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.

It is not always easy to scale Drupal -- not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. You need to buy the right hardware, install load balancers, setup MySQL servers in master-slave mode, setup static file servers, setup web servers, get PHP working with an opcode cacher, tie in a distributed memory object caching system like memcached, integrate with a content delivery network, watch security advisories for every component in your system and configure and tune the hell out of everything.

…

"We can do that cheaply, at a high cost."

Looking into InnoDB docs I found list of names of future InnoDB file formats: Antelope, Barracuda, Cheetah, Dragon, Elk, Fox, Gazelle, Hornet, Impala, Jaguar, Kangaroo, Leopard, Moose, Nautilus, Ocelot, Porpoise, Quail, Rabbit, Shark, Tiger, Urchin, Viper, Whale, X, Y and Zebra.

Aren't there animals starting on X and Y?

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If you’re at the MySQL Conference and Expo, you can get a free sample chapter of the upcoming High Performance MySQL Second Edition. Just go to the exhibition area. As you go through the doors, take an immediate left and look for the sample chapter on O’Reilly’s table. It’s a rough draft and contains typos and my incredibly crude drawings instead of those that will go into the final book, but it should serve to give you an idea of the book’s depth and scope. Kudos to Andy Oram, our editor, who was able to get these done for us on very short notice.

Andy Oram, mysqluc2008

Today is the first day at the conference (aside from the tutorials, which were yesterday). Here’s what I went to:

New Subquery Optimizations in 6.0

By Sergey Petrunia. This was a similar session to one I went to last year. MySQL has a few cases where subqueries are badly optimized, and this session went into the details of how this is being addressed in MySQL 6.0. There are several new optimization techniques for all types of subqueries, such as inside-out subqueries, materialization, and converting to joins. The optimizations apply to scalar subqueries and subqueries in the FROM clause. Performance results are very good, depending on which data you choose to illustrate. The overall point is that the worst-case subquery nastiness should be resolved. I’m speaking of WHERE NOT IN(SELECT…) and friends. It remains to be seen how this shakes out as 6.0 matures, and what edge cases will pop up.

The Lost Art Of the Self …

Marketcetera obtains funding. Microsoft posts additional protocol docs. Sun announces MySQL 5.1. (and more)

Marketcetera Closes $4 Million Series A Financing Led by Shasta Ventures, Marketcetera (Press Release)

Microsoft Publicly Posts Additional Protocol Documentation, Microsoft (Press Release)

Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

Sun Celebrates Third-Party MySQL Storage Engines, Sun Microsystems (Press Release)

…

Also in the MySQL Press Releases today but dated for tomorrow is Sun Microsystems Announces MySQL 5.1.

I find the wording clearly a new language from my previous understanding — “pending general availability of MySQL? 5.1″.

We now see the trademark notice, obviously a Sun influence.
We now have a “pending” GA version. MySQL is obviously very keen to release MySQL 5.1 for GA. This was expected at last years’ MySQL conference. Many in the past year have expected this prior to this year’s conference (we are now being informed late Q2 2008). There was an anticipation there would be two RC versions, this is now the third. So what exactly does “pending” mean? Will 5.1.24 be renamed Production if it passes community acceptance (I say community because it’s not an Enterprise release). This would be a …