Saturday was the Dallas Tech Fest. Several hundred developers heard presentations on the latest and greatest from several vendors and speakers. Sun was was on the sponsors and I spent a few hours meeting and greeting.

Several people were interested in MySQL but had no idea where to start. MySQL's download page really needs a 'hey, first timers who want to learn MySQL, click here to get the server and GUI tools in one fell swoop'.

As one of the shrinking numbers of CLI-centric dinosaurs, I acknowledge that most of the world prefers point-and-click and the MySQL Administrator makes quick work of many statements that require fussy typing. The Query Browser is also one of those tools that quickly becomes a regular in your arsenal. Add in the Workbench and you have a pretty complete set of tools for designing, administrating, and using your databases.

Then you need a good book on MySQL. I will try to do a …

VirtualBox 1.6 is out. Note that now you can use Mac OS X and Solaris as a host platform. Naturally, having Mac OS X support excites me.

I tried installing a Ubuntu 8.04 server guest. Found a tiny issue - 64-bit guests aren’t supported yet :( So I pulled in the 32-bit ISO, and that installed just fine. Note that PAE support for guests exist now, and this is a good step in the right direction.

Sun’s building an OpenxVM community, which currently focus on xVM and xVM VirtualBox. It also harnesses technologies like Open Service Tag. All in all, I think a lot of MySQL users should be interested in virtualization, as there is a growing amount of hardware out there with many, many cores available for use.

Yesterday I went to beCamp 2008 along with four roomfuls of other people interested in technology (perhaps close to 100 people total). The conference was a lot of fun. Not everything went as planned, but that was as planned. This was an Open Spaces conference and I thought it worked very well. From an email Eric Pugh sent:

Basically it all boils down to:

Open Space is the Law of Two Feet: if anyone finds themselves in a place where they are neither learning nor contributing they should move to somewhere more productive. And from the law flow four principles:

• Whoever comes are the right people
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
…

Last week I wrote an article on InnoDB plugin, which explains how to explore all the new features in the plugin along with comparing different row formats.

The article is live now from here:
http://www.innodb.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/venu-anuganti-article-april-29-2008.html

Thanks to Ken Jacobs, who took the initiative to post the article on the web site.

Update: here is the nicely formatted version:

http://venublog.com/exploring-new-features-in-innodb-plugin-10/

So what's it like now that Sun now owns MySQL? The executive summary: a little weird. I was at the MySQL User Conference a couple of weeks ago and had a chance to talk with a lot of people in the community as well as many MySQL folks. Marten Mickos is now the head of database products at Sun. It's not very hard to figure out what Sun will do with MySQL products for the near future--pretty much what MySQL was doing already.

The real question for a lot of people is what will happen with databases like PostgreSQL and Derby. Sun has invested heavily in both of them, and PostgreSQL in particular is now quite fast. With the MySQL acquisition, Sun has an opportunity to run the table with multiple offerings that cover both enterprise applications as well as web and embedded. However, that would mean cutting down the MySQL roadmap to concentrate, for example, on scale-out rather than scale-up. It would also require thinking big to combine with …

After an email (or two) on the php-general list, (of which I only read the subject), I've created a multi user web based chat system. Here.

Oh the fun. The status bar is irritating though - in that it keeps flashing as it downloads the page (maybe this could be fixed by the use of toilet cleaner, I mean AJAX). Oh and like IRC it will track the converstaion from the time you enter the chat room. And because it refreshes every second, the load average on the server will not be thankful.

O'Reilly's
Make magazine
and the
Maker Faire
that we're hosting today and tomorrow in San Mateo, California have
been described in many ways, ranging from a revival of the
mid-20th-century love for Popular Mechanics magazine to an
exciting new impetus for teaching children about science. During my
six hours there today, I noted its strong connections to powerful and
fundamental human urges toward creation, mastery, and the reproduction
of our own culture.

Some of the Maker Faire centers are devoted to the kind of
do-it-yourself projects shown in our magazine. Anyone from a
four-year-old to a mechanically adept adult can find challenge and
satisfaction at these tables. Projects in another building took a …

O'Reilly's Make magazine and the Maker Faire that we're hosting today and tomorrow in San Mateo, California have been described in many ways, ranging from a revival of the mid-20th-century love for Popular Mechanics magazine to an exciting new impetus for teaching children about science. During my six hours there today, I noted its strong connections to powerful and fundamental human urges toward creation, mastery, and the reproduction of our own culture.

Some of the Maker Faire centers are devoted to the kind of do-it-yourself projects shown in our magazine. Anyone from a four-year-old to a mechanically adept adult can find challenge and satisfaction at these tables. Projects in another building took a big step up, showcasing the brain children of engineers who devoted their spare time to building games and toys or aiding their …

Something that has excited me for a long time with upcoming features in the MySQL Server, is online backup. Since seeing it first being demonstrated by Chuck Bell at the Heidelberg Developers Conference in 2007, I’ve been enthralled. Now you too, can try online backup.

If you’ve not read the Forge Wiki page about it yet, please head over to Online Backup on the Wiki. You can grab the latest source from mysql-6.0-backup from mysql.bkbits.net. If you’ve never built MySQL from source before, go ahead and read Building MySQL from source. And you naturally need to test it once built, so I suggest making use of …

While I was at the MySQL Conference, I sat down with Michael Kimsal of WebDevRadio and recapped the two talks that I gave at the conference.  I have uploaded the slides so you can follow along if you want.

One to a Cluster - The evolution of the dealnews.com architecture.

MySQL Tips and Tricks - Some simple tips and some of the more advanced SQL we use in Phorum.

Thanks Michael.  Any time you need a guest, just let me know.