While visiting the CeBit Trade Show in Hannover on 2008-03-06, Kaj and myself stopped by the booth of our new employer for meetings with some of our new colleagues. During our stay, they performed a short video interview with us (in German), to get our take on the MySQL acquisition and what this means to us and our users - it is now available from the Sun@CeBit2008 pages. Enjoy!

I'm often asked what interview questions should be asked of a new DBA you are considering to hire. Mistakes in a DBA hire can cost an organization a lot of money and hurt morale. There are a lot of factors that determine how well a DBA will fit into an environment. I thought I would share some of the things I consider when I interview a new DBA. These questions can be asked to any type of

How do you return a dataset using MySQL Proxy?
This being a common task, as many that we will see in these pages, it is worth implementing with a function.
When you return a dataset, there are two main cases:

• Returning a single row with just one column. For example, when you need to give the user a simple message;
• Returning one or more rows with several columns. This is much more useful, and covers case like displaying help information, or creating a tabular set of information.

The first case is quite simple:

function simple_dataset (header, message)
proxy.response.type = proxy.MYSQLD_PACKET_OK
proxy.response.resultset = {
    fields = {
        {type = proxy.MYSQL_TYPE_STRING, name = header}
    },
    rows = {
        { message}
    }
}
return …

Wed 26 March at 2pm GMT/3pm CET we will present a new webinar on MySQL for Online Applications. Details and registration are here.

MySQL finds its sweet spot in online and web 2.0 application, because of the scalability reliability and the ease of use of the server. In a typical approach, users start with a simple architecture, with one server, then they need to scale in order to support the increasing number of users and the demand for more computer resources.

During the presentation, we will talk about the common ways to scale-out, how to provide high availability and about the common components of a web 2.0 solution and its interaction with the database.

The Q&A will be posted on this blog.

Matthew Aslett and I are in San Francisco for the next few days at the Open Source Business Conference (OSBC). We will be moderating a total of three panels this year. Matthew’s panel on the the state of the open source database market is especially interesting, given that we are days away from publishing a report on the same topic (more details on that in a day or two). For those of you reading this blog entry from OSBC, I am hoping you’ll attend the panels listed below…

Tuesday, March 25, 11:30am - 12:20pm
The Future of the Operating System
Raven Zachary, Research Director, Open Source, The 451 Group (Moderator)
Dirk Hohndel, Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist, Intel
James Hughes, Sun Fellow & VP, Sun Microsystems
Roger Levy, …

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 …