I’m at the MySQL Conference and the t-shirts I created for Maatkit have arrived. Come get yours! They are high-quality, attractive shirts you’ll be proud to wear, and they are a nice rich wine-red color. Harrison Fisk (co-author of MySQL Clustering) got the first one, because he told me that he recommends Maatkit to MySQL Support customers about twice a week. I made sure to save one for Jay Pipes too, because his luggage got lost so he has nothing to wear.

Hello everyone who is attending MySQLConf 2008!

I am finally able to announce when and where the Pythian BoF session has been scheduled! It will be in the Alameda room, 7:30-8:30pm on Tuesday, April 15th.

The session, titled “Ask the Pythian Maestro”, will be attended by myself and our two MySQL team leads, Sheeri K. Cabral and Augusto Bott.

This should be a fun session and hopefully people will show up. Attendees will get to:

• Schmooze with Augusto, Sheeri, and I, ask us your technical questions and find out if we know what we’re talking about
• Meet active Pythian customers - I have just been informed of the schedule and I am hopeful that several can attend
• Find out what it’s like to work at Pythian if that’s what you’re in to
• Find out what it’s like to have Pythian as …

Friday afternoon, I met with Tetsuro Ikeda-san and Teruyoshi Hazama-san of MySQL’s long-time key partner in Japan, Sumisho. Ikeda-san and Hazama-san taught me about their work on full text search in Japanese.

Senna is an engine for fast full text search in Japanese. The Senna project derives its name from Formula I driver Ayrton Senna. “But he’s dead”, I protested. “Sure, but he is a legend and will always be associated with speed.” I cannot protest there — and the numbers I saw for Senna’s full-text search defend the choice of name.

Tritonn is the combination of Senna into MySQL. The Tritonn name refers to two things: Triton Square in Tokyo, where Sumisho has its offices, and to the fact …

My Japan trip was full of meetings, as trips to Japan usually are. One of the most interesting ones was at Sun Microsystems K.K.’s site, with a number of people engaged in building Japanese communities for Sun.

Takashi Shitamichi, Yoko Suga, Natsuki Wakabayashi, Jim Grisanzio,
Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Satoshi Kawai, myself, Toshiro Umetsu, Takanobu Masuzuki

From Jim Grisanzio and others, I learned that Japan is Sun’s most active blogging country outside the US, on blogs.sun.com. And I got reminded of the messages heard many times at numerous Sun meetings: That Sun has Community experts both in Marketing and Engineering. On the contrary, MySQL’s Community Team is a separate entity, outside of both Marketing and …

Lars and I will have the replication tutorial Monday 9:00am to 12:30pm in Ballroom H.

In order to make it easy to play around with replication, I threw together a little package with scripts that are available from the tutorial page at the forge. With this script, you can run several servers from a replication tutorial directory without interfering with existing installations of the server that you might have installed on your machine. In order to use this package, you need to download a binary distribution of the server without any installers, the replication tutorial package, and unpack them in the same directory.

It is, however, not necessary to download the package to be able to attend the tutorial, but it gives you an option to experiment with replication.

If you can’t attend the MySQL Conference, you can still virtually attend

Simply visit
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/oursql-the-mysql-database-videocast

2-3 pm PDT on Tuesday, April 15th for the “Best Practices for Database Administrators” session,

and

11:55 am -12:40 pm PDT on Thursday, April 17th for the “Database Security Using White-Hat Google Hacking” session.

You need nothing but your web browser; unlike some other live meetings, audio streams from the website too, so there’s no phone number to call or participant code or anything. There’s also a live chat so you can participate and ask questions while the session is going on.

See you soon, virtually!

I am leaving in a few hours from Monterey for Santa Clara, the home of MySQL conference. I should be in the Hyatt Regency Lobby at 5:45 PM. I still have one more space in my car so if you haven't found a ride yet to go to the pre-conference dinner, you can reserve the spot by calling me or sending me a text message at 5/5/1/6/5/5/5/5/9/0.

The very brave soul, was Aaron Bockover, from the Banshee media player fame (via the LugRadio Live USA 2008 weblog). There were a few interesting highlights from these gong-a-thong sessions…

Zumastor
Dan Kegel spoke about the Zumastor Linux Storage Project. Want snapshots and remote replication in your Linux filesystem? This one does just that. From the contributor list, it looks like its all Google engineers hacking on this… Yes, this is better than LVM. No, I haven’t tried it yet.

mod_ndb
J.D. Duncan spoke about mod_ndb. Here are my transcribed notes of the talk.

MySQL Cluster is a database designed to be fault tolerant, on cheap commodity hardware. Write SQL queries, and they access the …

We at Javeline have released Javeline Platform under the GPL license. However GPL isn’t an easy license and therefor there is much confusion around it. To make matters worse, GPL isn’t written with script languages in mind as it talks about source code and object code. Than there is always the difficult question; Is this a single application or are these different programs talking through each other? I was at ApacheCon here in Amsterdam and got to talk with some OSI members about this subject.

How GPL works

To my opinion GPL is a great license, however it is also a complicated one. The biggest misconceptions about GPL is that is a ‘not for commercial use’ license. This is absolutely untrue. If that true no server running GNU/Linux …

MySQL application developers have some problems with connection state. There is a lot of state which can be used associated with a single connection

• Transactions (autocommit, uncommitted work, when a transaction was started, isolation level)
• Temporary tables
• Session variables which affect behaviour
• Other session variables

If you can avoid all of these, then you can benefit from transparent auto-reconnection and transparent connection reuse / pooling etc.

If you can't, then you will have to deal with reconnection, retry at a higher level. This is complicated and difficult to test.

I'll discuss ways of avoiding these things one at a time:

Transactions

I'm not advocating shunning transactions completely, just avoiding keeping any transaction state in the connection:

• Keep autocommit on. Execute …