I spent the day Thursday with some of Kickfire’s engineers at their headquarters. In this article, I’d like to go over a little of the system’s architecture and some other details.

Everything in quotation marks in this article is a quote. (I don’t use quotes when I’m glossing over a technical point — at least, not in this article.)

Even though I saw one of Kickfire’s engineers running queries on the system, they didn’t let me actually take the keyboard and type into it myself. So everything I’m writing here is still second-hand knowledge. It’s an unreleased product that’s in very rapid development, so this is understandable.

Kickfire’s TPC-H benchmarks are now published, so you can see the results of what I’ve been seeing them work on. They …

Got sidetracked in a major way the past few weeks, so “of the day” became something of a misnomer. Hoping to get back on track, here’s a rundown of the latest posts.

Since we’ve had this break anyway, I’m also resetting the “week” to start on Mondays.

(See this post for background information on MySQL Function of the Day)

Week Five:

• Monday, April 7th, 2008: DATE_ADD() :: MySQL Function of the Day
• Tuesday, April 8th, 2008: IFNULL :: MySQL Function of the Day

Week Four

• Wednesday, March 26th, 2008: FORMAT()
• Thursday, March 27th, 2008: …

For years I’ve been against blogging about work and what I do. As has been shown in the press time and time again, you can get in some fairly serious trouble about blogging on work issues and subjects. At BioWare which is a typical closed-source company I always felt a certain self-imposed taboo about talking on what I, my team, or BioWare in general was up to.

However, now I work for an open-source company and in some part I am encouraged to blog and to blog about the things we are doing (within reason, I am subject to most company rules and regulations on blogging, but heck, even my CEO, Jonathan Schwartz blogs). If MySQL has a giant blogging culture, then by sheer size and number we pale in comparison to the bloggers at Sun Microsystems.

If you regularly read my irregularly …

It has finally happened! The first public release of the MySQL plug-in for Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control is out.

It’s been a while since I first started to work on this, first as part of the Grid Control Extensibility article that I wrote for IOUG SELECT Magazine in 2006 (thanks to John Kanagaraj for encouraging me to write it), and then later as part of a demo for my …

I finally made it yesterday in Santa Clara. My flight on Saturday got cancelled, so I missed the party on Sunday at Marten Mickos' place.. I really looked forward to that, well maybe next year!
Today, Monday, the first day, it started nicely with breakfast meeting lots of colleagues and getting registered. We got a small bag with some spa.. flyers, and stuff. The coffee is good. At least I'm awake.
Right now Jan Kneschke is talking about MySQL Proxy together with Giuseppe Maxia. It started with the command:
 mysql> make coffee;
Woohoo!!!

eWeek April 15, 2008SQL Chip Gives MySQL Data Warehouse Boost (http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Database/SQL-Chip-Gives-MySQL-Data-Warehouse-Boost/)

Yesterday we started the conference early with MySQL Community Dinner which was quite a success with about 30-50 people showing up (hard to count as people come and go) even though it was conflicting with Silicon Valley MySQL Meetup and which at least prevented Jeremy and his team showing up.
UPDATE: What I was thinking… There the meetup is today, but still I did not see Jeremy on the party yesterday.

To my surprise Jonathan Schwartz (Sun CEO) and Rich Green (VP of Software - boss of Marten Mickos) showed up and showed up at exactly right time - when we were discussing how the bill should be handled for such event. Rich Green introduced himself with something like “We just bought the company for 1 Billion so we can …

Xaprb April 15, 2008A Different Angle on the MySQL Conference (http://www.xaprb.com/blog/2008/04/15/a-different-angle-on-the-mysql-conference)

It is finally exam time at the Users Conference. The Magnolia Room where the exams will be given is just past the escalators in the lobby area. Over 20,000 pieces of paper have go into the exams and two staplers were sacrificed in preparation for the six exam sessions. As you can see from the photo, we have plenty of seating just ready for you.

Actually I have been giving exams since Sunday to MySQL Employees who are going to be busy working during the normal exam time.

If you are at the UC, please be sure to stop by to say hello to Christi, Ricky, and me. And thank you for your support of MySql.

MySQL MagazineApril 15, 2008Introducing Kickfire (http://www.paragon-cs.com/mag/issue4.pdf)