Last week saw MySQL User Conference 2008 in Santa Clara, but I was not able to make time for it this year either. However, in the wake of Sun's acquisition of MySQL, it was very interesting to follow what was going on. A few things that caught my attention:

MySQL 5.1 is nearing General Availability and an interesting storage engine plugin ecosystem starts to emerge. It's this latter, but related event that I see as the first real sign of validation for MySQL's long-ago chosen path of pluggable storage systems instead of focused effort on making one good general-use engine.

Oracle/Innobase announced InnoDB Plugin for MySQL 5.1, which much-awaited features which promise a great deal of help for daily management headaches. More than that, InnoDB Plugin's release under …

Apache has a neat module called mod_dbd that allows your Apache modules to connect to a database. mod_dbd interfaces with apr_dbd, an Apache Portable Runtime (APR) abstraction layer around database specific drivers.

Back when Ubuntu 7.04 (fiesty) was released, a MySQL driver was not bundled with Apache for licensing concerns. So, in order to use mod_dbd to connect to a MySQL database, you need to get the MySQL driver source code from WebThing (apr_dbd_mysql.c) and manually re-compile apr-utils.

You also need the source code for Apache 2.2.3 (which includes apr-utils 1.2.7) from the Ubuntu 7.04 repositories, then copy the apr_dbd_mysql.c file into the Apache source …

Marten Mickos was profiled in this past weekend's San Jose Mercury News, the prominent Silicon Valley newspaper.  (In fact, they have the domain name www.SiliconValley.com among others.)

Integrating with Sun's products is an attractive thing, but it's not the main idea. The main idea of the acquisition and of our business generally is to be the platform for the Web economy. Now, with the help of Sun, we will be able to accelerate this.

We had in our field organization 200 people; Sun has 17,000. We have a lot of usage in the big corporations, but we haven't been able to sell to them and become key vendors for them yet. With Sun, we get instant access to the big Fortune 500 and Fortune 2000 customers.

And to those who do want more than the …

At the 2008 MySQL Conference and Expo, The Pythian Group gave away EXPLAIN cheatsheets. They were very nice, printed in full color and laminated to ensure you can spill your coffee* on it and it will survive.

For those not at the conference, or those that want to make more, the file is downloadable as a 136Kb PDF at explain-diagram.pdf

* or tea, for those of us in the civilized world.

During the conf, Keith Murphy spent long late-night hours getting issue 4 of MySQL Magazine ready.
Horay to Keith for starting (and continuing) that initiative!



(I snapped this pic of Keith + Monty at the MySQL Community dinner)

Read this doc on Scribd: Record every Referral for Flickr Realtime

Looks like the InnoDB plugin is completely broken with MySQL-5.1.24; at least there is no luck for me so far to set it up right. First, the Makefile is broken. Second, I tried to do a static build of InnoDB plugin with MySQL server (–enable-innodb and –with-plugin-innobase) resulted in partial InnoDB plugins (Information schema) missing the main one as shown below:

   1:  mysql> show plugins;

2:  +---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------+---------+

3:  | Name                | Status | Type               | Library | License |

4:  +---------------------+--------+--------------------+---------+---------+

5:  | …

In probably the best move by Sun during the whole MySQL Conference and Expo, Rich Green and Jonathan Schwartz turned up at the Community Dinner on the Sunday night before the conference.

As we walked into the restaurant I saw a face that I thought was familiar. Jonathan and Rich were standing outside the restaurant talking. However, only when we got inside did I hear Jay saying that that was Jonathan Schwartz.

So just before we all took our places, and while we were trying to work out how we were going to organize payment for the dinner, Rich and Jonathan turned up and quickly ended the discussion. Rich said his credit card would be good for the tab. So thanks to …

I thought I had already conquered the jet lag last night when I fell asleep at 22:00 (that's 10 pm...). But then I woke up somewhere around 2:30, read a book for a while until I decided to give up and have a nice breakfast. I kind of like jet lag though, it is a nice feeling to get out of bed 5:30, when no one else is awake, and birds are singing outside.

There would be a lot to tell about the conference, but you kind of find summaries from many live bloggers on Planet MySQL. One interesting aspect of the conference of course was to meet so many interesting people, many of whom I work with of course, but meeting them in flesh is still great. And Santa Clara being in Silicon Valley adds another funny revelational feeling to it all. For a European Yahoo, Google, Digg and others are Internet companies and seeing that they actually do have tangible offices in Silicon Valley was a …

Jay’s opening lines regarding the final MySQL Conference keynote speaker was: “I work with a lot of data. I think peta-bytes, maybe exa-bytes”. This was relating to Jacek Becla from the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, giving his presentation on “The Science and Fiction of Petascale Analytics”.

The goal of the Large Synoptics Survey Telescope (LSST) is the storage of 50+ PB of images and 20+ PB data.
Let’s just clarify the size. 20 PB of data = 20 years of HD Movies = 2000 years of 128kb MP3

The next database frontier is obviously building huge databases. What part will MySQL or other relational databases play? Some interesting facts were.

• The Digital Universe Created 161 Exabytes of data last year.
• Google, processes 20 petabytes of data per day.

The Operational plan for LSST Project Timeline is 10 years, only starting in 2014. The timeline: