Once again I spent a week in the San Francisco Bay Area. This time around it was for LugRadio Live USA 2008 and the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008.

I flew in on April 12 (from FRA via LAX to SJC) and arrived in the hotel, the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, in the afternoon.

The next morning I left the hotel around 7:00 in the morning for a genuine experience of what they call public transportation in the bay area. It took me three hours to travel the distance of …

*Disclosure: I am an advisor to TargetSource see: TargetSource Official Launch

1. How did you get started?

After 7 years effort on open source community and 3 years business practice on open source services in China, we think it is a right time for us to start up TargetSource. More and more companies always ask us to help them to solve problems when they use open source, sometime if you are just a individual, it is not a long term strategy for company to get support on open source software. That’s why we started TargetSouce, an open source service company which delivers to end customers by a global collaboration network with partners base on the open source software.

2. What is your product?

TargetSource strategy is not building a single open source component or product such as JBoss, hibernate, Spring or so. From our …

With assistance from Antony Curtis who spent some coding time with me at the conf, and a number of helpful other individuals (Monty, Sergei, Timour, Igor, patg, Stewart, Brian, Mark, Paul, and others) who answered questions and looked things up, the earlier backend demo can now be executed from a MySQL 5.1 server with the OQGRAPH Engine plugin loaded. In other words, the basic glue has been completed, and the prototype works. Thanks all!

This was later in the week, so at the BoF Tuesday night we still had to make do with paper and the backend test tool, but Thursday evening and Friday I was able to demonstrate the real thing, including at the post-conf MySQL unconference at Google HQ. I was happy to see good interest in the GRAPH engine, and also received some very useful …

It seems there is interesting problem with compatibility of MySQL binaries and binaries of third-party plugins.

I personally found and there is confirmation from InnoDB team that current InnoDB-plugin binaries do not work with lastest 5.1.24-rc binaries. It was very charming move from MySQL side to release new incompatible binary on the second day after the announce of InnoDB plugin. I do not think it was intentional, but still looks funny and shows broken communication between teams.

The more interesting becomes from Sergei Golubchik presentation on MySQL Conference, where Sergei says that in current API "versioning binds a plugin binary to specific server release". That simply means that InnoDB has to release binary for each binary of MySQL. I suppose it should …

(I really can't be stuffed referring to the "mysql conf and expo", to me it's the mysql conf).

Jay, thanks for a great conference! It was good "being back" and catching up with so many friendly community faces, and all my ex-colleagues among them. My own photos from the event are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/arjen-lentz/tags/mysqlconf08/, all tagged with 'mysqlconf08' to fit in with Mark Atwood's Flickr group.

I was present when Florian Haas (of LINBIT - DRBD) was asked by a conf delegate whether he thought the conference had been successful for him in a business sense. I wholeheartedly agree with his response, which was "Euh, let me think... hell yea!". I think that summarises it very well ;-)

Now to go on dealing with the joys and risks of (rapid) business expansion... Open Query is doing …

I was able to catch up with Mr. Bono Jacon Jono Bacon, Ubuntu community manager, not long after he and his miscreant buddies that call themselves "LugRadio" had hosted their very first "Rock Conference" in the U.S aka LugRadio Live USA 2008 

My interview with Jono (12:53)  Listen (Mp3)   Listen (ogg)
(a bit of background noise from tech-hooligans for the first couple minutes but then it goes away)

…

In a despicable business practice, I received a message from a PR Firm representing Ingres. Now, I even wrote about the controversy that seems to have swept the open source community; but even my writings were not completely factually correct — I wrote that even if online backups were closed it was not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The actual parts of the online backup that are not open source and free are compression and encryption — that is all.

So really, we are talking about a very small part of backup. The last I saw most people used their own compressing (ie, | gzip -c) and encryption for backups. And honestly, I would rather use tried and true compression and encryption than something new that MySQL comes up with, so I do not even see most people wanting compression nor encryption.

But that’s besides the point. If Ingres thinks they can win customers over by swooping in when a controversy is happening, …

While at the MySQL Conf, I bought an Apple Time Capsule (1TB). I like it. It does appear that at least an initial time Machine backup eats significant swap space; not RAM as such, I have 4GB in my MacBook and it's not used up at all...

Anyway, OS X cleans up the (encrypted) swap files in /private/var/vm on startup. However, I tend to not reboot my machine a lot, since just closing the lid has a near-100% survival rate (one of the reasons I use a Mac). So now I have these swap files hogging my diskspace. Right now I have 20 of about 1M. Of course, the same directory also holds the 'sleepimage' which with my amount of RAM is over 4GB in itself. Anyway, I'd rather not have OS X eat up 2GB of my disk until I decide to reboot - and I really don't want to reboot!

So, anyone have an idea on how to get rid of old swap files without rebooting? I've found info online about completely disabling swap, but that is (even with 4GB RAM) …

Supplementary Characters
MySQL 6.0 New Features Document#1
2008-04-20

MySQL 6.0.5 is about to appear on the “MySQL 6.0 Downloads” page http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/6.0.html

This is MySQL’s alpha version, not to be confused with MySQL 5.1, which has been ‘release candidate’ for a while. The big 6.0 features are “online backup”, “Falcon”, and “supplementary characters”. This document is about the new supplementary characters feature.

What

Since MySQL 4.1, MySQL has supported two Unicode character sets, ucs2 and utf8. Luckily we don’t have to explain all about “Unicode” because there’s good definition and explanation. So if you need help with Unicode in general, read here:
http://www.unicode.org (Unicode reference)
or here:
…

At the moment, there are two big features in the works in MySQL optimizer - Subquery optimizations and Batched Key Access. While the former is a part of MySQL 6.0, I wrote about it here in my blog, and so forth, the latter was in nearly stealth mode until a couple of weeks ago.

That's no longer the case:

• Batched Key Access source code is now published as mysql-6.0-bka-preview tree.
• Igor Babaev, the author of the feature, gave a talk about Batched Key Access at MySQL User Conference, and the slides are available here.
• There is now …