In my second day at the MySQL Conference and Expo 2007, I attended keynotes, several sessions, and three BoF (Birds of a Feather) sessions. This article is about these sessions. Again, I’ll focus on the Big Ideas and let you read other people’s blog posts for the small details. Keynotes There were three keynotes this morning. Two I won’t comment on, but I want to mention the third because it was mostly about the One Laptop Per Child project.

Today I missed a bunch of good talks that I was hoping to attend, because I was figuring out a problem at the Guru Bar. Offending criminal: MySQL Connector/ODBC 3.51. Offending OS: Mac OS X/PowerPC.

OS X comes with an ODBC Administrator. Once you unpack the MySQL package, and the .pkg installs itself, you’ll find that all your files are installed in /usr/lib. You need to fire up ODBC Administrator, click on Drivers, and Add the driver. Give it an appropriate Description (MySQL), provide the location of the driver file (/usr/lib/libmyodbc3.dylib), and define it as available within the System (this enables you to enable at the System DSN as well as the User DSN, in the next step).

Later, etiher add as …

I've described this idea to a few people, but I figured I would post it here.

I've had an idea for using Amazon AWS S3 to distribute MySQL cluster replication data.

The existing architecture for MySQL clustering is as follows:

1. The master has N slaves
2. The master copies each binlog replication to each slave. If there are 7 slaves, then the master has to push the same data out it's network pipe 7 times
3. The slave has a hot TCP connection to the master. The master has 7 hot TCP connections, one for each salve.
4. The slave takes each replication chunk and applies it.

Here is my idea.

• For each replication chunk, the master creates a handle name for it, and also the handle name for the next chunk.
• The server copies each chuck into an S3 item, once. The item's name is it's handle, and it has a piece of S3 …

I have just completed my presentation at the MySQL Conference 2007 on MySQL for Oracle DBAs and Developers.

Not mentioned in my slides, but referenced during the presentation was what I consider the most important page to document from the MySQL Manual — 5.2.1. Option and Variable Reference

You can download a PDF copy of my presentation here.

Using MEMORY tables in MySQL is very useful; they are stored in memory and they are usually not so big in order to avoid a huge utilization of RAM. They are very fast.

MEMORY tables are often used to store session user data, chat messages and to store small frames of data from a bigger table in order to achieve great performance.

But, if you use them in a replication environment, you can have some problem due to their “volatility”; MEMORY table rows are lost when the server shuts down.

If you restart a slave host for some reason, you will have empty MEMORY tables on it, while the master host will have the correct ones.

How to populate automatically MEMORY tables at slave start up copying data from master host?

We could use something like LOAD TABLE table_name FROM MASTER, but it’s deprecated, so we will use something else.

I have developed a stored procedure you have to create on …

Christine Vota is talking at the 2007 MySQL Conference about the US Navy using MySQL.

The session starts with an introduction from a MySQL sales engineer, Craig Sylvester, about how MySQL is used in government. Los Almos lab, the US Census Bureau and NASA all use MySQL for some part of their operations.

Christine's presentaition starts with a video about the operation of a Navy aircraft carrier. Maintenance, fuel, weather conditions, flightdeck plans etc all have to be tracked and shown all around the ship. The subject of the film is a new computerized flight deck and operations management system. Instead of having multiple systems around the ship it is all centralized into one repository.

For deployment they needed no single point of failure. Complete reduncancy. Needs to have minimal hardware physical footprint. They were looking for an alternative to a …

Here are the slides for Mats and my presentation today:

Replication Tricks and Tips

Enjoy!

mysqlconf mysqlconf07

For those wanting the slides for “Testing the Security of Your Site”, they’re at:

http://www.sheeri.com/presentations/MySQLSecurity2007_04_24.pdf — 108 K PDF file

http://www.sheeri.com/presentations/MySQLSecurity2007_04_24.swf — 56 K Flash file

and some code:

For the UserAuth table I use in the example to test SQL injection (see slides):

CREATE TABLE UserAuth (userId INT UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY, uname VARCHAR(20) NOT NULL DEFAULT '' UNIQUE KEY, pass VARCHAR(32) NOT NULL DEFAULT '') …

I'm sitting in a session at the 2007 MySQL Conference where a handful of open source organizations are discussing working with communities. It is being facilitated by Jay Pipes, Community Relations Manager for MySQL.

Jay: What are the big Issues for your organization?

Zend: 3 big topics...2 of them security. The issues are security and frameworks. There are 99 frameworks.

SugarCRM: SugarForge (around 2 years old) has 300+ projects with millions of downloads. The issue is to make sure these extensions are secure and will work well with SugarCRM. Project certification is something they are thinking about. A new platform is coming to make module development even easier.

Pentahoo: Collaboration and making it efficient and valuable. There are around 75-100 folks participating.

Eclipse: Biggest challenge is segmentation. …

The MySQL SandalCamp session is complete, slides are available at:

http://www.openwin.org/mike/presentations/mysql-sandalcamp-2007/

The A/V recording of the session will be online once I complete the recode.

Thanks to all that came.