Here you go — slides of the presentation. I will probably blog on the presentation and any interesting questions I got, but that will have to wait till after the conference. MySQL Conference 2007: Real World MySQL Tuning (PDF)

Hugh MacLeod is at it again. He asks the question, if open source is so great, where are all the open source billionaires (as if that is the right way to gauge the success of the software)? Never mind that we could ask the same question of proprietary software: "Where are all the proprietary billionaires?" There just aren't that many. There aren't even that many proprietary software companies that do over $1B/year in revenues.

Will open source pass the $1B barrier? Yes, it will. But just as with the proprietary old world, it will take open source's new world a few years.

But I fundamentally disagree with MacLeod on this, as well as with Jeff Atwood, who …

mysqlconf mysqlconf07

Well, I came late, so I missed the first one….so we start with #2

#2. Ambiguous GROUP BY –

query BUGS and include details on the corresponding PRODUCT rows —

SELECT b.bug_id, p.product_name from bugs b NATURAL JOIN bugs_products NATURAL JOIN products GROUP BY b.bug_id;

We use the GROUP BY to get one row per bug, but then you lose information.

Standard SQL says that GROUP BY queries require the GROUP BY columns to be in the SELECT clause. MySQL does not enforce this. If a column is in a SELECT clause but not in the GROUP BY clause it displays a random value.

[my note, not said in the presentation this fools people when they want the groupwise maximum, they think that selecting multiple columns and …

There has been some ongoing discussion since the end of last year about MySQL’s decision to change how often they release binaries for the MySQL Community Edition.

For those that haven’t been paying attention, at the end of last year MySQL decided that they will no longer commit to releasing binaries for all versions and platforms of their Community Edition. Instead, some versions of their Community Edition are labeled “source-only” releases. For example, 5.0.33 Community Edition was a source-only release.

People have realized that this means they will either wait longer between MySQL-released community binaries or else they need to build the binary themselves. Peter Zaitsev blogged at the time that he is hoping the community will establish trusted …

A few photos from the Staff Party (pre-conf) at Marten’s place (our gracious host and CEO) on Sunday (before the conf).

I got an early start to the day today. I still don’t have a rehearsal schedule for my presentation, so I may have to miss lunch to get the opportunity to test out my slides (which will be posted on this blog, by the way). But thats a minor irritant - I do have them in PDF, so worst-case I’ll just use the computer/projector set-up provided by the a/v crew.

The keynotes started with Mårten Mickos, the CEO of MySQL AB giving us a “State of MySQL” address. Keeping all the people together in a company where 70% of the employees work from home and are distributed across hundreds of cities across the world is no easy task, and I have a lot of respect for him.

The roadmap for MySQL looks very interesting, with 5.1 expected to be stable by the end of the …

Moving into the user sessions on the first day at MySQL Conference 2007, I attended Building a Vertical Search Engine in a Day.

Some of my notes for reference.

Web Crawling 101

• Injection List - What is it seed URL’s you are starting from
• Fetching the pages
• Parsing the content - words and links
• Updating the crawl DB
• Whitelist
• Blacklist
• Convergence — avoiding the honey pots
• Index
• Map-reduce — split a large problem into little pieces, process in parallel, then combine results

Focused content == vertical crawl

• 20 Billion Pages out there, a lot of junk
• Bread-first would take years and cost millions of lives

Listening to Elliott White III (Eli) and Tim Ellis (Time) talk about technology at the 2007 MySQL Conference. As expected, a packed session.

Eli is the Senior PHP dude, Time is the DBA.

Initially started with Apache 1.3 and PHP 4.x. Used MyIsam and MySQL full text search. Then moved to multiple servers, Apache 2.x, MySQL Innodb, PHP 5, and memcached. Are now using Lucene with solar for search. Currently around 100 machines, 30 databases and the rest serve other functions. 9 memcached machines running on the db slaves. Right now around 30 gigs of data. XSF for user interface stuff (millions of user images). ext3 for other things.

Many PHP servers behind a load balancer. Many MySQL slaves talking to a master. Randomize connections between PHP servers to MySQL connections.

Memcached is used heavily for caching chunks of content. You can't cache the entire page because it almost entirely customized for the user. …

This week I'm attending the second of two developer conferences on my schedule for this month. I noticed an interesting trend that I hadn't seen discussed anywhere else before. Nearly every presenter is using some kind of virtualization technology to give their talks.

This is a terrific idea -- it's awesome to have a more or less pristine copy of your development environment that you can put into cold storage and spin up right before your talk is slated to begin.

I'm not sure why it's taken until 2007 for this kind of virtualization to reach a tipping point, although it might have something to do with the success of Parallels on the Mac -- as well as the fact that Microsoft released Virtual PC as a free product last year. (Although I should mention that I overheard more than one conversation at VSLive two weeks ago from presenters who were slagging Virtual PC's performance.)

I'd be willing to bet that this trend will work …

Our third keynote at MySQL Conference 2007 was titled Building the Ultimate Database Container with RHEL, MySQL, and Virtualization by Michael Evans.

The presentation was on Red Hat & One Laptop Per Child. His initial Quote was “Thinking Past Platforms: The Next Challenge for Linux”, By Doc Sears, 2007-04-16 http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000210

OLPC

• A Non profit idea from Nicholas Negroponte.
• Aim is to build & distribute inexpensive laptop systems to primary & secondary school students worldwide.
• Sell to young children in developing countries.

In summary at presentation to Red Hat — “Non-profit, run by a professor, we make …