This year’s conference has a great lineup. As usual, with 8 sessions concurrently, it’s impossible to pick which ones I want to see. However, I did learn a few things from last year’s conference, which I think will help me get more out of it this time.

Number one rule: not all sessions are created equal. I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure that when you see “How Product X Will Scale Your Databases” presented by a person from Company X, you can reasonably suspect that Company X is paying for this privilege, and it’s not really a session as much as a product demo. These sessions were not reviewed and voted on by the community (I know, because I was one of the community members who were asked to review and vote on proposals. Maybe I’m being a whistle-blower and won’t get this honor next year as a result…)

Number two rule: if the description is vague, or if it sounds like regurgitation, I’m skeptical. For …

By the way, the entry counter at Planet MySQL stands at 9982. Which blogger will capture the illustrious 10,000th entry, and will MySQL hand out a prize? I think it's worthy, Planet MySQL has proven to be a great resource over the years.

Of course, there have been more posts, but prior to me setting up the current software infrastructure (March 2004), there was no archiving of old posts. Actually, it'd be great to be able to search the archives. Fairly simple to implement, MySQL Community team just needs to put the code out there so anyone external can do it. I'm happy to be embarassed (it's my code ;-) so no worries there.

But let's see, so it's been about 4 years, that's 2500 entries per year, about 48 entries per week. Not bad! I asked Lenz some time ago if he could run a query to show the trend of # of queries per week/month over time, also split out between …

There has been some discussion recently regarding the death of MySQL Read Replication starting with Brian Aker and then Farhan, Arjen and Paul have all chimed in. Whatever you want to call it, the next generation of replication approach is clearly on the agenda of the industry leaders and pack followers. We should take a programmatic look however and ask ourselves a few questions. Such as:

1. The Use — What is/was MySQL Replication used for?
2. The Reasons — Why was it used?
3. The Problems — Why is there a need for something better, different or …

I’d like to welcome you all to Kickfire. My name is Raj Cherabuddi. I am the co-founder and CEO. Joe Chamdani, my co-founder, and I founded Kickfire back in 2006. Since then we, along with our amazing team, have been working extremely hard to bring a revolutionary new technology to market which we believe will change the way people think of data warehousing.

Joe and I have worked together for the last 13 years. We met when we were both lead architects on Sun’s SPARC processors. What has continued to inspire us over the years is a passion for daunting technical challenges with the potential to create paradigm shifts in the marketplace. In our first company, Sanera, the breakthrough was to bring a high-performance networking architecture to the multi-protocol SAN world resulting in the most scalable SAN switch of its time. This success is proven by the fact that Sanera’s products, now part of Brocade, can be found in thousands of …

I set Antony Curtis (former MySQL colleague, and he recently moved to Google) a little challenge before the conf, can he make his external stored procedure framework support Lua? This will hinge on whether Lua is truly thread-safe and does not have evil mutexes hiding in its inner depths.

Antony responded that, if indeed it's thread-safe, it should only be a matter of hours. That'd be cool.... the standard stored proc language, while standard, is really nothing more than basic with a gross hangover. It's not pretty or flexible, writing longer procedures is like .... I dunno what would compare, but it's painful. The problem is just finding something threadsafe and small enough to get embedded, otherwise it requires external infrastructure. Lua would be ideal. We'll see!

Lua is of course also used in …

This year’s conference has a great lineup. As usual, with 8 sessions concurrently, it’s impossible to pick which ones I want to see. However, I did learn a few things from last year’s conference, which I think will help me get more out of it this time. Number one rule: not all sessions are created equal. I can’t say for sure, but I’m pretty sure that when you see “How Product X Will Scale Your Databases” presented by a person from Company X, you can reasonably suspect that Company X is paying for this privilege, and it’s not really a session as much as a product demo.

Zack is kindly humouring me, he's put up a new quickpoll on the MySQL dev zone (results) asking people what they're most looking forward to at the MySQL Conf. One of the choices is "Dinner with Arjen" ;-)
Thanks for the exposure, Zack! Of course it's not really just dinner with me, it's dinner with a great gang of MySQL Community people, about 30 at the time I'm writing this but new names adding all the time (well I often have to add them, since the forge wiki appears a tad broken on the login front right now - but I was registered and logged in already - I don't suppose Jay or Colin have time this week to fix up whatever's the prob there).
Even if …

As written here and here I’ve been working on a MySQL Proxy Lua module that transparently splits up tables into multiple partitions and rewriting all queries to go to the right partition.

I finally got everything together to release a 0.1 version. Go on and download, try and read more about HSCALE 0.1.

All this started out as a prototype just to see if it could be done. And after adopting parts of our main product to use partitions via HSCALE + MySQL Proxy (which was an easy task, we just had to rewrite a few out of hundreds of statements) I really think that this could work out in a larger scale.

What Will Come Next?

Just a …

What could be more of an incentive to attend the MySQL Conference & Expo in Santa Clara next week than to know that you could get a pair of genuine MySQL boxer shorts?   They have the official "freedom to work anywhere" motto on them, because, well, if you're working at home, you may as well work in your boxers.  (This is not recommended for those who work in an office.)

This past weekend I was in Utah for the first ever Open Source Goat Rodeo (OSGR) gathering organized by rabid open source ski-cowboy and pie-maker extraordinaire …

Good vibes from Hamburg and Berlin. My colleagues Barbara May, Lenz Grimmer and Jörg Brühe did an excellent job of organizing the event and beating the drum.
Both events were held at the local Sun offices, where we were received warmly with friendship, food, and beverages.
I noticed a common pattern in both places. The audience looked shy and uncooperative in the beginning, and very few questions were asked during the presentation. Shyness? Language barrier? (I was speaking in English while the other speakers were using the local language) Who knows. But things changed dramatically and for the better after the presentation, when all were ushered to the adjoining room where food and beverages were provided generously. The language barrier, if ever existed, disappeared, and questions rained from everywhere.
Perhaps serving beer before the event (like it happened in Paris) is the right path. We'll keep this in mind for the next …