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Over the weekend, MySQL made available a new storage engine, codenamed Maria.
It is an improvement of MyISAM, the flagship engine, adding crash recovery to the already appreciated features of MyISAM. This release is a preview, based on MySQL 5.1 code base. The actual final implementation has not been announced yet, although it is safe to assume that it will happen in the 6.x series.
The source code is available as a bitkeeper tree.
There is some documentation, and more will follow.
What can we do with the new engine? The immediate answer is "use it as we use MyISAM, with crash recovery features".

Let's show an example, using MyISAM: (this demonstration was given live at the Linux Conference Australia …

I’ve been very excited seeing that we announced the Maria Engine Preview. Giuseppe and I were trying to setup a demo, for Maria, at the lightning talks happening later today, towards the end of the MySQL MiniConf at linux.conf.au 2008. It involved MySQL with Maria, and an Asus Eee PC. For the demo, we wanted to show pulling the plug, which can be done either via a kill -9 `pgrep mysqld` or pulling out the battery of the Eee.

However, we failed to get MyISAM to reliably crash! Yes, imagine that, we actually want it to crash - pity that it might have only happened about 1/3rd of the time we tested it. The magic we were looking for:

check table t1;
+---------+-------+----------+---------------------------------------------------------+
| Table   | Op    | …

The MySQL Proxy presentation at Linux Conf Australia 2008 was done just before lunch.
As announced, here are the presentation slides
The penguin on the above image is actually painted on my room's window glass.

Today Nokia announced their intention to acquire an open source tools manufacturer, Trolltech.

Trolltech is an open source company by virtue of their dual-licensing of the QT tool kit that is used by a number of products but probably most notably the KDE desktop. Though they do dual license and sell commercial proprietary products as well.

The Nokia deal was reported in kroners …

Nokia acquires Trolltech. Black Duck announces Code Center. LoopFuse launches update. (and more)

Nokia to acquire Trolltech to accelerate software strategy, Nokia / Trolltech (Press Release)

Black Duck Code Center Accelerates Component-Based Software Development in the Era of Open Source Software, Black Duck Software (Press Release)

Former JBoss Executives Launch New Version of LoopFuse OneView, Changing the Face of Online Marketing, LoopFuse (Press Release)

New Open Source WSO2 Mashup Server Combines Best of Web 2.0 and SOA to Enable the Social Enterprise, …

While I ducked out of Giuseppe’s miniconf talk, on MySQL Proxy (a great session, might I add - it takes up 2 slots right up until lunch), I went over to the LinuxChix miniconf, to attend a talk about memcache, by Brenda Wallace. Brenda, works at Catalyst IT, in New Zealand - they use a lot of memcache, in the telco business.

Memcache: volatile cache for keeping data in. Its a daemon. The code, can connect to memcache, put values in, read values, delete values. An example of how to use memcache, is given in PHP5.

A killer feature, is the setting of expiry. You can tell it to cache for 30 seconds, and then forget about it, no worries there.

What do you store? Database, generated content (front page of a website, just like a blog even), web service lookups (useful in telco, or …

Upcoming MySQL Features - Stewart Smith

Stewart’s talk on Upcoming MySQL Features was sort of a roadmap of what one might expect to see in MySQL 5.1 and above - he touched on Falcon, online backup, batched key access, Maria, Proxy, Workbench, and some cluster changes. When he shares his slides, it might be great to link to Worklog items, and Forge pages about these new features and previews (because, believe me, the stuff thats coming in future, is clearly very exciting).

MySQL Indexing Methods - Jonathon Coombes

Sitting in Jonathon Coombes session on MySQL Indexing Methods now - he’s going through covering indexes, the B+-tree index, hash index, full text indexing.

Some select points, that aren’t in the slides (otherwise, the slides themselves are very verbose, and when they make it online, it will provide some great reading material):

• InnoDB uses a B+-tree, and a secondary …

Jason Hull of OpenSource Connections, a company in my town, posted an article on what Sun’s acquisition of MySQL means for the US government. I thought Planet MySQL readers might appreciate a different angle on the issue than many of the Planet MySQL posts, which are often focused on business or community more than government. (I’m just passing the link along, not agreeing or disagreeing).

Arjen and Stewart are on stage, and there’s an introduction session going on now. We’re now, introducing the ex-MySQLers (Arjen), and MySQLers (Stewart, Giuseppe, me). Trent has just walked in, so that makes all the MySQLers that are around at linux.conf.au.

Highlights of some of the attendees:

• A user from LG, who has been using MySQL for about 3 years now
• An technology manager in defense, interested in MySQL as an education exercise
• A MySQL user for over 8 years
• Systems administrator who’s been heavily using MySQL for 5 years, however with a total of about 8 years of use
• Systems administrator at IBM, using MySQL for a long time
• Travel startup in the Gold Coast, doing lots of MySQL, replication, proxy use
• A software engineer at HP, in China, and they use MySQL for benchmarking on HP hardware
• A Connector/J user
…