MySQL just gave me an award at this morning’s keynote, along with Sheeri Kritzer Cabral (for the second year in a row!) and Diego Medina, for my code contributions to the MySQL community, specifically Maatkit, which makes it easier to make MySQL reliable, fast, and robust. It’s an honor to be recognized. And while I could leave it at that, I’d like to say a word or two more. The economy, community, and ecosystem that’s building around Free Software can often be very rewarding financially.

There are quite a few business angles you might see only if you’re here at the conference, and you won’t get from blogs. For example, let’s take a look at the contents of the shoulder bags they hand out with your registration. (This is only a partial list.) SnapLogic’s flyer gets it right: their system is compatible with “GNU Linux.” Hooray, a commercial company acknowledging the GNU operating system for what it is!

We’re hosting the Silicon Valley MySQL Meetup tonight at the MySQL Conference and Expo venue in Ballroom D in Santa Clara, CA. We start at 7pm and run about 2 hours. Come on down!

No, this is not a blog about Computational Fluid Dynamics - my least favorite subject in college. This is about a more exciting (sorry mechanical engineers!) CFD: Customer Facing Data. This is the data that is typically available on the website of an organization that their customers interact with. CFD can range all the way from profiles of users on a social networking site such as Facebook to the customer information database of an e-commerce company such as Travelocity.

CFD represents today’s data protection challenge. Probably the biggest challenge while planning a backup solution for CFD is that it is very hard to figure out what to plan for. You might be starting with a very small database which might grow much more rapidly than what you think. If the data can be segmented based on users or some other characteristic, then you will find that your databases may scale-out instead of scale-up. Also, rate of change can …

Even though I didn’t go to MySQL conf this year (really sad about this), this week is gonna be most active in the community so I decided to do some community stuff too Today I’ve released version 0.3 of our innodb recovery toolkit. Now it became much faster, stable and accurate. At this moment it is possible to recover almost any table from corrupted/deleted tablespace without so much effort as it was before. Here is a short changes list (since 0.1 announced here):

• More MySQL data types added: DECIMAL (both old and new), DATE, TIME
• CHAR data type handling improved in table definitions generator
• Indexes filtering added to page_parser
• 64-bit stat() support added to all tools
• Linux has no isnumber() function so we define our own …

This is a continuation of the MySQL User Conference replication notes part one.

The session is opening up talking about failover. The shared disk in this case is drbd. DRBD is a fine product for replicating block devices of single disk systems. It’s made redundant by raid and doesn’t provide as much protection as binary log failover. You can find my notes on why I don’t recomment DRBD for MySQL in drbd in the real world.

Lars went a bit quick through the other two configurations. I’ll try to review the slides and post comments.

The next configuration is using federated. The federated storage engine has many problems that make it almost useless for any production deployment. Mats says, “Federated isn’t the fastest engine in the world”. That’s an understatement. Join on two tables as they describe it is almost …

During this week, expect there to be a flood of posts on Planet MySQL. If you’re using an offline RSS reader, you might not even get all the RSS feeds (might I suggest something like Google Reader?). If you want to be informed as and when something hits Planet MySQL (say, on your mobile phone or via IM), there’s a Twitter feed available - Planet MySQL on Twitter!

Also, on the wiki, I’m trying to keep track of all blog posts (notes) from the conference. Please do help, if something slips to the cracks. Its organised by day, and and by talk topic. All slides will obviously make it to the conference page after the conference is over, so there will be further linking a little later…

If you’re hip and have a Facebook account, do become a member of the …

Here is the quick notes from MySQL Cluster by Stewart Smith session that I attended today in the MySQL conference 2008.

• What it is
  • Clustering of in memory databases in a shared-nothing system
  • Designed for HA, 99.9% Uptime (not really) and sub-second failover
  • Supports Hot (online) consistent backup along with compression
  • No locks are used during the backup as NDB uses a global counters
• Think as virtual file system
• Redundancy
  • NoOfReplicas (1,2,3,4), For production use 1 or 2 but don’t use any other as it may have bugs (2 is preferred and well tested mode)
  • 1 means no redundancy (a node fails and cluster fails)
  • 2 means two copies …

I’m at the MySQL Conference and the t-shirts I created for Maatkit have arrived. Come get yours! They are high-quality, attractive shirts you’ll be proud to wear, and they are a nice rich wine-red color.

Harrison Fisk (co-author of MySQL Clustering) got the first one, because he told me that he recommends Maatkit to MySQL Support customers about twice a week. I made sure to save one for Jay Pipes too, because his luggage got lost so he has nothing to wear. Unfortunately, I didn’t make any Maatkit underwear, sorry Jay. Now I know what to do for next year…

…

Today is the opening day of the MySQL User Conference - so I thought I'd describe a recent customer interaction related to the acquisition.

A few weeks ago, I was visiting the Chief Information Officer of a large commercial institution. He had with him the company's Chief Technology Officer, Chief Information Security Officer (known as the "see-so"), and a series of lieutenants from various parts of their (large) development organization.

The Sun team had spent the day reviewing our progress together, and was finishing up with a product roadmap presentation. From what I sensed, it'd been a good day, so when I arrived, it was mostly to say thanks for the business, and ensure everyone had my contact info in the event I could help out going forward.

We had just closed the acquisition of …