  
• ACID compliant
  
• MVCC, transactional
  
• default non-transactional and default transactional storage engine for MySQL
  
• MyISAM replacement, including temporary table use
  
• Storage engine good for data warehousing.
  
• Allow any length transactions to take place
  
• all indexes should have equal speed (clustered indexes are not in the plan)
  
• log shipping — incremental backups just by copying the logs
  
• used as a standalone library
  
• fast count(*)
  
• allow copying of Maria tables between different Maria servers
  
• Better blob handling (than MyISAM) — no memory copying, or extra memory used for blobs on INSERT/UPDATE
  
…

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 …