I had a chance to visit the Kickfire booth after the keynotes and before the first presentation. They gave me a kicking t-shirt, followed by a presentation on the newly announced Kickfire appliance (now in beta, shipping in Fall 2008). Here are some notes I jotted down:

• von Neumann bottleneck
• SQL chip (SQC), packs the power of 10s of conventional CPUs
• Query parallelization on the chip
• On-chip memory - 64GB. No registers - no von Neumann bottleneck
• Beats the performance of a given 3 server, 32 CPU, 130TB box (1TB of actual data - space is used for distributing IO)
• SQC uses column-store, compression, intelligent indexing
• SQL Chip, PCI connection, plugs into a Linux server
  • SQL execution
  • Memory management
  • Loader acceleration
• KDB (Kickfire storage engine), plugs into MySQL …

Baron Schwartz gave a most interesting talk about EXPLAIN. You will definitely want to read his slides (filled with detail), when they make their way online. These notes are very sparse, just bits that I didn’t see in the slides, that Baron mentioned verbally. Plenty of good questions, and plenty of interaction.

EXPLAIN only works for SELECT queries.

How does MySQL execute queries? Optimisation happens even as the query is being executed. As the query is being optimised, some execution happens as well. Execution Plan is a data structure, not bytecode.

When EXPLAIN’s output is generated, MySQL actually executes the query. It just set’s DESCRIBE on it, rather than executing it. Everything is a JOIN to MySQL (union, SELECT 1 [simplest base case join], etc…).

key_len - to know if your table is indexed well.

rows: estimated number of rows to read, but not the number of rows in the result set. In 5.1 …

Here is the presentation material I used for my "Testing PHP/MySQL Applications with PHPUnit/DbUnit" presentation at the MySQL Conference in Santa Clara, CA today.

| View | Upload your own

A PDF version of the presentation is available here, notes by Joe Stump (Digg.com) are …

• Baron Schwartz presents
• only works for SELECTs
• nobody dares admit if they've never seen EXPLAIN
• MySQL actually executes the query
• at each JOIN, instead of executing the query, it fills the EXPLAIN result set
• everything is a JOIN (even SELECT 1)
• Columns in EXPLAIN
  • id: which SELECT the row belongs to
  • select_type
    • simple
    • subquery
    • derived
    • union
    • union result
  • table: the table accessed or its alias
  • type:
    • join
    • range
    • …
  • possible_keys: which indexes looked useful to the …

Speaker: Mike Zinner

Developed a design tool called DBDesigner4 as his own schema design tool, had 1.5 million downloads. Tool was built on Delphi, became outdated. Project brought him to the attention of MySQL AB, resulted in a job offer.

After signing on he began work on basic MySQL GUI tools such as MySQL Administrator, MySQL Query Browser, Migration Toolkit, and MySQL Windows installer and configuration wizard.

Project existed from DBDesigner, then in 2005 a preview version of Workbench was released. Workbench was re-architected in 2007-2008 and was released in April 2008.

Workbench is a fully featured schema design tool for MySQL developers. Two editions: one open source and one commercial. Commercial version has additional functionality.

Intended for developers, architects, DBAs.

Provides schema design features, schema documentation features, database sync, schema validation, internal …

In case anyone is wondering, I will be at two birds of a feather sessions today, one with the PHP/Zend crowd and another with the good folks over at Wavemaker.

MySQL and PHP: Joined at the Hip

It's no secret I'm a huge fan of PHP, so it should be no surprise I'll be joining the fun over in Ballroom H, from 7:30-8:30pm tonight to discuss all things PHP and MySQL.

Be a Web 2.0 Rock Star

OK, I'm a sucker for competitions, and this one definitely looks like fun!

It's Tuesday evening, tonight, April 15, at 8:30 in Ballroom E. For rock stars, compete against other Ajax experts to build the coolest Web 2.0 app in 30 minutes and win your very own copy of the Rock Band video game. For newbies, get an up-close look at the latest Ajax …

So, I have been mistaken in thinking that the MySQL Conference web system was set up for providing online feedback for speakers. Apparently, there is a 3rd party online service in use for providing speaker feedback. The link to it is available here.

Cheers. I'm off to run more benchmarks for tomorrow's presentation with Tobias.

The slides from my tutorial yesterday are up at develooper.com. 189 slides this year! A handful of people have told me today (and more yesterday obviously) that they learned a lot and got new ideas for how to build things - yay!

I’m considering putting up a version of the slides with sound. Would anyone want a 3 hour quicktime movie of that?

Well, maybe split up into smaller bits, but you get the idea. You wouldn’t get the hand waving, but you would get a bunch more detail, obviously.

I actually had audio recorded, but I haven’t checked how it came out, yet, and I’d have to make a synchronized movie version of the slides (and …

A

We are proud to announce that MySQL Workbench has reached GA (General Availability)
status and the final version - 5.0.19 - is available on our mirrors.

We managed to get another 32 bugs fixed since the last Release Candidate and hopefully there aren’t many still hidden in our code. We are planning to release a new Version of Workbench every three weeks so if new bugs are found and reported we’ll fix them and supply a improved build quickly.

Get a copy of our OSS Edition from Servers now and start designing your databases.
If you want all the time-saving features (including direct connection to DB, Validation of your models, …) you could invest 99 USD on the Standard Edition - please go to http://shop.mysql.com and get your license there! (Our web-shop is currently being prepared so Workbench will be available there at 4pm PST)