In this modern Web-based world, I figure I should try and keep things, well, really, up-to-date as quickly as possible. For those of you not in Japan, I do hope the pictures of the UC-J interest (and tempt) you… The master set: MySQL Users Conference Japan (UC-J) 2007.

Some quick snippets follow. I’ve tagged them uc-j (flickr should treat it as “ucj”) as well as uc-j2007 (because, this may be the first, but it’s definitely not the last!).

Mats, Mr. Ruby

Big, big, crowd. Room holds 600. 1,200 registered. Standing room!

Jimmy, Mr. Carrier Grade Cluster

I haven’t actually written about my amazing Japan trip. Arrived late on Saturday night, spent the whole of Sunday doing tourist-y stuff, visited MySQL KK on Monday, had an amazing dinner later with lots of MySQLers, and today, Tuesday is the first day of the users conference. And boy was it fun!

Larry-san spoke Japanese in the keynote introduction, and boy was it amazing. I absolutely loved the honesty in Yukihiro “Mats” Matsumoto’s talk. It was even funnier that while he spoke Japanese, and people laughed at his jokes, it took a while for the simultaneous translators to catch up with English, and then we’d have delayed laughter :)

I gave my talk today, and was pretty pleased with the attendance. My 35 slides were delivered in a mere 50 minutes, and at parts I was …

There are two recent updates on the MySQL storage engine front worth looking into.  Paul McCullagh over at PrimeBase has updated their BLOB Streaming engine MyBS. (Ok, some people like the name, others don't.  I suggest going for something more serious sounding.)  The engine itself is pretty cool.  It'a not really a general purpose engine, but the idea is to be able to store BLOBS of any size and stream them directly into and out of the database.  Ideally, any engine could use the BLOB repository and streaming API. Paul got a good reaction at his MySQL Camp …

It’s now officical: Japanese translations of the Developer and Database Administrator certification exams will be available all over Japan as of September 25. As usual, the exams will be delivered through Pearson VUE.

We’re obviously pretty excited about this, and so are visitors to the MySQL Japan User’s Conference that is going on right now. Pearson VUE are here with two testing stations that have a few sample exam questions. Visitors have a lot of fun testing their own MySQL knowledge.

If you’re in or near Tokyo, you can …

Falcon engine is here! It seems that MySQL is pushing very hard to have its own transaction engine ever since Innodb was acquired by Oracle. MySQL should buy Innodb long time ago. Now they are paying for the price!

On the bright side, I do believe the developers at MySQL will do a good job and come out something better than Innodb :-)

In the next few weeks, I will do some benchmarks to how the baby falcon doing.

http://www.mysql.com/mysql60/

One of the cool capabilities that's part of our Enterprise subscription offering is MysQL Enterprise Monitor.  This week at our user conference in Japan we showed a preview of the forthcoming Japanese version.  I don't know what it says, …



One of the most appreciated keynotes at the ongoing Japanese MySQL Users Conference was by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, the creator of the Ruby language.

Me and Matz at MySQL UC Japan Day 1 2007-09-11

Matz was preceded by an impressive set of keynoters, moderated by MySQL K.K. President Larry Stefonic, also Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific at MySQL AB :

• His Excellency Mr. Stefan Noreén, Ambassador of Sweden to Japan
• Mårten Mickos, CEO, MySQL AB
• Masahiko Yoshida-san, Director, Hewlett-Packard Japan, Ltd.
…

If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough --Mario Andretti

The performance optimization options available are too numerous and often confusing. You need to keep the design simple by minimizing the number of optimizations required. Choosing the optimizations with biggest impacts is easy when you align them to the appropriate process in the data warehouse:

ETL performance

1. Database bulk load
2. Assuming that sufficient hardware capacity in terms of CPU processing power and disk throughput is available to support the parallelism:

• Task parallelism
• …

So, someone had a great idea to go back through the Developer Zone, which has become a bit disorganized of late, and put together an article with links and summaries for all the Dev Zone articles that discussed MySQL 5.1 features. I have done so, and also linked in many community member's blog articles and tutorials to give everyone a good dose of the features that make MySQL 5.1 worth investigating.