At the MySQL Conference & Expo this week, Marten Mickos showed a slide in his keynote presentation of a recent ceremonial "S-1 burning" that took place on the beach in Santa Cruz.  The S-1 is the document filed when a company goes public with the SEC.  MySQL put a lot of effort into preparing the S-1 and getting ready to go public over the last year or so, working with auditors, creating the prospectus, lining up the bankers, the lawyers and all of that.  We were literally weeks away from filing when Marten had his dinner with Jonathan Schwartz who asked about acquiring the company in late november. 

So the S-1 burning was a little bittersweet especially for CFO Dennis "the fox" Wolf (right) and VP Finance Jeff "in socks" West (middle) who had put so much time into the preparation.  Also the photo …

First of all, thank you, Jay Pipes, for setting up the Bayshore Room tomorrow between 10am and 2pm, for Julian Cash to take pictures of us!

Second, I am a big fan of descriptive subject headers. So I thought I could promote this memorable event even more explicitly than what Jay did in his posting “Yes, It’s That Time of the Year Again…“.

It’s Julian’s fault that I bought my 8mm Sigma lens. He has one, and takes weird pictures with it. As opposed to mine, his are good (yup, he uses fancy high-tech equipment like flashes, and white background paper — one day I’ll go there, too).

This is MySQL’s very own Brian Aker, as distorted by Julian.

The new thing Julian is doing is Light Painting. This means he creates …

Joe Stump, Lead Architect, Digg. Slides should make its way at Joe’s website soon enough.

Mainly works on the backend, makes sure its scalable, can all the Digg buttons be served, et al.

Application layer is loosely coupled from your data. Whole point of SOA? You can put a service in front of the DB, and move between DB’s if required.

They do use MySQL, but its pretty vanilla.

Old habits die hard
- Data requests are sequential (I need foo, bar, bleh, ecky)
- Data requests are blocking (When you need foo, nothing else is happening)
- Tightly coupled (mysql_query, and if you’re using DB abstraction layer even, you’re still using SQL… you then can’t use CouchDB for instance)
- Scaling is not abstracted (a lot of caching are in the front end code. Its a problem when you start scaling your teams out). They …

Sun Microsystems, Inc. today announced the availability of MySQL™ Workbench, a new visual database design tool that integrates data modeling, physical database design, database creation, change management and documentation capabilities into a single, seamless environment for MySQL developers and DBAs.

MySQL Workbench is available for download in two versions: an open source Community Edition and a (US) $99 commercial Standard Edition. Both are available now for Microsoft Windows, with future cross-platform support for Linux and Macintosh OS X under development.

Allow me to provide some relaxed photographic observations from this morning’s MySQL UC keynotes.

Warning 1: My view is distorted, by my favourite lens, Sigma 8mm.

Warning 2: I took the pics with a shaky hand in low light, so they’re not sharp ones, of the James Duncan Davidson type (the guy who takes all the great pics for O’Reilly).

On Johnny Good’s command, doors open, and the audience starts pouring in.

Zack Urlocker has challenged me in the James Callis Lookalike Contest (of Battlestar Galactica fame), but is himself clearly in the lead.

Journalist James Niccolai of IDG, taking a picture of Rich Green and Mårten Mickos (Note: I am a fan of recursion; it would have been even better if Zack had taken a picture of me taking a picture of James, Rich and Mårten).

Mårten Mickos talking to Sheeri Kritzer Cabral.

Jay Pipes’s head is moving so fast talking to …

that the "lightning bloggers" at the MySQL conference achieve total dominance of the "Top 30 Most Active" list on PlanetMySQL. I have so many things going on at the conference that I don't often find time to blog and so my name drops off the active list as fast as you can say "online backup"...

OK, in all seriousness, this post is actually about something... Our friend Julian Cash will be at the conference tomorrow, taking photographs, in his trademark fashion, of conference attendees. His work can be found all over, including Brian Aker's site, and he's been at various open source conferences around the world. He'll be in the …

There’s a reason for Sheeri winning the Community Advocate of the Year award. Her activity level is hard to beat.

If you want a chance to beat Sheeri for 2009, you need to master multitasking. Not only is Sheeri listening to Mårten presenting his keynote. She’s preparing for some vlogging, i.e. recording Mårten’s presentation. And she’s blogging at the same time. And (although she doesn’t know it until three seconds after the picture was taken) she’s getting ready for getting up on stage to receive her 2008 award.

Ah, myself I’m only listening, and taking the odd picture. (Some of them very odd).

In today’s Official MySQL Press Release, PrimeBase XT (PBXT) has been named along with three other storage engine partners in “Sun Celebrates Third-Party MySQL Storage Engines“.

This a great achievement for a small company to be recognized in the certified storage engine partner program, in comparison to the other companies that are much larger on the balance sheet. This continues the news with last week you may have read PrimeBase Technologies a MySQL Platinum Level Partner.

A noted absence from the list is Nitro, an expected absence was Solid.

Today is the first day at the conference (aside from the tutorials, which were yesterday). Here’s what I went to: New Subquery Optimizations in 6.0 By Sergey Petrunia. This was a similar session to one I went to last year. MySQL has a few cases where subqueries are badly optimized, and this session went into the details of how this is being addressed in MySQL 6.0. There are several new optimization techniques for all types of subqueries, such as inside-out subqueries, materialization, and converting to joins.

If you’re at the MySQL Conference and Expo, you can get a free sample chapter of the upcoming High Performance MySQL Second Edition. Just go to the exhibition area. As you go through the doors, take an immediate left and look for the sample chapter on O’Reilly’s table. It’s a rough draft and contains typos and my incredibly crude drawings instead of those that will go into the final book, but it should serve to give you an idea of the book’s depth and scope.