April 14-17th is going to be an exciting time. Why? Because the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo is going to be held in Santa Clara, CA. Who would want to miss out on a chance to lurk around, let alone talk to, some of the smartest people in the MySQL world? Well, those who don't have at least $1000+, of course. A 3 day pass to the conference without tutorials costs a whopping $1199. A full pass would dry up your pockets $1499.

Well, "good news everyone". Thanks to Sheeri Cabral of The Pythian Group, PlanetMySQL.org, Jeremy, and, …

We had a workshop in Stockholm in early March to discuss what can be done to innovate MySQL in a number of areas. Most of the work here will not be useful code in yet a year or two and a lot longer before it'll be used in Enterprise Ready binaries. Obviously there is no guarantee that this early work will reach production binaries. This work is part of an aim at advancing the MySQL Architecture in the next few years.

One interesting topic we discussed was Pushdown of Query Fragments to Storage Engine.

A Query Fragment is a piece of an SQL query, for example in a 3-way join any join of 2 tables in this query is a Query Fragment, also the full query is a Query Fragment. As part of this interface the storage engine can decide to perform its own optimising using a new interface or it could rely on the MySQL Server to handle this optimisation. If the Storage Engine decides it can handle the Query Fragment and the optimiser …

The people, plain and simple.

I encourage you, if you are not part of the local MySQL community, then why not? Find a local MySQL Meetup group, attend the MySQL Conference, get online to IRC @ freenode#mysql, subscribe to some lists or read the forums. I didn’t meet these people being an observer, but part of the community.

As I wrote recently with some vacation time and the need to pick the brain of some experts I organized a quick trip to Germany to specifically visit Jan Kneschke and Paul McCullagh to improve my MySQL skills in certain areas on my own time …

My first real chance to meet up with my new colleagues at Sun was an internal technology conference at Sun. It was interesting to listen to what's cooking within Sun.

We got a presentation of Data Centers and their impact on the environment and it immediately triggered me to start thinking of how we can interact with power save functions from the MySQL Code. It was also interesting to see slides on how computer architecture is developing, this can be put into thinking about how the MySQL architecture should progress over the next few years.

On the 13th of March I attended an interesting workshop on techhnology for Genealogy. My interest in this is based on interest in genealogy itself (my family tree contains currently about 3000 persons from various parts of Sweden down to some farmers in northern Sweden born around 1400) and my interest in technology and in particular how MySQL and MySQL Cluster can be used for genealogy applications. Being an LDS myself also adds to my interest in the subject.

The LDS church has developed a Web API FamilySearchAPI where genealogists through their genealogy software can work on a common database where they can add, edit information about our ancestors. The system handling this system currently contains 2.2 PB of data and is going to grow significantly as images and more genealogy information is added.

There were quite a few interesting discussions on how to link information between the source information (scanned images …

This post will focus on the performance tuning work that we've been working on since December 2007 on the Sun T2000 server. We got a nice speedup of 36% with fairly small efforts and we've got good hope we can improve performance a great deal more. This effort is part of a new effort at MySQL to improve performance both on Solaris and Linux platforms and to some extent Windows as well. This report focuses on T2000 using Solaris.

T1000 and T2000 are the first CoolThreads servers from Sun with the UltraSPARC T1 processors. The T1 is very energy efficient, which is extremely important to modern datacenters. On the other hand, leveraging the massive amount of thread-level parallelism (32 concurrent threads) provided by the CoolThreads servers is the key to getting good performance. As the CoolThreads servers are used by many Sun customers to run web facing workloads, making sure that MySQL runs well on this platform is important to Sun and …

A new MySQL Users Conference is coming up again. MySQL was acquired recently by Sun Microsystems and thus innovation within will happen at an even faster rate than previously. The Users Conference will contain a lot of interesting presentations on how to develop your MySQL Applications. So come to Santa Clara 15-17 April to take part of the development and discuss with many MySQLers how MySQL will be developed in the next few years. I've prepared a set of blogs that I will publish over the next few days to give you an idea of what's cooking within MySQL and I hope some of these blogs can persuade you to come there and give your opinion on where the future development should be heading.

Personally I'll add my contribution to the talks at the MySQL Users Conference what to think about when building a high performance application based on MySQL Cluster. MySQL Cluster technology has matured over the last few years and is being used in …

Lately, I've been trying to keep up with at least one of the MySQL Forums: Partitioning.It's a great way to keep on top of issues surrounding partitioning, and also get an idea of what people are trying to do with the new 5.1 feature. Richard came up with an interesting problem that I jumped into only to realize that I hadn't done my homework, and my initial suggestion wouldn't work at all due

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Last November, I became an employee of MySQL Inc, which was owned by MySQB AB.

A few weeks ago, MySQL AB and MySQL Inc etc et al became wholly owned by Sun Microsystems, which immediately started rapidly digesting this new corporate M&A meal.

As of today, I am now an employee of Sun Microsystems.

For the most part, for the time being, nothing changes. I do the same kind of work, have the same lovely workplace (an array of local cafes), and the same annoying business travel. (And the same expense reporting "system". Ugh!)

We shall see what does change, next.

But for now, when someone asks me what my job is, my short answer will remain "I work on MySQL".