At the MySQL Developers Meeting in Heidelberg there were show off sessions where each team had a chance of showing their best to others.
As part of this shut out presentation, I demonstrated some MySQL Proxy magic.

This is a sample session from that presentation.

mysql> select 1 + 1;
+-------------------------------+
| ERROR                         |
+-------------------------------+
| Don't understand these digits |
+-------------------------------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec)

# Hmmm!
# Let's try to make it understand ...

mysql> set sql_mode='english_digits'; # You did not know we could do that. Did you?
Query OK, 42 rows affected (0.01 sec)

mysql> select 1 + 1;
+--------+
| result |
+--------+
| two    |
+--------+
1 row in set (0.00 sec) …

MySQL has had this Enterprise Monitor around for a while, but I’ve not had the chance to try it. Well, all this changed briefly in July, when I was doing my APAC tour, and folk wanted to see Enterprise Monitor at work. Back then, I showed them some canned screenshots, and in Singapore, Kim Seong (famous on #mysql) from our partners Global Link, had some kind of special login, so they demoed it. It wasn’t until this week that I actually tried it (besides, it wasn’t until the UC-J that it was re-launched with new features), and found some time to play with it. And I was blown away.

An excessive table scan, you say?

With new …

Augusto Bott at Pythian recently posted a good entry detailing some differences between Oracle and MySQL from a MySQL DBA's perspective, From MySQL to Oracle: A Few Differences. My viewpoint is exactly the opposite, I know Oracle extremely well but I have a lot of learning to do with MySQL.

Augusto ran into a SQL*Plus issue, where it is less than obvious where a SQL syntax error is. He could get around this error by using SQL Developer, Oracle's free SQL Development IDE. SQL Developer can connect to and browse MySQL databases in addition to Oracle and SQL Server.

He also noticed some syntactic differences between …

I don’t know about you, but the idea behind MySQL University is pretty amazing. It is truly a great way to come learn with us. The sessions are normally done via IRC and voice streaming, which is also recorded, however, seeing it in person at the MySQL DevMeeting, was just fabulous.

There are obviously so many more Uni sessions that I wish I went to, but I’m lucky in the sense that they’re all recorded, so expect to see them online soon. Kudos to the scribes!

I attended a few interesting sessions yesterday:

• How to Create a Test Case by Omer and Matthias - this was highly interesting, as I got a deeper understanding of our test framework. More importantly, I’ve found out that this is obviously an extension to mysql-test, and …

I am amused to end up on the list of the best of LifeHacker this week...

http://lifehacker.com/software/tgif/this-weeks-best-posts-302465.php

Seeing how the last time this happen, it was because I pointed out
that the best way to bump your productivity was to raise the fetch
rate of your email client (aka go from fetching your email every 5
minutes to every few hours), it makes me wonder what I can do to get
on the list again.

Maybe mention my habit to get up in Germany at 4:00 in the morning
because I can't sleep and instead spend my time working on porting
bugs in MySQL?

Not that I am doing that right now...

Horay, we finally made it work. Registration for the Open Source Developers' Conference 2007 is now open. For non-presenters, the earlybird price is $275 (until October 14th), after that the full conference price is $325. All regular tickets include the conference dinner!
Cool & affordable, right?

As a reminder: the OSDC 2007 conference dates are 26-29 November; location: Brisbane, Queensland. Peruse the overview of confirmed sessions. You simply must be there, otherwise you're just not cool, and evil geckos will eat your undies.

So what was the holdup with the registration stuff? I'll try to clarify:
Naturally we want to provide the option for credit card payment. The kind people at Common Ground where our conference system …

Each year I pick a topic to explore for conferences. I look at trends, do some research, and I write a slide deck to give a talk.

Then the learning begins. As I go around the country, and the world, giving the talk, I get to hear from others. Learning from the collective lets me find new ideas and refine my own thoughts on the topic. Some ideas I hear over and over, and these bubble to the top.

This year's topic was scaling. To date I've given the "Scaling" talk as a keynote three times, and as a regular session another four times (and I need to apologize to at least two conferences that I had to
skip or I would have delivered it another two times).

At the moment Architects are looking at two forms of scaling, Macro and Micro. The computing clouds, distributed processing systems, routing …

Object Relationship Mapping (ORM) is probably the best things that happened to enterprise software development since the invention of the Lego brick in 1949. Implementing the database access through ORM allows you to access the account data of a customer through the class 'Account' (with pure Java code), rather than having to mix SQL code in your Java classes. A framework does the job of translating your Java code to SQL statements and executing them though a JDBC connection.

ORM adoption has faced (and still does) a lot of resistance from the IT industry in general, but even more with enterprise software. Can't blame them: database access is a very common bottleneck for software that has intense use of data. Would you give away your fine tuned SQL scripts in favor of some 'magic bullet' that will automatically write that SQL for you at run-time?

It certainly does not help that many ORM frameworks did not work, or were simply not …

Object Relationship Mapping (ORM) is probably the best things that happened to enterprise software development since the invention of the Lego brick in 1949. Implementing the database access through ORM allows you to access the account data of a customer through the class 'Account' (with pure Java code), rather than having to mix SQL code in your Java classes. A framework does the job of translating your Java code to SQL statements and executing them though a JDBC connection.

ORM adoption has faced (and still does) a lot of resistance from the IT industry in general, but even more with enterprise software. Can't blame them: database access is a very common bottleneck for software that has intense use of data. Would you give away your fine tuned SQL scripts in favor of some 'magic bullet' that will automatically write that SQL for you at run-time?

It certainly does not help that many ORM frameworks did not work, or were simply not …

If you use mondrian's parent-child hierarchies, you will know that performance sucks unless you create closure tables. Closure tables expand the hierarchy, and allow mondrian to the operations required to roll-up a parent-child hierarchy using raw SQL: really fast.

The problem is populating the things. Closure tables contain what computer science profs. call a transitive closure of the parent-child relation (hence their name), and transitive closures aren't something which relational databases are very good at computing (which is why the database performs so much better when they're around). You can't just define a view, or write a simple SQL statement to populate them. Up til now, you'd have to use a stored procedure (if your database supports them) …