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 …

This week I’d expected to hear good friend Giuseppe (CCO) Maxia speak about MySQL SandBox at the Hamburg MySQL April Meetup.

This is product I’ve thought about using, wanted to use, but just never got to the point to using. I download the current version 1.18, I had MySQL tar’s already of 5.0, 5.1 and 6.0 and was all ready until the late topic change.

However due to the language barrier in the second talk, I got a one-on-one lesson. Now I know how it works, and understands the strengths I can use it as part of my standard vanilla testing. There are some improvements I could see, something perhaps I can contribute if they allow a Perl part-timer too. The joy of open source is I can add, modify, change and submit my work, if …

I've created a Flickr group for the 2008 MySQL User's Conference & Expo

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mysqluc2008/

If you are going to the UC, please join, and post interesting pictures.

I'm pleased to announce release of Memcached Functions for MySQL version 0.4. This release has a lot of new goodies, including:

New Functions

memc_add()
memc_add_by_key()
memc_cas()
memc_cas_by_key()
memc_set_by_key()
memc_get_by_key()
memc_replace_by_key()
memc_prepend_by_key()
memc_append_by_key()

Install tools
sql/install_functions.sql - installs these functions via simple sql script

utils/install.pl - interactively installs these functions (perl, DBI/DBD::mysql required)

Benchmark

benchmarks/benchmark.pl - simple dumb perl script to set, get, delete N number of objects,
printing out timings (perl, DBI/DBD::mysql, Time::Hires required)

Docs/Info

* More …

There is a Linked In group I created some time ago but forgot to advertise that is for MySQL Speakers and Presenters.

If you a speaker or presenter of MySQL content, confirm your registration here.
You will need to have a reference to a website confirming you have been a speaker at a MySQL Event such as a User Conference, MySQL Camp or Local MySQL Users Group.

Hopefully overtime we can build a consolidated index at MySQL Forge Presently some pages exist including MySQL Conference & Expo and User Group Presentations but I’m accepting input for a model to have a central page, and link to or upload …

David's thoughts on app engine:
http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/04/app-engine-facebook-platform-o.html

What do I think? I think I need to not procrastinate by thinking about Google App Engine, instead of getting work done for the MySQL User's Conference next week.

That is a lost cause.

Here goes:

Google Apps Give people private apps under Google Apps and you will kill off a lot of department applications built around Microsoft's Access. If someone builds a "wizard" for building applications then this would go over gang buster (aka the frameworks that Borland used to build).

Lock In Yes this is the mother of all lockins for platform... or is it? I think some smart developers could build out a look a like framework. You would not have …